Metatheatricality on the Renaissance Stage, the Audience and the Material Space
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METATHEATRICALITY ON THE RENAISSANCE STAGE, THE AUDIENCE AND THE MATERIAL SPACE ___________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to The Temple University Graduate Board ___________________________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ___________________________________________________________________ by Shiladitya Sen August, 2012 Examining Committee Members: Shannon Miller, Advisory Chair, English, Temple University Eli Goldblatt, English, Temple University Robert Storey, English, Temple University Teresa Soufas, External Reader, Spanish and Portuguese, Temple University © by Shiladitya Sen 2012 All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT My dissertation examines how early modern metatheater enabled the Renaissance stage and its original audience to develop a complex and symbiotic relationship. Metatheater—by which I mean a particular mode of theatre, in which actors, playwrights, dramatic characters and/or (in particular) audiences express or share a perception of drama as a fictional and theatrical construct—pervaded Renaissance drama, not by simple happenstance but arising almost inevitably from the complex context within which it functioned. The early modern stage was a particularly conflicted forum, which monarchs and playwrights, town fathers and actors, censors and audiences, impresarios and anti-theatricalists, all strove to influence and control. The use of the metatheatrical mode allowed playwrights and players to better navigate this difficult, sometimes dangerous, space. In particular, the development of Renaissance metatheater derived from (and, simultaneously, affected) the unique nature of its original spectators, who practiced a much more actively engaged participation in the theater than is often recognized. Performers and playwrights regularly used metatheatricality to adapt to the needs and desires of their audience, and to elicit the intellectual and emotional responses they desired. My study utilizes a historically contextualized approach that emphasizes the material conditions under which Renaissance drama arose and functioned. It begins by examining the influence of the surrounding milieu on the Renaissance stage and its spectators, especially its facilitation of the development and use of metatheater. Traces of such influence are evidenced via varied historical texts, such as play prologues and epilogues, legal documents, and playgoer iii experiences expressed in prose and verse. Then, via close readings of four plays—Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy , Shakespeare’s Henry V and Antony and Cleopatra , and Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle —the dissertation indicates how varied and versatile early modern metatheater was, and how it responded to and influenced the nature of its audiences. My study demonstrates the centrality of metatheater to early modern theatrical practice, delineates its pervasive influence on the stage-audience relationship in Renaissance theaters, and underlines the influence of material conditions on the creation and dissemination of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Throughout the long process of completing this dissertation, I have received incredible support from my chair, Shannon Miller, who has consistently provided encouragement while pushing me to produce my best work. I am grateful to my committee-members, Robert Storey and Eli Goldblatt, for their critical feedback and constant support. My external reader, Teresa Soufas, was kind enough to join the committee at a late stage and suggest useful ways to broaden my study’s scope. I am also very appreciative of the faculty and my colleagues in the Temple English department, my interactions with all of whom have made my time here a constant pleasure. I would particularly like to thank the administrators and coordinators—Belinda, Gloria, Sharon, Derrick and Rose—who have always had inordinate patience for all the demands that I have made of their time. Roy Wolper, editor of The Scriblerian , has been a great source of support, when I worked for him and long afterward. The Undergraduate English Program, the First-Year Writing Program and the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple have all aided my professional development and enabled me to support myself by employing me, first as a teaching assistant and then as an adjunct. My students have always been a source of great joy, providing intellectual and emotional sustenance. Outside the academic sphere, I am thankful to my family and friends in India, who have always been supportive of my life far from them even as they ribbed me about the duration of my v studies. My D&D (Dungeons and Dragons, for the non-geeky) group have been a regular source of entertainment and a reprieve (and, admittedly, sometimes a great distraction) from work. Finally, I must thank Amber—fiancée, partner and friend. Her love, encouragement and appreciation have keep me supported and motivated, as have her reminders about how long I’ve taken over the dissertation and how old I’m getting. This one’s for you! vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………………. iii-iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ……………………………………………………........................ v-vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………….. 1-14 2. THE MATERIALS OF METATHEATRICALITY ……………………………………. 15-61 3. THE SPECTATOR’S THE THING: METATHEATER IN THE SPANISH TRAGEDY ………………………………….…………………………... 62-98 4. PLAYING MONARCHS IN HENRY V AND ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA ………………………………………………………....................... 99-145 5. THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE : METATHEATER TOO FAR? …………………………………………………………..……………….. 146-176 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………..………………… 177-191 vii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION The genesis of the term “metatheatre” can be quite precisely located, occurring in Lionel Abel’s Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (1963). Its definition and application, however, are far thornier matters, having been severely complicated by the various uses of the term (and related ones, such as metadrama or metaplay, which some critics treat as virtually the same and others as distinctly separate concepts) ever since it first appeared. Abel’s own broadly general and idiosyncratic view of the concept has hardly helped matters, simultaneously allowing and impelling those who followed him (whether chronologically or in spirit) to stretch the concept in varied, sometimes even contradictory, directions till there sometimes appears to be almost no commonality on the subject. Some scholars, such as Thomas Rosenmeyer, have argued that the term should simply be discarded, since it has “been employed to cover too many different moves, and to elicit responses that undervalue the traditional inventiveness and the wonderful immediacy of the emotional power of theater … ‘Metatheater’ has been such an obstruction [to enlightenment], where it is not simply an uninformative frill” (119). As this study—Metatheatricality on the Renaissance Stage, the Audience and the Material Space — indicates, I do not consider it a concept without merit and contend, rather, that it can still be very effectively utilized, including in areas that have seen relative neglect by earlier scholars. Before outlining such positions and aims, however, one should begin with a quick coverage of some past uses of the term in the interests of precision and to avoid at least some of the pitfalls that Rosenmeyer notes. 1 Abel’s definition is, of course, the place to start. In Metatheatre , Abel argues that tragedy is difficult, if not impossible, for modern playwrights to write. Shakespeare, for example, only writes one play, Macbeth , that he considers a genuine tragedy. Instead, Abel argues, Shakespeare and many subsequent dramatists tend towards plays that “tell us at once that the happenings and characters in them are of the playwright’s invention, and that insofar as they were discovered … they were found by the playwright’s imagining rather than by his observing the world” (59). He characterizes plays in this unique genre as having “a common character: all of them are theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized” and argues that the “persons appearing on the stage in these plays … themselves knew they were dramatic before the playwright took note of them” (60). Abel contrasts such works with tragedy and dubs them a separate genre: “metaplays, works of metatheatre” (61). The issue of characters being self-aware of their theatricality is particularly important to his definition, leading to his characteristically idiosyncratic argument that the ultimate metatheatrical character is actually not in a play, being Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Abel was coining a term to name what existed long before him and, thus, was hardly the only person studying the subject. Anne Righter, for example, publishing a year before Abel, explores the metaphor of the world as a stage in her Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962). Righter lays especial emphasis on the actor-audience relationship. She draws a line of development from the earlier mystery plays, which she views as heavily influenced by the audience’s presence and nature, to the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama that follows, where she says playwrights imbue their plays with individual self-contained identities, from which actors sometimes can reach out to the audience, but only “as the result of stage convention, not through conscious intention on the part of the speaker” (61). For Righter, Renaissance drama (especially