Drama,

Also by Richard Hornby:

Metadrama,
Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production (1977)
Patterns in Ibsen's Middle Plays (1981)
and Perception
\

Richard Hornby

Lewisburg
Bucknell University Press
London and Toronto: Associated University Presses
Ifc^l

© 1986 by Associated University Presses, Inc.

Associated University Presses

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'Fhe paper used in this publication meets the

requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hornby, Richard, 1938-

Drama, metadrama, and perception.

Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
I. Title.
PNI631.H58 1986 809.2 85-47936
ISBN 0-8387-5101-6 (alk. paper)

Printed in the United States of America

 Contents

Acknowledgments
N 1 Drama and Reality 13
•*
Part I Varieties of the Metadramatic
2 The Play within the Play 31
3 The Ceremony within the Play 49
4 Role Playing within the Role 67
5 Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play 88
6 Self-Reference 103

Part II Drama and hreeption

7 Sophocles, Oedipus the King 121
8 Shakespeare, As You Like It 133
9 Buchner, Vi/oyzeck 148
10 Strindberg, The Father 158
11 Ibsen, The Master Builder 164
12 Pinter, Betrayal 171

13 Afterword 179

List of Works Cited 181

Index 185
 1
Drama and Reality

i
For over a century, realism has been the touchstone of dramatic criticism and
theory. Not that plays have all been realistic; far from it. Rather, realism has
provided the theoretical basis for all that has gone on in the theatre. Everything is
defined in terms of realism: we hear of selective realism, stylized realism,
abstract realism, narrative realism, epic realism, and of course naturalism, which
is defined as an “extreme” form of realism. Even nonrcalistic theatrical forms
need realism for their definition; an avant-garde theatre artist who despises
realism will typically describe his work as being “unrealistic” even before
coming up with a positive term for it. Similarly, theatre history textbooks
categorize genres such as symbolism, expressionism, or theatricalism as all being
part of the revolt against realism.
Realistic doctrine has dominated the American theatre in particular. Wc tend
automatically to polarize theatre into the realistic or the unrealistic, and to
categorize what we perceive, whether it is the dialogue or the design or the
actors’ performances, in relation to one of these two poles. The underlying
doctrine is thus not limited to realism as a genre, but is a device for categorizing
everything in theatre. Whether one likes realism or not, the defining trait for the
theatre is always how “close to” or “far from” everyday life it seems.
Structuralists influenced by L^vi-Strauss will recognize this realistic/anti-
realistic polarity as a kind of bina^ opposition, a pattern that is fundamental to
all human thought. All cultures view the world through polarities: up and
down, good and bad, male and female, positive and negative. No doubt we
evolved this mode of thinking because it is the simplest and most effective means
of processing information, as seen in such stripped down systems as Morse Code
or computer languages, in which everything can be conveyed through a pattern
of dots and dashes, or the binary digits 0 and 1.
The problem, however, is that while wc easily recognize binary systems like
Morse Code as abstract fabrications, when it comes to matters of language and
culture, we tend to think of binary oppositions not as human constructions
applied to reality, but rather as attributes of reality itself. Male and female, for

13
14 Drama and Reality
example, come to be seen as absolute categories, standing for more than just
biological differences; they become opposed in every conceivable way—in so­
cial, economic, political, and personal contexts. Actually, however, a binary
opposition may be inappropriate to the reality that it describes, leading to
sterile, automatic thinking that obscures more than it reveals. Certainly the
extreme polarization of male and female in our culture can be damaging to
women, type-casting them in roles that are far too limiting. It is not that there
are no differences between men and women; it is rather that the differences may
not form a polarity. Levi-Strauss describes primitive tribes as seeing a solemn,
fundamental polarity between honey and ashes;* although we have little trouble
differentiating the two, it seems rather odd to think of them as opposites.
Polarization arises when we start paralleling binary oppositions, so that, as in
mathematical proportions, A: B :: C: D :: E: F, and so on; thus many believe that
male is to female as strong is to weak, as rational is to emotional, as profession­
alism is to domesticity. The artificiality of some of these parallelings becomes
clear, however, when we observe other cultures. In Iran, for example, men
commonly embrace and hold hands in public, weep easily, and arc considered
intuitive but not too logical, while women arc seen as rational and practical,
though somewhat cold;^ the polarity that our cultures takes for granted is simply
reversed. We should thus be careful never to accept such parallelings of polarities
without question.
The realistic/antirealistic polarity in dramatic theory may at last be dying out,
as new theories from structuralism and poststructuralism supersede it. This is
not to say that realistic drama is dying. Realism in the theatre answers funda­
mental needs for a scientific, technological society; realistic plays will continue
to be written and performed as long as science is at the center of our beliefs. But
we must distinguish realism as drama from realism as doctrine. Realism as drama
is simply one genre among many, a form influenced by science that arose in the
late nineteenth century, characterized by psychologically deep and complex
motivation in the characters, behind a continuous facade of mundane detail in
setting and action.^ Realism as doctrine is a device for categorizing all drama,
polarizing it into realistic and antirealistic. This polarity is paralleled with other
polarities: realism is to antirealism as “represeivational” is to “presentational,” as
acting “in person” is to acting “in style,” as being “close to” life is to being “far
from” life, as Stanislavski is to Brecht, as Ibsen Is to Maeterlinck, as .Marlon
Brando is to Laurence Olivier. These paralleled oppositions, along with many
others, have become embedded in the brains of theatre practitioners and scholars
(especially in the United States), but are largely false or misleading. In par­
ticular, as I shall argue, no form of drama or theatre is any closer or farther from
life than any other, in any way that truly matters. No plays, however “realistic,”
reflect life directly; all plays, however “unrealistic,” are semiological devices for
categorizing and measuring life indirectly.
Realistic doctrine, whose basis is found in Aristotle’s term mimesis in the
Drama and Reality 15
Poetics, has waxed and waned over the centuries, and will always have a limited
usefulness, but when it is pressed too hard it becomes as artificial as the male/
female opposition. Contemporary American directors and actors of Shake­
speare, for example, have great difficulty with his plays because of being
straitjacketed by realistic d(x:trine, which does not actually fit Shakespeare at all
well. At times, his plays seem as realistic as those of Lanford Wilson (allowing
for obvious differences of time and place), at other times as antirealistic as those
of Samuel Beckett, at still other times neither realistic nor antirealistic. It is
\^luable to be able to point out to actors that Corin, the greasy-handed shepherd
in As You Like It, has an earthy, life-like quality, while Silvius, his “pastoral”
counterpart, is intentionally artificial. It is not valuable to have to waste time
trying to justify to actors, in terms of realistic doctrine, the fact that Shakespeare
writes In blank verse, even though real people do not talk that way. Verse in
drama is neither a movement toward nor a withdrawal from everyday life; it is a
formal technique of no mimetic significance whatever.
A major idea of modern structuralists, based on the linguistics of Ferdinand
de Saussure, is that meaning is always carried by a system as a whole, rather
than just the individual elements in actual use in a given communication. We do
not understand a sf>eaker in piecemeal fashion, word by word, or even sentence
by sentence, but rather by relating what he is saying to the entire language.
'Fhus, if 1 were to say, “I came to work this morning by motorized conveyance,”
you would immediately recognize the pompous tone in the choice of my words,
because you are aware of the other locutions available: “I came by car,” “I drove,”
“I dragged out the old jalopy,” and so on. Your full understanding of the concept
embodied in my words is informed by your knowledge of the English language
as a semantic system. This is w'hy, in learning a foreign language, one does not
really know any of it until one knows all of it, or enough to have a sense of it as
an interconnected system; a second-year student of English as a foreign language
would probably know 75 percent of the vocabulary and 100 percent of the
formal grammar that the average native speaker would know, but the foreign
student would probably not notice the jx)mpous level of my sentence about the
motorized conveyance, because he would m)t yet be able to see how my choice of
words relates to other possible choices.
A binary opposition, then, forms a kind of subsystem, in which a given term
is paralled and contrasted to a whole series of terms. Realism is defined by the
related terms, “close to life,” “in person,” etc., but also by its oppositions, so
that we can sav that realism is not far from life, not stylized, etc. Indeed, polar
terms tend to be more strongly defined by their opposites than by their parallels.
One cannot discuss masculinity without thinking of femininity, or peace with­
out war, or health without sickness. Fhe pleasure of leisure is enhanced w hen we
think of the work we are temporarily avoiding; work is all the more tedious when
we think of the pleasures of leisure. Fhe joy of winning a sports event is
generated by the contemplation of the agony of losing, and vice versa; a game
 16 Drama and Reality
that both teams won would be as pointless and boring as one that both teams
lost. Again, terms arc typically defined by their opposites: “real men” don’t cry,
don’t play hopscotch, don’t eat quiche. “Real women” don’t work outside the
home, don’t initiate sex, don’t understand sports. Similarly, in the theatre,
realism and antirealism arc defined in terms of each other. Stanislavski, a realist,
wanted his actors not to employ cliches, stereotypes, artificialities. Bertolt
Brecht, the antirealist, wanted his actors not to identify with the character, not to
be “in a trance”; his theatre was to be »o«empathetic, ;;o;7illusionistic, non-
Aristotelian. Such rhetoric, so typical of human communication in its nega­
tiveness, has led to a good deal of confusion among actors today, since we can no
longer experience the kinds of acting that Stanislavski and Brecht were setting
their concepts against.
Similar confusion has resulted when modern theatre practitioners have looked
at other cultures or times, and interpreted them in terms of realistic doctrine.
Modern actors, for example, find Hamlet’s speech to the players, in which he
advises them “to hold . . . the mirror up to nature” (3.2.2(C21),‘* familiar yet
perplexing. Holding the mirror up to nature sounds Stanislavskian, yet the
dramatic speeches that the players, and Hamlet himself, actually perform seem
antirealistic to an extreme, the kind of thing we would expect in the hyperpoetic
theatre of Yeats or Maeterlinck. The reason for this apparent contradiction is not
the condescending one that is usually heard, that the Elizabethans had more
naive ideas about reality than we do. Instead, their ideas about art and reality
were organized dijferently. The modern actor’s confusion results from imposing
the realistic/antirealistic code on a play from a period in which the code did not
operate. The polarity that dominated Renaissance art and literature was instead
the Platonic one of Idea/Imitation. In calling for the players to mirror nature,
Hamlet is not asking them to avoid artifice, as would a modern acting teacher;
instead, he is asking them to avoid complications, distortions, or additions—
anything that might blur the audience’s perception of an Ideal form. Thus, in
the same speech, he tells them to “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (3.2.18);
the whole thrust of the passage is not toward making the players perform as in
everyday life, but rather to perform with restraint and polish. Hamlet’s nature is
not a world of scratchings and burpings and mumblings, but a world of pure
ideas; in that context, everyday life is ««natural.
A significant aspect of structuralist dramatic theory was that it implicitly
rejected the realistic/antirealistic bipolarity; the question of whether a given
work is “close to” or “far from” everyday life was simply not at issue. ITie same
holds true for poststructuralist approaches, including semiotics, deconstruction,
reader-response theory, information theory, or phenomenological criticism. The
whole tenor of contemporary aesthetics is nonmimetic. This is, again, not the
same thing as being antimimetic. The mimetic aspect of art is not denied, but it
is no longer seen as its defining trait. 'Fhe present rev'aluation of Ibsen’s plays
provides an example: critics of the past few decades have been treating Ibsen
Drama and Rcalitv 17
primarily as a dramatic poet, whose plays are filled with symlx)lism and meta­
physical reflection; the realistic Ibsen, the astute observer of bourgeois life, is no
longer of much interest.
11
Such nonmimetic criticism leaves op>en the question of just how drama, or any
other art form, actually does relate to life, if it docs so at all. Certainly the
traditional, simple bipolarity of “close to” versus “far frmn” will not do. It leaves
too many elements in drama unexplained; it leads to rigid, narrow thinking
(especially noticeable in American actors, because excessively realistic training
has rendered them timid, confined, and querulous); it makes drama into some­
thing far too passiv’e. We should not view drama as reflecting life, but rather as
operating on it, though in a complex manner. Drawing on structuralist and
poststructuralist theory, 1 suggest the following axioms for relating drama to
reality:
1. A play does not reflect life; instead, it reflects itself.
2. At the same time, it relates to other plays as a system.
3. This system, in turn, intersects with other systems of literature, nonliter­
ary performance, other art forms (both high and low), and culture gener­
ally. Culture, as it centers on drama in this wav, I shall refer to as the
“drama/culture complex.”
4. It is through the drama/culturc complex, rather than thnmgh individual
plays, that we interpret life.
'Hie first two axioms draw on the ideas of such structuralists as Roland
Barthes and Northrop Frye, who saw creative writing as a surprisingly recursive
activity. Barthes insisted that the verb “to write” was actually intransitive, that
the writer does not really write “about” anything, but rather writes writing.^
Frye, in his influential b(X)k Anatomy of Criticism, maintained that literature
forms a vast system that reflects the basic rhythms of life. His method is
sometimes misinterpreted as simple genre criticism, in which the critic merely
sets up categories for pigeonholing individual works. Instead, Frye was doing
something very different: for him the relationship of the individual work to the
overall literary system is like that of parole to langue in Saussure’s structuralist
linguistics. Langue is, in the “motorized conveyance” example given earlier, the
underlying, unstated system of grammar, syntax, and semantics that speakers
and listeners must master in order to make or understand individual utterances
(parole). Frye’s system is the underlying langue that remains unstated, but which
both author and reader or audience member must know in order for a given
work to communicate.
18 Drama and Reality
Barthes seems right in stressing the self-contained quality of artistic creation.
Everything we know about the creative process tells us that it does not have
much to do with “recording” something, like newspaper reporting. 'Fhe creative
artist focuses on the work itself, on making it seem fitting and right. If realistic
plays are “close to” life, that closeness certainly does not come from direct
observation. Realistic playwrights (at least the successful ones) have not gone
nosing around with notebooks or tape recorders taking note of what people say
and do. Instead, they compose in the study. Often, they arc far from the locales
they describe—Ibsen wrote plays about Norway while living in Italy, for
example. While they may be inspired to write a play by a real-life event, they do
not fully research that event, nor show much concern for what actually hap­
pened in detail. (In fact, the finished play is typically very different from the
event or events that inspired it.) Instead, the play comes to have an independent
life for the playwright; Ibsen said that, while writing his plays, he felt as if he
were watching them take place on a stage. There is indeed a certain passivity to
creative writing, at least from the subjective viewpoint of the author, who feels
more that he is being acted upon than that he is “doing” something.
From Frye’s theories, we can infer that what is, in fact, acting upon the author
is the received literary tradition, the archetypal characters, plots, and situations
that he has grown accustomed to from reading literary works or seeing them
enacted. His real-life experiences merely trigger associations with these arche­
types, so that, while real life may indeed be a stimulus, and will show up in his
writing in some sense, it will only show up where it seems to fit. (Fhe film All
the President's Men was a good example of this; although all its characters were
based on actual people and all its events actually happened, the film succeeded
not because of its “accuracy,” but rather because those characters and events
happened to fit the standard pattern of the detective story.) The author, as he
writes, is not checking the episodes against reality—indeed, he will cheerfully
change reality as it suits him, to make the play seem right in terms of its own
exigencies, which are in turn based on his intuitive feelings for archetypal
patterns. The literary work is like a mathematical pnK)f—self-contained in the
sense of having all its parts interconnect according to logical rules, yet reflecting
an underlying system consisting of those very rules, plus axioms, definitions,
and propositions already proven. A theorem in mathematics reflects both inward
and outward, but the outward reflection is not toward life, but rather toward the
mathematical system as a whole.
'Fhe situation for the audience parallels that of the author. The audience
certainly does not sit there testing what it sees moment by moment against its
real-life memories. Occasionally, something will occur in the work that triggers
such an association, either for an individual audience member or for the whole
group, but if anything, such moments are intrusive on the basic experience of
seeing the plav, rather than being characteristic of that experience. If a character
reminds someone of his aunt Mary, the play stops for him for a while; if the
Drama and Reality 19
action suddenly and obviously depicts the election of Ronald Reagan, the
dramatic illusion for the audience is broken rather than enhanced. A good
production of a good play seems isolated and self-contained; for a while, it is all
in all. Again, its self-contained quality derives from the intuitive sense of what a
play is—how action progresses, how characters are supposed to behave, what
kind of situations are interesting. As it does for the playwright, the play for the
audience reflects primarily inward, and secondarily outward, to the unstated
but crucial conventions of the theatre.
The major objection to this notion of the play as a self-contained work in a
self-contained system is that it seems to cut off life from art entirely, and thus
apparently trivialize artistic activity. Barthes seems toimply that literature is a
meaningless game, perhaps a highbrow form of crossword puzzles. Frve’s sys­
tem does reflect life ultimately, but only on a very general level—the seasons, the
rhythms of birth, growth, maturation, and death.In the same vein, the Czech
structuralist Jan Mukafovsky maintained that all literature, no matter how
realistic, reflects no particular reality, but instead reflects reality as a whole.^
Literature thus becomes something solely and entirely existential, an idea that at
times has struck me as pleasingly profound, and at other times as irritatingly
vacuous. Implying that literature has nothing to do with everyday life or anv
immediate concern seems to be playing directly into the hands of the philistines
in our society who maintain that art and literature and drama are totally
impractical, serving at best as patrician amu.sements, of no interest or impor­
tance to the average person.
Furthermore, the notion of creative passivity leads to questions about artistic
value. If a knowledge of archetypes is all that is required to write a good play,
why are more gexx! plays not written? Why is it that when I, a critic who has
read more widely than either Shakespeare or Ibsen, sit down and try, “intran­
sitively,” to write a play based on the archetypes that 1 know extremely well, the
results are so paltry? Under realistic doctrine, one could at least say that
Shakespeare and Ibsen were better observers of life than I, but under struc­
turalism it will not do to say that they were better observers of literature. 'Fhey
were not. Shakespeare, with “small Latin and less Greek,” was well read in the
popular literature of his day, but in little else; Ibsen, during the time of his
greatest creativity, read little except newspapers. It is inadequate to try to
understand drama entirely in terms of literary archetypes.
The postructuralist solution to this dilemma is to sec archetvpal systems like
those of Frye as existing concentrically within other cultural systems of mean­
ing. A play relates to drama as a whole, but also, simultaneously, to literature as
a whole, to theatrical performance as a whole, and to communal eexies of
speech, dress, and gesture, as well as of artistic convention, px)litical ideology,
social convention, and religious belief. (Both Barthes and Frye have maintained
as much in their later work.) I'his is the reason that a Shakespeare or an Ibsen
can write great plays, while even an intelligent, educated person without their
20 Drama and Reality
talent cannot. Their “talent” consists of an extraordinary sensitivity to all the
vast, shifting systems of thought within which their dramatic creations operate.
It is possible to teach ordinary individuals these systems, in piecemeal fashion,
but only the talented person has the intuitive grasp to be able to use the entire,
universal system in a dynamic wav.
This “universal system,” consisting of all the systems of meaning by which a
society thinks and acts, is what is commonly known as a culture. Drama, no
matter how much it may seem to redect life directly, is always reflecting it
through the cultural system in which it functions. Even “kitchen sink” realism
achieves its effect by breaking a cultural taboo against showing kitchen sinks (or
nudity, violence, sexual behavior, etc.). Without the cultural taboos, which are
those that in turn generate the literary and theatrical taboos affecting the play, no
one would even notice the kitchen sinks. It is the fact that a talxx) is being
broken that creates the audience’s sensation that it is seeing something very
“real,” very “close to life,” even though the tab(K) item is actually no closer to life
than the rest of the elements onstage. And, indeed, once kitchen sinks become
acceptable, no longer taboo, they lose their magical power of appearing to break
through to a noumenal reality, which is why theatre artists in our century have
so restlessly and endlessly sought new taboos to break.
Ill
To recapitulate, a play is first and foremost what the New Critics described as
“autotelic”: it reflects no external reality (at least not directly), but instead reflects
inward, mirroring itself. A notable example of this is a play’s narrative structure,
in which each event triggers the next, so that there is, in Aristotle’s terminology,
a beginning, a middle, and end. This structure connects the plav, so that, as the
audience experiences each e\’ent, it is recalling previous events and anticipating
those to come. Many plays, especially in modern times, avoid traditional
narrative structure, but nevertheless still have all kinds of interconnected rela­
tionships among their parts: characters reflect other characters, scenes reflect
other scenes, verbal images reflect other verbal images, and so on, generating the
motifs that hold the play together. The playwright, as he composes his play, is
unconcerned with external realities, and instead concentrates on the play as a
self-contained entity; similarly, the audience, as it watches the play, is primarily
aware of it as a self-contained experience.
Nevertheless, although this self-contained quality is in the foreground for
both playwright and audience—and, indeed, for the performers as well—their
sense of what a play is and of the very rules that hold it together have been
formed through their experience with other drama. Just as a theorem in geome­
try is self-contained, yet at the same time is a product of geometry as a whole
discipline, so too a given play is self-contained, yet also is a product of drama as a
Drama and Realitv 21
whole literary genre. In Henry /V, Fart I, Falstaff is enjoyable first and foremost
because of the way he functions in that particular plav, we enjoy his li\-clv
antics, his healthy sensuality, his unashamed cowardliness, and, ultimatciv, his
loyalty to Hal. We do not think of him as a traditional braggart soldier
bomolocho^ while we arc watching, but nonetheless, our experience with this
archetype in an abundance of other drama is nguide to the character, showing us
what to look for. In the same way, the archetype was an unconscious^ guide for
Shakespeare as he created the character, steering Shakespeare thrtmgh the play’s
potentialities as the play developed on the page.
At the same time, Shakespeare and his audience would ha\c been uncon­
sciously aware of other cultural systems overlapping the whole system of drama.
Drama is a subsystem of literature as a whole; the archetype of braggart soldier
is not limited to drama, but is found in the epic, the novella, and the narrative
poem of Shakespeare’s time. In addition, drama is a subsystem of theatre, which
includes a multitude of performance practices that arc nonverbal. Thus, the
incident in which Falstaff lifts the dead Hotspur on his back draws upon the
standard stage business, in the morality play, in which a devil or a character
personifying a vice carried someone off to hell on his back. Furthermore, the
creation of the character of Falstaff is a product of the surrounding cultural c<xJcs
of the Elizabethan age. Falstaff is fun partly because he breaks the established
norms of societal nicety and of military heroism. The fact that Falstaff is an
unofficial but strongly influential advisor to a prince shows Shakespeare drawing
upon political codes of his time, when there was a wealth of writing on the
proper behavior of a ruler, and the role of his advisers. The fact that Falstaff is a
vestige of the vice character in the morality play, a Christian form of drama,
means that he is also a product of the prevalent religious code. And so on.
Ultimately, Falstaff depicts Shakespeare’s entire culture.
We are just beginning to understand the importance of cultural codes with
regard to our behavior. Anthropologists, in studying primitive tribes, have
grasped the significance of myth and ritual as embodying a world view for the
tribe. The mistake that civilized people made originally in examining primitive
myth and ritual was in assuming that they operated in piecemeal fashion, with
each individual story or rite stating an isolated, quasi-scientific “fact” about the
world. But cultural systems do not make isolated assertions in the way that
science does; they always op>erate wholistically. Fhus when a primitive tribe has
a myth in which its ancestor was sired by a bear, this should not be taken as a
literal, historical statement. The tribesmen are aware that bears do not really
father human beings, just as we are aware, when reading Aesop’s fables, that
animals do not really talk. The story of the tribe’s animal ancestry cannot Ik
understood outside the whole system of mythology in which it operates. In the
whole system one might find, for example, that a neighboring tribe had been
sired by an eagle. 'Fhe true meaning of the tale is thus an analogical one: our
tribe is to theirs as bears are to eagles. Bears and eagles, in turn, will have a
22 Drama and Reality
whole range of associations connected to them that will make this analogy rich in
meaning. As with Shakespeare’s play, the myth will operate within a vast,
interconnected system of mythology, ritual, natural ordering, social structure,
cosmology, etc. It is through this system as a whole that the tribe members view
the world, enabling them to grasp reality as a whole and to develop strategies for
dealing with it.
'I'hus, myth and ritual are not primitive science and technology; they are
primitive literature and theatre. Conversely, literature, theatre, and the arts
generally function for us like myth and ritual for primitive tribes. Like the
primitive mvth, a play operates within a system of drama as a whole, and,
concentrically, also within the systems that form culture as a whole. Culture,
centered on drama in this way, 1 am dchning for the sake of brevity as the drama!
culture complex. The drama/culturc complex, like the myth complex of the
primitive tribe, provides our society with a vast model for understanding reality.
A play is “about” drama as a whole, and more broadly, about culture as a whole;
this drama/culture complex is “about” reality not in the passive sense of merely
reflecting it, but in the active sense of providing a “vocabulary” for describing it,
or a “geometry” for measuring it.,
A mathematical sysem, though self-contained, and part of a system of defini­
tions, axioms, and other theorems that is also self-contained, nevertheless may
turn out to have important practical applications as a side effect. When
Ricmann, in the mid-nineteenth century, invented non-Kuclidean geometry, the
result was seen as as intellectual curiosity only, a self-contained system that was
as intellectually rigorous as traditional Luclidean geometry, but which of course
did not “fit” real space as did Euclidean geometry. Later, Einstein showed that
Reimannian geometry did indeed fit, that in fact the apparent practicality of
Euclidean geometry was an illusion brought about by our limited human
viewpoint. In the age of modern physics, Riemann’s ivory tower system turned
out to be realistic and useful. Riemann, however, had not been thinking about
reality when he invented his geometry; he was thinking only about making it
consistent and complete. The practical application came as an unintentional side
effect. In the same way, the playwright or actor is only concerned with making
the play or performance unified and entertaining, which he does by making it
adhere to his intuitive sense of the drama/culture complex in which he operates.
Nonetheless, plavs and performances may very well effect how people behave in
practical circumstances. William Manchester, in his memoirs of the Second
World War, writes;
Combat as I saw it was exorbitant, outrageous, excruciating, and above all
tasteless, perhaps because the number of fighting men who had read Heming­
way or Remarque was a fraction of those who had seen B movies about
bloodshed. If a platoon leader had watched Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, Errol
Flynn, Victor McLaglen, John Wayne, or Gary (hooper leap recklessly al)out,
he* was likely to follow this role model.
Drama and Reality 23
Here the B movies provided a criterion for behavior in actual combat. Certainly,
the actors Manchester mentions had no intention of doing this when thev made
their films; they were intent only on giving exciting performances, which they
did by following role models that they had seen or read about in other plays or
novels or films. But, unquestionably, society does use such performances in
trying to understand the world and how to behave in it.
Note, however, that it is again the entire system of culture that is operating
here: not just “serious” works by a Hemingway or a Remarque, but grade B
movies, pulp novels, commercial plays. (More recently, FV dramas can be
added to the list.) Nor does Manchester mention only a single film or even a
single actor, but implies that there had been manv recklessly heroic perform­
ances to establish the archetypal role mtxlel. The individual work rarely has any
direct influence on reality; this is why it is naive to think that any single plav will
cause a revolution, defeat fascism, end exploitation, make people more loving, or
achieve any other worthwhile goal, just as it is naive to think that any single play
will, in the fantasies of the Moral Majority, incite blasphemy, treason, or
promiscuity." Again, the individual work is really addressing itself to the total
system by which we choose to do these things or not. Manchester writes of
Hemingway, his idol:
Before the war I thought that I lemingwav, by stripping battle narratives of
their ripe prose, was describing the real thing. .Afterward I realized that he
had simplv replaced traditional overstatement with romantic understate­
ment.^^
In other words, Hemingway was not trying to describe war directly, but to
attack the traditional way of depicting war in literature and drama, d'here has
developed a whole genre of anti-war literature, not only by such authors as
Hemingway or Remarque, but Shaw^, Brecht, and innumerable others. This
genre was a major reason for the extensive opposition in the United Stales to the
Vietnam War; Americans had a vehicle for thinking about w'ar in a negative
way—the anti-war novel or the anti-w’ar play—which earlier Americans had not
had during wars in our past, which may have been equallv brutal and unjust but
which went largely unopposed.
IV
We can now see the distinction between the serious work of art and the work
of a hack: the hack play merely reinforces the drama/culture complex in effect at
the time of its composition, while the serious plav attempts to attack that system
in some way. Fhus both the serious and the conventional play will be full of
traditional elements, but the serious play will call some of those very elements
into question, making them seem strange—“alienated,” to use Brecht’s termi­
24 Drama and Reality
nology, or “defamiliarized,” in the terminology of the Russian formalist Viktor
Shklovsky. Ibsen in his day seemed revolutionary not because he wrote com­
pletely new kinds of plays, but rather because he wrote traditional plays with a
new slant. Thus A Doll House is a traditional nineteenth-century Well-Made
Play, setting a heroine, Nora, against a villain, Krogstad, in a struggle revolving
around a suppressed secret (the forgery), and developed through the use of
simplistic devices such as the letter in the visible mailbox. As in many Well-
Made Plays, the villain undergoes a sudden conversion of conscience, and the
heroine emerges victorious. The difference is that Ibsen has Krogstad undergo
this change one scene too early (Nora is not even on stage at the time), and in the
6nal scene, where audiences would expect a confrontation between the heroine
and the villain, there is instead a confrontation between the heroine and her
husband, who turns out, surprisingly, to be the true villain of the piece. Critics
who dislike Ibsen have pointed to all his Well-Made Play machinery with scorn,
while those who like him have tried to explain it away. (One such critic insisted
that Ibsen really got all the devices from Shakespeare and Holberg, which was
somehow better than if they had come from Scribe.)*’ Both sides miss the point.
A Doll House, like any effective play, is really about drama, not about life, and its
originality comes not from being as unlike hack plays as possible, but from
making new uses of the conventions upK>n which those hack plays are based.
TTiis is the reason that playwrights who seem revolutionary always turn out,
after critical analysis, to l)e embedded in a tradition. Shaw seemed revolution­
ary, but, as Martin Meisel showed in his excellent book, Shaw and the Nineteenth
Century Theatre, he was actually a master of every nineteenth-century theatrical
trick and convention. Chekhov seemed revolutionary but was actually writing
traditional melodramas turned inside out, with the pivotal action (a suicide, a
duel, an auction for the family estate) placed offstage. Beckett seems revolution­
ary, but, as Albert Bermel has ably demonstrated, he actually is placing tradi­
tional characters in plots and situations that parody those of traditional drama. *■*
Thus, the drama/culture complex gradually changes, in movements that may at
the time seem rapid and drastic but which are actually slow and evolutionary.
Here again one can make an analogy with language, which always evolves
slowly, despite the fact that at anv particular time an innovation, such as the use
of “Ms.” instead of “Miss” or “Mrs.,” will seem to be disrupting it radically. The
crest of the wave may be turbulent and frothy, but the wave itself retains its size
and shape, moving in a steady and orderly manner.
In fact, plays that attempt to break totally with tradition—the dream of every
sophomore in a playwriting class—simply do not and cannot succeed. Orig­
inality in playwriting comes not from writing something completely new, but
from putting old things together in new ways. Thus, the most original play­
wright of our century, Bertolt Brecht, borrowed from the most places. This was
because Brecht, like any serious artist, was actually addressing himself to the
conventions and traditions by which society views the world.
Drama and Rcalitv 25
Brecht’s Mother Courage, for example, is an anack on the traditional Cierman
history play, of the sort established by Goethe and Schiller. Such plays were
heroic and nationalistic, setting a courageous, idealistic, talented man of the
people against a privileged, feudal, outdated, fragmented aristocracy. The plavs
were simultaneously individualistic and nationalistic, and were a major force in
changing the German people from a fragmented, agrarian society into a unified,
industrialized nation. A nineteenth-century Cierman capitalist struggling with
internal tariffs, a stultifying bureaucracy, and aristocratic privilege may seem a
far cry from an Egmont or a Wilhelm Tell, but those hen>ic, anti-aristwratic
plays did provide a frame of reference, an underlying way of thinking, that
enabled the capitalist of the nineteenth century to understand himself and his
problems. In Mother Courage, Brecht created a heroine who is indeed individu­
alistic and courageous, like the heroes of Cierman Romantic drama, but her
individualism destroys her children, and her “courage,” far from being ide­
alistic, was solely in search of a profit: she drove through the bombardment of
Riga because she had fifty loaves of bread to sell, and they were getting moldy.
The play is really “about” Egmont and Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell and their
hundreds of imitations, without which Mother Courage would never have been
written. Again, this is not because Brecht was engaged in some sterile exercise of
copying other playwrights, but rather because he believed that German drama
had formed a system of ideas and beliefs for the German people that had
ultimately l)ccome pernicious. All great drama is parody, but it is a parody of a
complex and serious nature. In parodying the received dramatic tradition, the
serious playwright is attacking and ultimately altering the means by which
people think, behave, and decide.
The split between conventional and serious art exists in our society because of
the rapid way our society has changed. Primitive societies, which are relatively
static, do not have an artistic avant-garde, fhe primitive artist’s function is
conserv'ative, to reaffirm the cultural order. In a dynamic society like ours,
however, the changes that are occurring require a constant reexamination of the
culture. Thus, Brecht attacked the conventions of Romantic historical drama
because changing social conditions had made those conventions no longer apt.
The serious artist’s function in a dynamic society becomes radical, not to
reaffirm the social order but to hold it up for examination and—if his new vision
catches on, as Brecht’s did—to alter it.
V
The principal fallacy in realistic dramatic theory was in its assigning a passive
role to drama, which was seen as merely reflecting reality in a point-blank
manner. 'Fhe ingenuousness of this theory is the same as that of the traditional,
naive view of language, which was also seen as merely describing reality in a
26 Drama and Reality
simple, one-to-one relationship. Twentieth-century linguists have instead
stressed the operative nature of language. Edward Sapir, for example, noted that
“distinctions which seem inevitable to us may be utterly ignored in languages
which reflect an entirely different type of culture, while these in turn insist on
distinctions which arc all but unintelligible to us. . . . It would be difflcult in
some languages, for instance, to express the distinction which we feel between
‘to kill’ and ‘to murder,’ for the simple reason that the underlying legal philoso­
phy which determines our use of these words does not seem natural to all
societies.”'^ Eskimo languages have some thirty or so words for water in its
frozen stale, in contrast to the half-dozen or so we have in English (ice, snow,
slush, etc.). Such words do not merely reflect what is “out there,” but are instead
a device for categorizing and measuring the enormous range of phenomena that
are actually perceived. At any given moment we are bombarded with such
phenomena, which we must organize and catalog if we are to function at all
efficiently. Thus, if I were to ask a visitor to my office what the walls were made
of, he would immediately answer, “bricks.” But suppose he were someone from
a culture unfamiliar with that word or the concept it stands for. He would then
have to launch into a long description, such as “it appears to l)e made up of some
rectangular stones, ranging in color from dark brown to light orange, in between
which are bands of hard, grayish white stuff.” When someone says that some­
thing is a brick wall, his words are not just duplicating some “things” out in the
world, but are actually summing up a wide range of sensations, and composing
them into a single, elegant concept.
Drama has an operative function similar to that of language. Rather than
mirroring life passively, drama is instead a means of thinking about life, a way of
organizing and categorfemg it. Drama as a whole, both serious and con­
ventional, in all its media (stage, film, televison, etc.), generates archetypal
categories of events, characters, situations, and themes, which we then apply to
real life in order to understand and deal with it. For example, our nuclear policy
is shaped by the archetype of the Western gunfight, in which the hero must
allow the villain to draw his gun first, but must then draw his own gun quickly
enough to kill the villain before he can effectively fire. Thus, we must never use
our nuclear weapons first against Russia, but instead allow them to attempt a
first strike, at which point we are morally justified, even required, to obliterate
them. There is strong evidence that the “quick-draw” duel never actually took
place in the Old West; there are no direct reports of it, and the types of guns and
holsters then in use would not really have allowed it. \ he quick-draw duel is
thus “unrealistic,” in the historical sense, but such unrealism is beside the point,
since the purpose of the archetype is not to reflect reality, but rather to provide a
model of behavior that is an ethical norm for violent confrontations in our own
lives. Thus Americans, for all their violent history, have always been slow to go
to war. ITie villain must always draw first, by firing on Fort Sumter, blowing up
the Maine, torpedoing the Lusitania, bombing Pearl Harbor. At that |X)int, we
Drama and Reality 27
are morally enabled to shoot back with full and horrible force; according to the
“quick draw” archetype. Pearl Harbor justified Hiroshima. This is not an
archetype found in other cultures, and is not even Christian—the Christian
cowboy would “resist not evil,” turn the other cheek, and allow himself to be
shot. It is uniquely our own dramatic archetype, and it dominates our thinking
on everything from gun control to nuclear retaliation.
In the 1960s the “adult Western” began to alter the traditional Western form.
Films and television dramas depicted villains with some redeeming qualities,
and heroes with misgivings or weaknesses; the quick-draw duel was often
averted, or, if it occurred, had unpleasant consequences rather than a clear moral
victory. This modification was a typical case of “serious” works modifying the
drama/culturc complex through which we view life, and, indeed, the rise of the
adult Western coincided with a new era of detente with the Russians. In recent
years the system has shown signs of regressing, with the quick-draw duel
returning, not in Westerns but in science fiction and fantasy films such as Star
Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we find ourselves entering another period of
hostile confrontation with the Soviets.
The drama/culture complex is thus not something beyond our control that
fatefully rules our lives; it can change. It changes gradually, however, and rarely
in response to any individual work. I he changes come in response to changes in
life itself; there is a feedback loop through which changes in reality stimulate
changes in the complex, while changes in the complex alter the ways in which
we comprehend reality.
This semiological theory attaches much more importance to drama (and the
other arts) than does realistic theory. If drama reflects reality directly, what is the
purpose of it? Why bother to study it, when one can just as easily study life
itself? Why study life at second hand, when one can tackle it directly, using the
social sciences of psychology, anthropology, sociology? Indeed, the present low
value of humanistic studies in contrast to the social and physical sciences is in
large measure the very result of realistic doctrine, which fails to recognize the
crucial function that drama has for us. Drama is not a mirmr held up to nature,
but rather a gauge.
Notes
1. Claude Levi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, trans. John and Doreen Weighiman (London:
Jonathan ('ape, 197 3), passim.
2. Edward T. I lall, The Silent language (Garden (litv, N.V.: Doubicdav, 1973), 44.
3. I have dealt with this at length in chapter two of my b<K)k, Patterns in Ibseni Middle Plays
(l.cwi.sburg. Pa.: Bucknell Universitv Press, 1981).
4. This and all subsequent quotations from Shakespeare’s plays, cited in the text, are taken from
The Complete Words, genera! ed. .\lfred I larbage (Baltimore: Penguin B<K)ks, 1969).
5. Roland Barthes, “To Write: .\n Intransitive \'erb?" in The Structuralists from Marx to IJvi-
Strauss, ed. Richard and Eernande DeCJeorge ((jarden City, N,^.; [X>ubleday, 1972), 164 etpassim.
28 Drama and Reality

6. Northrop Frve, Anatomy Criticism (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 19S7X 158-60.
7. Jan .Mukafovsky, Structure, Sign and Function, trans. and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner
(New Ilaven: Yale University Press, 1978), 21 etpassim.
8. Frye, 175.
9. Not in the Freudian sense, but in the Saussurian sense of langue.
10. William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific (New ^brk: Dell, 1979), 83. Part I
11. The Moral Majority mav have good reason to fear an entire genre or subgenre, however, as
with pornography. But the solution to the pntbicm is not censorship (w hich is never effective); our
imaginary life is impregnable under direct assault. Instead, the solution is the creation of literary
Varieties of the Metadramatic
works that ridicule and otherw ise attack the norms and archetypes of pornographic literature.
12. .Manchester, 83.
13. .Michael .Mevcr, Ibsen: A Biography (Garden ('ity, N.Y.: I3oubleday, 1971), 116, 297.
14. .\lbert Bermel. “Beckett w ithtjut .Metaphysics,” 1‘erformance 1, 2 (.\pril 1972); 119-26.
15. Edward Sapir, Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and hrsonality, ed. David CU .Men-
delbaum (Berkeley and Ix>s .\ngeles; University of California Press, 1949), 27.
 2
The Play within the Play

In recent decades there has been a growing scholarly interest in metadrama (or,
variously, metatheatre, or metafiction in drama) as an element in the drama.
Books like Lionel Abel’s Metatheatre, James L. Calderwood’s Shakespearean Meta­
drama, Robert Egan’s Drama within Drama, Sidney Homan’s When the Theatre
Turns to Itself, Robert J. Nelson’s Play within a Play, and June Schlueter’s
Metafictional Characters in Modem Drama are only a few examples of the new
attention being paid to this aspect of theatre. Yet these various studies tend to be
rather limited in their range; metadrama is rarely given an adequate definition,
nor is its extraordinary ubiquity appreciated, nor its many varieties categorized.
For example, Lionel Abel’s seminal book. Metatheatre, although original and
striking, is actually a collection of only loosely connected essays, of which only
about half actually deal with metatheatre—which is never clearly defined.
Calderwood, Egan, and Homan limit themselves to Shakespeare; Schlueter, to
modern drama. Nelson’s book is broader in scope, but contains no systematic
taxonomy, nor any significant philosophical treatment of metadrama as a whole.
I do not intend these characterizations to denigrate these works, however, which
are of high quality, but rather to suggest that it is time for a broader overview of
metadrama as a phenomenon.
Briefly, metadrama can be defined as drama about drama; it occurs whenever
the subject of a play turns out to be, in some sense, drama itself. There are many
ways in which this can occur. In one sense, as I argued in the last chapter, all
drama is metadramatic, since its subject is always, willy-nilly, the drama/culture
complex. A playwright is constantly drawing on his knowledge of drama as a
whole (and, ultimately, culture as a whole) as his “vocabulary” or his “subject
matter.” At the same time, his audience is always relating what it sees and hears
to the play as a whole, and beyond that, to other plays it has already seen and
heard, so that a dramatic work is always experienced at least secondarily as
metadramatic.
> Metadrama is thus not a narrow phenomenon, limited to a few great play-
31
32 Varieties of the Metadramatic
Wrights or to a few periods in theatre history, but is always occurring. Neverthe­
less, the manner in which a given play is metadramatic, and the degree to which
the metadramatic is consciously employed, can vary widely. Great playwrights tend
to be more consciously metadramatic than ordinary ones, and their plays to
employ metadramatic devices more obviously, because the great playwright
conceives his mission to be one of altering the norms and standards by which his
audience views the world, and is thus more likely to attack those norms
frontally. But again, this is only a tendency, and in fact every metadramatic
device Wnd in great plays can also be found in ordinary ones, even among the
most crass and pedestrian.
11
The possible varieties of conscious or overt metadrama are as follows:
1. The play within the play.
2. 'Fhe ceremony within the play.
3. Role playing within the role.
4. Literary and real-life reference.
5. Self reference.
I shall deal with the first of these types in this chapter, and the remaining four in
subsequent chapters. 1 shall deal with a sixth type, drama and perception, in the
final section of this book, since this type is broader and subtler than the more
overt ones. Serious drama, again, always moves toward the metadramatic, and
beyond that, toward the theme of human perception, via the drama/culture
complex. In the final section of the book 1 shall discuss, in six plays from
differing periods, the ways in which the serious playwright examines the
manner in which his society perceives reality.
These types of metadrama should be seen not as passive categories, but rather
as instrumental ones. ITcy are rarely found in pure form, but often occur
together or blend into one another. They are not truth in and of themselves, but
rather a means of discovering truth. Phenomenologically, there is much more to
metadrama than the simple technical definition of “drama about drama.” The
metadramatic experience for the audience is one of uncase, a dislocation of
perception. It is thus possible to talk about the degree of intensity of metadrama,
which varies from very mild to an extreme disruption. At times, metadrama can
yield the most exquisite of aesthetic insights, which tht'orists have spoken of as
“estrangement” or “alienation.” This “seeing double” is the true source of the
significance of metadrama, and is the true subject of this book.
The Play within the Play 33
iii
With regard to the play within the play, there are two general kinds: in one,
the “inset” type, the inner play is secondary, a performance set apart from the
main action, like The Mousetrap in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; in the other, the
“framed” type, the inner play is primary, with the outer play a framing device,
like the Sly episodes in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Sbrem The two types are
usually distinct—until mcxlern times, in fact, it was always obvious which of the
two plays, the inner or the outer, was primary.
With both the inset and the framed types, the degree of connection between
the outer and the inner play can vary considerably. In Hamlet there is a
continuous link between the outer and the inner play; the characters in the outer
play fully acknowledge the existence of The Mousetrap {performance, preparing
for it, watching it, and commenting on it. Hamlet himself breaks up the
performance, thus actually intruding upon it. In other plays, howev’er, there
may be much less integration between inner and outer play; such plays may
contain interludes, choruses, songs, dances, dumb shows, and so on, that arc
not really part of the outer play. Bertolt Brecht’s A Man's a Man, for example,
contains a playlet called 'The Elephant Calf which, while having strong thematic
connections with the main play, is in no way acknowledged by the main play’s
characters or action. In the popular theatre, with its long tradition of entr’acte
entertainment (which has disappeared only recently from our theatre), the
animal acts, songs, dances, acrobatic feats, jokes, music, and the rest were even
less integrated than The Elephant Calf, being chosen with no regard for the main
play at all.
Conversely, the inset play within the play can be even more integrated with
the main play than The Mousetrap is in Hamlet. 'Fhere may be long stories, set
speeches, reports of messengers (standard in classical Greek and Roman dramaX
pageants, songs, or dances that are capable of standing apart, yet which arc still
presented as fully part of the main action, llie “Bleeding Sergeant” speech at
the beginning of Macbeth is set in traditional epic style, and would have provided
a nice opportunity for a trained orator to deliver as a recitation, yet it is essential
for carrying forward the plot of the play, since it reports the story of the battle to
Duncan and his entourage. Furthermore, the speaker is not just an orator, but a
full-fledged character, a soldier who has Iwen injured in that battle, and whose
wounds ultimately make him faint. In 'Twelfth Night, Sir Toby and Festc, the
Clown, sing a song that is also dialogue:
[sings] “Farewell, dear heart since I must needs be gone.”
TOBY,
MARIA.Nay, good sir Toby.
CLOWN, [sings] “His eyes do show his days are almost done.”
MALVOLio. Is’t even so?
34 Varieties of the Metadramatk
[sings] “But I will never die.”
TOBY,
CLOWN,[sings] “Sir Toby, there you lie.”
MALVOUO. This is much credit to you.
TOBY, [sings] “Shall I bid him go?”
CLOWN. “What an if you do?”
TOBY, “Shall I bid him go, and spare not?”
CLOWN. “O, no, no, no, no, you dare not!”
(2.3.93-103)
Here the song, like the Bleeding Sergeant’s speech, is recognizably an inset
performance, yet it too is an integrated part of the dramatic action, being used
directly to mock Malvolio. The play within the play in Hamlet also achieves an
aim of one of the characters—to cause Claudius to confess—but that aim is not
apparent to the rest of the court, so that the inner p>erformance there stands
more apart than it does here.
With the framed type of play within the play, the outer, framing play can be
strongly integrated with the inner play. In George Pcele’s Elizal)ethan play The
Old Wives' Tale (ca. 1588-94), for example, the Old Wife spins a story that turns
out to be the main play. She and her listeners comment on the inner play from
time to time (like the watchers of 'The Mousetrap in Hamlet). The frame is
completed with a little scene of about twenty lines at the end—she, it seems, had
fallen asleep during her own story/play, but her listeners awaken her and go off
to breakfast. In The Taming of the Shrew, the frame is apparently not completed;
Sly and his fellow watchers simply disappear from the printed text, though they
may not have done so from the original performance. Other plays may employ a
narrator or a chorus as a frame, which is only loosely integrated with the main
play. For centuries it was common to have prologues or epilogues written for the
occasion of a performance by someone other than the playwright, which did not
frame the main play except thematically. Finally, just as entr’acte (Irntertainment,
totally disconnected from the main play, used to be common in the popular
theatre, so too were the “curtain raiser” and the “afterpiece,” one-act plays or
other types of short performance that also had no relation to the evening’s
principal entertainment.
From all this, we can distinguish between play within the play situations that
are truly metadramatic, and those that are not. On the one hand, there must be
some integration of the inner play with the outer; that is, the outer play must in
some way acknowledge the inner play’s existence. Curtain raisers and afterpieces
do not really create a metadramatic frame; interludes are not really metadramatic
insets. I would insist further that full-fledged metadramatic framing does not
occur unless the outer, framing play contains at least a minimal degree of
characterization or plot, as in 'The 'Taming of the Shrew or 'The Old Wives' 'Tale.
Prologues, epilogues, choruses, narrators, and the like, usually do acknowledge
the existence of the main, inner play, and certainly do set it off within a frame,
'Fhe Play within the Play 35
but it is more a frame of convention, which is noticed only subliminallv bv the
audience, than a frame that makes the audience “sec double.” An exception
would have to be a play like Shakespeare’s Pericles, where the Chorus, a single
character, is given a name (Gower), and comments repeatedly on the action
(rather than just at the beginning, or beginning and end), sometimes describing
events while the characters act them out simultaneously in dumb show. Or­
dinarily, however, we do not feel that conventional framing devices like a chorus
or prologue are a layer between us and the main action, but instead soon forget
them.
Conversely, with the inset type of play within the plav, true metadrama does
not arise when the inner performance is too well integrated. Set speeches (like
that of the Bleeding Sergeant), choral odes, reports of messengers, and the like,
are indeed acknowledged by the outer, main play, but, like prologues, epilogues,
choruses, and narrators in the framed type of play, they are more conventional
than metadramatic. The characters in the outer play acknowledge the existence of
such ifiset pieces, but they do not acknowledge them as performance. The theatre
audience accepts such devices because they are used to them, noticing no strong
shift in the mode of representation. Again, they do not feel as if they are seeing
double, through one level of performance into another.
In sum, for a play within the play of either the inset or framed type to be fully
metadramatic requires that the outer play have characters and plot (although
these may both be very sketchy); that these in turn must acknowledge the
existence of the inner play; and that they acknowledge it as a performance. In
other words, there must lie two sharply distinguishable layers of performance.
IV
Such use of the play within the play is not found in Western drama before the
Renaissance. Classical Greek and Roman drama do not employ the device,
although they do employ all the other metadramatic devices, some of them in
abundance. They also employ many of the conventional framing and inset
techniques already discussed, such as the chorus and the prologue, that have
little or no metadramatic effect of estrangement. The choral odes in ancient
Greek comedy and tragedy are certainly differentiated, in many ways, from the
main action shown in the episodes, but they cannot be considered either an
outer or an inner play as they function in any extant plavscript. In the latest
plays we have, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, f^uripides’ The Bacchae, or
Aristophanes’ Plutus, the role of the chorus is considerably reduced from what it
had been—in some earlier plays, in fact, it was even the protagonist—so that, at
times, the choral odes seem to be lyric interludes rather than integral parts of the
play. Nonetheless, even in these late plays, the chorus is always given a charac­
terization that is part of the world of the play, and always interacts, at least some
36 Varieties of the Metadramatic
of the time, with“the main characters. In later Greek drama, and in Roman
drama as well, it seems that the chorus did become detached from the action.'
This kind of interlude can be seen as literally a play within a play, but functions
differently from the kind of piece in which the inner play is acknowledged by
the characters in the outer play.
Aristophanes, in The Frogs, provides numerous inset pieces in the form of
lines and parodies from the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides,
which are potentially metadramatic. They do not have a strong metadramatic
effect, however, because they arc merely recited out of context; even the charac­
ters who originally sp>oke the lines often remain unidentified. Rather than plays
within the play, they are actually examples of literary references (see chapter 5).
As far as we can tell, then, the full-fledged play within the play never
occurred in the classical Greek and Roman period. Classical oriental drama at
times used the play within the play, however. Kalidasa, the fifth-century a.d.
Hindu playwright, made use of the inset type in his play Vikramorvashe. In it, a
celestial nymph falls in love with a mortal king. Taking part in a celestial play,
she misses her cue and pronounces her lover’s name during the performance, an
error that gets her banned from heaven. Kalidasa’s successors appear to have
frequently used the inset play within the play as a device.^ In another oriental
tradition, the Japanese Noh theatre used the retrospective, framed play within
the play as a stock convention. In many of these plays, a traveler encounters the
hero in the form of a ghost, who proceeds to act out in dramatic form the story of
his earthly life.^ This framed enactment becomes the main play.
In the English Renaissance, the integrated play within the play became
common for the first time in Western drama. Both the framed and the inset type
appear. Shakespeare employs the inset type in three of his plays: The Taming of
the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet. This list is greatly expanded,
however, if we include nondramatic performances like the masques in Love's
Labour's Lost, As You Like It, and The Tempest; the apparitions and show of kings in
Macbeth; the dumb shows in Pericles; the dream sequences in Richard HI, hricles,
Cymbeline, and Henry VIII; the pageantry in Troilus and Cressida and Richard II;
and the songs that occur in almost every play. 'I'hese examples, however, might
better be included in the second type of metadrama, the ceremonial within the
play. We might also include as plays within the play the informal play acting of
Falstaff and Hal in the Boar’s Head lavern in Henry IV, Part 1, or of Lear
performing the mock trial of his daughters with the F(K)1 and Fxlgar playing
judges. These, however, might better be included in the third type of meta­
drama, role playing within the role. In fact, as already noted, the varieties of
metadrama tend to blend into one another, or to operate in tandem; when a play
contains a ball (the ceremonial), for example, it will often turn out to be masked
(role playing).
I he play within the play In English Renaissance drama is not limited to
Shakespeare. It is found as early as 1497 in Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres,
The Play within the Play 37
which Nelson cites as probably the first use of the device."* In Norton and
Sackville’s well known political play Gorboduc (1562), a different dumb show
appears at the beginning of each act. These dumb shows are not integrated into
the main play, however, since they neither directly acknowledge nor are ac­
knowledged by it. Instead, they anticipate Brecht’s “alienation effect,” by ser\-
ing as didactic commentary on the play’s events. Later, dumb shows apj>ear in
such plays as Lvly’s Endymion (1588), .Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (ca. 1588-92),
Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (ca. 1589-92), Webster’s The White Devil
(ca. 1612-14), and Middleton and Rowley’s ’The Changeling (1622). All of these are
integrated into the dramatic action. A masque appears in Marston’s 'The Dutch
Courtesan {Ca. 1603-5), a mountebank performance in Jonson’s Volpone{cA. 1605-
6X and a puppet show in his Bartholomew Fair{\6\A)- There is even an audition,
in the anonymous The Return from Parnassus, Part 11 (ca. 1601-3), and, of course,
songs, pageants, and dances abound in drama throughout the period. As for the
framed type of play within the play, many plays in the period employ induc­
tions, such as the anonymous Mucedorus (ca. 1588-98), Drayton’s The Merry Devil
cf Edmonton (ca. 1599-1604), or .Marston’s The Malcontent (1604), while framing
plays arc found in Pcele’s 'The Old Wives' 'Tale already mentioned, Greene’s James
the Fourth (ca. 1590-91), and Beaumont’s 'The Knight of the Burning Pestle (ca. 1607-
10). This last is interesting in that the framing play arises from the audience, thus
anticipating Pirandello; similarly, in Pccle’s Arraignment of Paris, the audience
becomes the framewhen Paris gives the golden apple at the end of the play to—
whom else?—Queen Elizabeth, the principal audience member.
'The all-time metadramatic record, however, must go to Thomas Kyd’s 'The
Spanish 'Tragedy (ca. 1584-89). This amazing play contains both the framed and
the inset type of play within the play. The ghost of a former Spanish courtier,
and his companion, the allegorical character Revenge, form an induction and
chorus for the main play, which contains, in turn, three inset pieces: a parade of
the victorious Spanish army with its captives (which the Spanish king likes so
much he orders to be repeated), a masque glorifying Spain’s earlier defeat by
little England (most unlikely entertainment for the Spanish court, but no one
seems to mind), and a play, Soliman and Perseda, delivered in several different
languages! 'This last inner play also has a Pirandcllian quality, foreshadow ing Six
Characters in Search of an Author, as the deaths within it turn out to be real deaths
in terms of the surrounding play. The experience of the audience seeing The
Spanish Tragedy is thus not only triple-layered—the play within the play within
the play—but also ambiguous, as the principal inset play intrudes back upon the
main play.
'The play within the play, then, was so commonplace in the English Renais­
sance as to become almost a cliche. This fact may shed light on a problem in
theatre history: in the only pictorial evidence we have of a performance in that
period, the Swan drawing of Johannes DeWitt, there is a small group of people
lined up on a balcony above and behind a thrust stage, on which three actors are
 38 Varieties of the Metadramatic
performing. Historians have wondered whether these watchers arc other actors,
or if they are audience. The former possibility presents difficulties, since actors
not actually performing ought to be in the tiring house rather than out in full
view; some historians have thus suggested that what is depicted is in fact not a
performance but a rehearsal. But the latter possibility is also troublesome, since
there are no other audience members depicted in the entire auditorium; why
would DeWitt show audience members only in the worst viewing place of all,
and nowhere else? A solution might be that what is depicted is one of the
prevalent plays within the plays of the period, with the actors on the thrust
taking part in the inner play, and those above in the outer. 'I'his would have
worked for either the framed type of play, with the people above forming the
frame, like Sly and his deceivers watching the main action of The Taming of the
Shrew; or for the inset type, with the actors on the thrust performing an inner
piece like The Mousetrap or Soliman and Perseda for the large “audience” above,
who are actually in the main, surrounding play.
1 he play within the play is found in C>ontinental Renaissance drama almost as
frequently as in the English. Lope de Vega’s Lo Fingtdo Verdadero (ca. 1600)
contains two inner plays. A more well-known example is Life Is a Dream, written
by the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon dc la Barca around 1636, in which
the inner play is really a dream, and a faked one at that. The protagonist, a
young prince reared in confinement, is drugged by his father the king and
brought to court, where he behaves abominably. The kind has him drugged
again and returned to imprisonment, where he is told that what had occurred
was a dream. Since he never afterward knows whether what is happening may
be a dream or not, he eventually becomes a good king. I he idea expressed is the
traditional Christian one of contemptus mundi, with a new, theatrical twist.
Calderon pursued a similar metaphor in his Great Theatre of the World (ca. 1645),
and eventually become a priest. ^ In France a number of plavs having plays
within them were written as late as the 1630s and 1640s: Jean Retrou’s Le Veritable
Saint Genest (1645) has for its subject an actor who becomes converted through
his acting.6 Ciougenot’s La Comedie des comediens (1633), de Scudery’s play of the
same name written two years later, Corneille’s LTllusion comique (1636), and de la
Fessoneries Le Triomphe des cinq passions (1642) arc all apologies du theatre that
employ plays within them.^
These pieces, which were mainly essays in dramatic form rather than plays to
be performed, mark the end of the play within the play for centuries. After the
Renaissance, the device went out of fashion. We do not find it much in the
ncoclassic period, nor in the romantic, despite the admiration for Shakespeare in
the latter era, when his plays were consciously imitated. Of course, inset songs
and dances continued to be popular; indeed, it is hard to find plays without
them at any time or place before the modern period. (Despite the vague
prejudice that exists today among intellectuals against musical theatre, it is
'Fhe Play within the Play 39
really the norm in theatre history.) Nonetheless, they were rarely metadramatic
in the fullest sense; music and dance tend to be either too little integrated (as ^
entr’acte entertainment and the like) or too much integrated (as merely con­
ventional elements, like the arias in opera, rather than offset performances) to
have an effect of estrangement. Certainly, the full-fledged performance within
the play, like I lamlet’s Mousetrap, virtually disappears with the coming of the
neoclassical age.
MoHere, for example, provides endless examples of role playing within the
role—it is his stock in trade—but rarely anything resembling the play within the
play. LTmpromptu de Versailles (1663) takes place at a rehearsal where, although we
do hear brief lines declaimed from a few other plays, we do not see the play
being rehearsed. Others of Moliere’s plays contain interludes; the hilarious
Turkish ceremony in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670) is one of these, but, signifi­
cantly, it is not the sort of play that would have been seen on Moliere’s own
stage. In fact, such interludes are really examples of the ceremonial within the
play, which has less metadramatic impact than an inner performance that is
truly a play.
The Italian neoclassical stage, and the English Restoration and eighteenth-
century stage, similarly made little use of the play within the play. The framed
type appears occasionally, in attenuated form, as in John Gay’s The Beggar's Opera
(1728), which has a brief induction by a beggar, the supposed author of the
piece. The inset type appears in burlesque plays like Villiers’s The Rehearsal (1671)
or Sheridan’s The Critic (1781), but not in nonsatiric drama. (The Beggar's Opera is
also satiric.) In general, as Robert J. Nelson notes, by the late eighteenth
century,
the play within a plav figures at best merely as an episode of the outer plav. As
interest shifts from tlic action to the actor, we go not only backstage with the
man but offstage with him. In play after play about actors, we do not see the
hero onstage, or, when there is a play within a play, it is used only inciden­
tally. ”
What is the reason for this disappearance of a device that had once been so
common? The change does coincide with drastic innovations in staging tech­
niques; perhaps the new illusionistic, proscenium style of staging that replaced
the simple thrust platform of the Renaissance with its minimal, emblematic
scenery, made the play within the play too difficult to stage. We must remember,
however, that Shakespeare’s plays were performed continuously through the
neoclassical and romantic periods; the actors of those times must have managed
somehow to stage the inner plays. And, as mentioned, the play within the play
was used in parodies like The Beggar's Opera, The Rehearsal, and The Critic.
Ultimately, the dramatic conventions of a given era are not determined by!
staging mechanics, but by the social and philosophical concerns of that era. The'
near disappearance of the play within the play around the middle of the
 40 Varieties of the Metadramatic
I seventeenth century represents a change in world view, which I shall discuss
shortly.
V Daughter of Indra appears, in various characterizations, in both the prologue and
From the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, then, the play
within the play appears only occasionally, usually in a play parodying the
prevailing theatrical styles. Even there, it is sometimes used less than one might
expect; L'Impromptu de Versailles, for example, would l>e much funnier if Moli^rc
had thought to include a full-scale performance rather than a few snippets.
In the romantic era, the play within the play occurs hardlv more frequently
than in the neoclassical. Goethe’s Faust contains a double frame—a prelude on
the stage and a prologue in heaven—plus many songs, dances, and choral pieces,
as well as the Walpurgisnacht dream sequence. But, although we have come to
think of Faust as the quintessential romantic play, and although it had enormous
influence on other playwrights, the play within the play device was still not
nearly as popular in the period as it had been in the Renaissance. Again, even
where we would expect it to occur, playwrights seem to avoid it. Robert J.
Nelson notes that in Alexandre Dumas pere’s Kean (1836),
Fhe fact that Kean is an actor is paradoxically almost forgotten. . . . Kean is
formally onstage for only a relatively short period. . . . Even in the play
within a play—the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet—Kean seems to be
onstage only to come off it.*^
Significantly, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s twentieth-century adaptation of the play,
Kean is on stage much more of the time, and there is much more exploration of
the nature of theatre, than in the source play.
As realism replaced romanticism, the play within the play was used even less
frequently. Realism often dealt with the everyday life of the middle classes, but,
even though theatregping was a regular part of that life, realistic plays do not
depict it. (Characters arc often shown going to or coming from the theatre, but
rarely in the theatre.)
A drastic change began around the turn of the century. I Icre, two plays by
the influential playwrights, August Strindberg and Anton Chekhov, are signifi­
cant: A Dream Play (1902) and Fhe Sea Gull (1896). The former play is of the
framed type, with the whole play being in dream style:
'Fhe characters are ^lit, double and multiply; thev evaporate, crystallise,
scatter and converge. But a single consciousness holds sway o\”er them all—
that of the dreamer.***
I he play itself begins with a prologue in the heavens; in it, the Daughter of
Indra, an oriental god, descends to the earth to observe the suffering of human
'Fhe Play within the Play 41
beings. Two things differentiate this play from dream plays and dream se­
quences of the past: For one thing, dream-like though the play may be, it is not
clear who “the dreamer" Strindberg refers to in his author’s note is supposed to
be, or even whether this dreamer is anywhere in the play itself. Second, the
in the framed play. (Actually, the prologue does not truly frame the play, as a
separate performance or as a dream, but merely introduces it.) Such confusions
and moving across boundaries will become typical in twentieth-century
metradrama.
The Sea Gull contains a play of the inset type, a pretentious yet strangely-
fascinating piece by a Decadent playwright, Treplev. The main play contrasts
Treplev with the realistic writer, 'Frigorin, and includes two actresses, Arkadina,
an older actress who is 'Freplcv’s mother, and Nina, a young actress who
performs Treplev’s play. 'Fhere is a good deal of discussion about art, literature,
and drama; like so much of twentieth-century literature, the play is directly
about the nature of art and the role of the artist.
A Dream Play and The Sea Gull can be seen as prototypes for much of
twentieth-century metadrama. ’Fhe framed type of play within the play, in
which the inner play is bizarre, nightmarish, and confusing, and in which the
outer frame is only vaguely defined, became common in the second and third
decades of the century with both German expressionism and French surrealism.
In both cases, the playwrights were more interested in creating a dream-like
quality than in specifying explicitly that someone in the play is experiencing an
actual dream. Indeed, plays in which dreamer and dream are explicit, as in the
imitative expressionist play. Beggar on Horseback (1924), by the Americans
Kaufman and Connelly, seem tepid by comparison with the plays of Kaiser,
Toller, Kokoschka, Cocteau, Breton, or Artaud. I'hc disturbing quality that is
central to the experience of expressionist or surrealist metadrama disappears if
one can say, “Ah, well, he’s only dreaming all this." Beggar on Horseback is more
literally metadramatic than, say,. Artaud’s of Blood (1925), since its double
layers of performance are more clearly defined. Yet the existential concerns that
are raised by plays like Jet of Blood are more true to the spirit of earlier
metadrama like Hamlet or Life is a Dream.
'Fhis style of metadrama continues with the later movement beginning in mid­
century, the theatre of the absurd. Here, the frame of the inner play is even less
clearly defined than with expressionism or surrealism. Expressionist plays, for
example, often had a central “Ich” figure (usually an artist), whose vision the
audience shared. Sometimes it might be implied, vaguely, that he was dreaming
the whole thing; more often, that he simply had a unique and fascinating
subjectivity, which enabled him to sec the world more sensitively and genuinely
than the rest of us. I'hc central figure thus both framed and performed in his
own play, making the boundary between inner and outer rather fluid, but
nonetheless well defined. In the absurdist plays of Beckett, Ionesco, or Pinter,
 42 Varieties of the Metadramatk
the same subjective, dream-like quality remains, but there is usually no central
figure in the play itself to whom we can attribute this dreamy subjectivity. The
boundary between inner and outer play have dissolved completely, taking us
away from metadrama in structure, yet retaining the mctadramatic tone or style.
The play within the play has widened out into the “perception” type of meta-
drama that will be discussed in the final section of this book.
The inset type of play within the play in The Sea Gull, which provides the
playwright with the opportunity to examine the function of theatre, the per­
former, and the artist generally, also became a major type of twentieth-century
metadrama. It is found extraordinarily often even in popular theatre, including
the movies. The show business play or musical comedy is a Broadway staple;
Shov) Boat, Once in a Lifetime, Babes in Arms, Annie Get Your Gun, Gypsy, The
Sunshine Boys, Follies, A Chorus Line, Forty-Second Street—the list is endless. Recent
movies have included The Goodbye Girl, Fame, Tootsie, and The Cotton Club. In the
“show biz” piece, the principal focus is on the actor rather than, as in The Sea
Gull, the playwright; the action of the play or film usually involves a young actor
or actors achieving stardom. I he fascination with show business in American
culture has its roots in the loss of traditional Christian religion; the self-transcen­
dence that religion once promised must now be attained by becoming a “star.”
(Note the heavenly nature of the metaphor.) It is interesting that in such plays
and films, stardom is r^arely achieved through training; instead, the young
performer gets a “break,” or is “discovered.” He or she turns out to have “talent,”
which is as mysterious as God’s grace. As with grace, talent is given to only an
elite few; its essence is beyond man’s comprehension; it cannot be obtained
through one’s own efforts. You examine your behavior in hopes of perceiving it,
but actually it is God (the Broadway or Hollywood producer) who elects you to
one of the blessed (a star). John Calvin could not hav^ put it better.
tatuous as the show business play or film may seem, then, it did not come
into existence merely because the writers know nothing but the theatre, as is
often charged. (Besides, there is nothing wrong with that; all playwrights write
about theatre in some manner.) Such works arc actually related to more serious
drama or literature, in which the playwright or p>oet or novelist or artist is
depicted as a special, rare, sensitive, blessed creature. This archetype, like all
archetypes, is found throughout the entire spectrum of the drama/culture com­
plex, including both serious and popular forms. The difference is that in serious
drama and literature the artist’s greatness is likely to be much more complex,
and his relation to society more ambiguous, than that of the actor/star of popular
fare. The Sea Gull ends with Freplev committing suicide; we do not really know
whether he could have become a great playwright or not. Chekhov gives evi­
dence for his being talented, but also for his having serious deficiencies as a
writer, just as he shows the young actress Nina as having had mixed success, and
as being both dedicated and confused about her art. Nor does artistic success
bring transcendence; the successful artists in the play, Trigorin and Arkadina,
The Play within the Play 43
seem quite ordinary people at bottom, especially in contrast to the tormented
Treplev and Nina.
The inset type of play within the play is less common in serious twentieth-
century drama than is the framed type, but is still widespread. Notable play­
wrights who have used the device include jean Cienet, in such plays as The
Balcony and The Blacks; Samuel Beckett in Krapp's Last Tape; and Tom Stoppard in
The Real Inspector Hound, 'Travesties, and 'The Real 'Thing. In these plays we often
find multiple layering—'The Blacks contains no less than six levels of performing
within performing—as well as characters moving across iKmndaries. In The
Balcony, the ordinary men playing the roles of Bishop, Judge, and General at the
brothel are required also to play them in the outer, “real” world. Krapp in
Beckett’s play listens constantly to tape recordings—of himself, as a younger
man. 'Travesties revolves around a 1916 production of Wilde’s The Importance of
Being Earnest, but the outer, “real” play echoes the inner, both in scenes and
specific lines. Such plays show the influence of Pirandello, who deserves special
mention.
In the 1920s the most strikingly metadramatic playwright was Luigi Piran­
dello. In his “trilogy of the theatre in the theatre”—Six Characters in Search of an
Author, Each in His Oven Way, 'Tonight We Improvise—Pirandello was concerned
not so much with the function of the theatre artist, but rather with the theatre
itself, and illusion generally. (His Henry IV, which 1 shall discuss in chapter 4, is
associated with this trilogy, but is really an example of role playing within the
role rather than the play within the play.) A cliche in the criticism of Pirandello
is that he saw no distinction between illusion and reality; this is actually a more
suitable description of the expressionists and their successors than of Pirandello,
who always provided clear, distinct layers of plays within his plays. Rather, the
significant thing about Pirandello’s plays is that the truth value given to the
different layers is subjected to drastic revision as the play progresses. Although
in the twenties (and often even today) Pirandello was often considered to be a
freak playwright, interesting but isolated and unique, there was in fact nothing
new about the play within the play, nor in using the device for an exploration of
the nature of reality. Nor had the breaking of boundaries between inner and
outer play been previously unknown; the death of the Boy at the end of Six
Characters, for example, which destroys the boundary between the inner and the
outer play, is prefigured by the deaths in Soliman and hrseda, the inner play of
Kyd’s The Spanish 'Tragedy. What was truly original and striking about Pirandello
was that he was the first playwright to amalgamate the framed and inset type of
play within the plav. In Six Characters, for example, it is impossible to say
whether the inner or the outer plav is the main one. I he rehearsal that starts the
outer play can be seen as an induction, framing the inner, “real” play, but the six
characters in the inner play first intrude on the rehearsal and raise the philosoph­
ical issues (not discussed in the inner play) that become the overall principal focus,
thus making the inner play into an inset type, a demonstration. The six
 44 Varieties of the Melodramatic
characters appear in both the outer and inner plays—tbemselves~b\st, until the
end, are represented in the Inner play by actors whom we saw rehearsing in the
outer play, while the six characters themsclv'es, until the end, stay in the outer
play, and, like Hamlet and the members of the court watching The Mousetrap,
comment upon it. The inner play is both framed and inset, both primary and
secondary.
A final type of play within the play that has been important in the twentieth
century, but which is unrelated to the Dream Play and Seagull prototypes, is
found in the epic style of theatre. Here the framing may not be found in the
script, but in performance only; indeed the framed play may be a traditional one
from a historical period. A prototype might be the Russian director F.ugene
Vakhtangov’s production of Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot, in Moscow in 1922. 'I'he
play itself is a fantastic, eighteenth-century Italian piece, which Vakhtangov
presented in a graceful Commedia dcll’Arte style. This by itself would not be
unusual, although the appalling conditions in Moscow at the time, during the
Civil War, led to expediencies in costumes and decor that turned out to be
fascinating visually. But, in addition, Vakhtangov placed a Commedia style
platform on the stage floor—already creating a visual doubleness—and began
the play with a prologue in which the actors donned their costumes in full view
of the audience, and a group of zanies put up the scenery. The zanies also
changed the scenery during the play, and performed a pantomime that paral­
leled the action of the play itself"
This production is related to the aesthetic theories of the Russian Formalists of
the time, who maintained that the function of art was in its ostraneniye, which
literally means “making strange.” In 1917 Viktor Shklovsky, a leading formalist,
had written:
The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult,
to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.
Shkiovsky’s theory as expressed here is basically apolitical, as was Vakhtangov’s
production of Turandot. Most of Vakhtangov’s successors, however, have used
this type of framing for making strong political statements. As with Turandot,
the defamiliarization may be achieved through an induction, or with interpo­
lated material like the pantomime; interpolations can include songs, slides, films,
interludes. From the epic theatre of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht (whose
famous “alienation effect”—Verfremdungsejfekt—was taken directly from
Shkiovsky’s ostraneniye), to more recent experiments bv Jerzy Grotowsky, Joan
Littlewood, Richard Schechner, Peter Stein, Andrei Serban, and many others,
the framing of a traditional play has acted like a frontal assault on the drama/
culture complex. Sometimes an original plav will be produced, with an induc­
tion included to frame it, as in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, but more often the
play is a well-known one, which the director wants the audience to reconsider in
Fhe Play within the Play 45
a radical new way. The framed play may even be held up to outright ridicule, as
in Charles Marowitz’s productions of Shakespeare; it may also be altered so
drastically that its only true relation to the original is in its title. In better
examples, however, the framed play is explored with care and fidelity; the attack
may even turn into a reaffirmation of cultural values that the director feels are
being lost.
Despite the strong political thrust of such productions, there is little or no
direct propaganda in them. The best directors sense that drama docs not really
work that way. In the theatre, blatant sermonizing that capitalism should end,
that war is evil, or that racism or sexism are ruinous, is ineffective, since it docs
not alter the habitual ways in which people think alxmt those things, ways that
are ingrained, automatic, unquestioned. “Agit-prop” type productions can
therefore convince only those who are already convinced; others will simply
reject the overt messages as wrong. Theatre works in subtler ways, at a deeper
level. By forcing audiences to reexamine famous plays, one is making them
reexamine not political issues themselves, but the way in which they perceive
those issues. This is not to say that such productions are always g<x)d, nor that
framing of the epic theatre type is the only means of achieving ostraneniye
(estrangement), but only that their indirect approach, via the drama/culture
complex, is likely to have a stronger effect on an audience than simply telling
them directly what to think. Ostraneniye is a profound concept, with a wide
range of implications, and many methods of realization.
VI
The play within the play device is certainly not new, but we can sec that it has
tended cither to be widely used in a given period, or barely used at all. In certain
ages, it quickly became the norm, part of the drama/culture complex; at other
times, it appeared only in peripheral forms like parodies, if cv’er.
Whenever the play within the play is used, it is both reflective and expressive
of its society’s deep cynicism about life. When the prevalent view is that the
world is in some way illusorv or false, then the play within the play becomes a
metaphor for life itself. The fact that the inner play is an obvious illusion (since
we see other characters watching it), reminds us that the play we are watching is
also an illusion, despite its vividness and excitement; by extension, the world in
which we live, which also seems to be so vivid, is in the end a sham. We watch a
play, within which there is another play—ultimately, all is a play. In other
words, the play within the play is projected onto life itself, and becomes a means
for gauging it.
'Fhus, it is no surprise that the play within the play would have been
employed in oriental drama, since oriental religion teaches the illusory nature of
life. A prologue to a Japanese Noh play begins:
 46 Varieties of the Metadramatic
Life is a lying dream, he only wakens
Who casts the World aside.
We who on shallow hills have built our home
In the heart’s deep recess seek solitude.
Similarly, in Renaissance England and Europe, comparing life to a play, a game,
or a dream, was commonplace: We are to the gods as flies to wanton boys, we are
the stars’ tennis balls, all the world’s a stage, life’s but a walking shadow
By contrast, during ages in whieh people are basically optimistic about life,
the play within the play will have no appeal. It is acceptable in parody, because
there the dramatic action does not generate a strong sense of presence. Parody
does not call the dramatic illusion into question, because there is very little
illusion in the first place; instead of being absorbed in an imaginary world, the
audience has its attention on comparing what it sees with the work or works
being parodied. In “real,” serious drama, the play within the play is unaccepta­
ble in optimistic ages because it engenders an uneasy estrangement that is out of
keeping with the prevalent cultural habits of thinking and feeling.
The Greeks and Romans had their share of pessimistic philosophers, but one
cannot say that the prevalent world view was that life, however painful, was a
fraud. Plato’s famous cave analogy is an exception that proves the rule. In it,
Plato compared life to the flickering shadows on a cave wall, illusory projections
of the real world of ideals outside. But this was an elitist philosopher’s view, not
held by the mass of society. According to Plato, most people thought those
shadows were real. Most people, if they had ever heard of the cave analogy
would have agreed. Neither the playwrights (whom Plato despised) nor their
audiences saw the world in Plato’s way. Even the most pessimistic of Greek
playwrights, Euripides, does not suggest that life is a delusion, in contrast to a
greater reality somewhere else. Life may be bad, so that one may even be better
off dead, but it is all too real.
Shakespeare and his contemporaries viewed life as an illusion, a secondary
world in contrast to the real world of heaven. This was a theatricalization of the
traditional Christian attitude of contemptus mundi. In Moli^re’s time, by contrast,
this view had waned. The age of Louis XIV, while certainly seeing the world in
thdatrical terms, did not see this theatricality as something negative, but, on the
contrary, delighted in it. Theatre was not sham, but truth; references to the
theatre within the plays (always negative in Shakespeare) are positive. The play
within the play, however, was avoided, for the very reason that theatre
thought to be positive; thus its relationship with the audience should not be
made ambiguous through layering. The play within the play calls both theatre
and life itself into question, which is something that Moliere and his contempo­
raries would not have wanted to do. Moliere’s stock in trade, role playing within
the role, carries very different meanings from the plav within the play, as we
shall see.
The extraordinary numbers of examples of the play within the play in our
The Play within the Plav 47
own time again coincides with a widespread feeling that life is false. This feeling
may be existential, as with Pirandello’s theatre or the Theatre of the Absurd, or
political, as with the epic theatre; in either case, the world around us is a hoax.
The difference between us and previous ages is the additional element of
breakdown between the layers of the plays within the plays. In the past, the
inner and outer plays were clearly distinguishable, and one could always tell
which of the two was primary. In the twentieth century we find the same
characters moving between inner and outer play, the boundaries between inner
and outer play becoming blurred and sometimes disappearing, and even con­
fusion as to whether the inner or outer play is the main or “real” one. This is an
expression of the extreme cynicism of our time; in previous ages, the world may
have been an illusion, but there was something else framing it—nirvana, heaven,
•<iod, gods—that was the true reality. Today people often feel that there is
nothing framing our illusory lives at all.
In the modern political drama of the epic theatre of Brecht and Piscator and
their followers, there is still a feeling that a “true” reality is possible, a better
society that will come when capitalism is swept away; thus, these playwrights
and directors typically maintain sharp distinctions between the frame and the
framed. But even in much of our political theatre of the past few decades, with
its restless altering and updating and distorting, there is a deeper cynicism than
with Brecht or Piscator, a nihilism that despairs of any justice or goodness in
modern society. Directors delight in confusing the audience as to where the play
begins and ends, where the performance space begins and ends, whether inset
pieces are supposed to be part of the performance or not, whether interpolated
elements are accidental or planned. The uneasiness always generated by a play
within a play becomes outright hysteria, epatant le bourgeois. Here the political
theatre blends in with the existential theatre of our time, and again, employs the
technique of blurring the boundaries between metadramatic levels. We have
come to see life not only as a play, but as a play with no framing reality. All the
world’s a stage for us—but nobody is watching it.
Notes
1. Aristotle criticizes this in the plays written in his time, complaining that “in the hands of our
later poets, the songs included in the play are no more a part of that particular plot than they are of
any other tragedy” (Aristotle's Poetics, trans. Leon Golden [Tallahassee; Florida State University
Press, 1981], 33). Other evidence includes the absence of anv choral odes in the playtexts of
Menander, the Greek playwright of New Comedy, or of Plautus and Terence, Romans who wrote in
imitation of him; and the increased height of the stages in extant theatres from the period, which
made interaction between chorus and principal actors difficult.
2. John Gassner, Masters of the Drama (New York: Random 1 louse, 1954), 119-20.
3. Ibid., 131.
4. Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play: The Dramatist's Conception of his Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 8.
48 Varieties of the Metadramatic

5. Oscar G. Brockett, History of the Theatre (Boston; Allyn and Bacon, 1968X 205.
6. Nelson, 36-37.
7. Ibid., 47, 49.
8. Ibid., 89.
9. Ibid., 95.
10. August Strindberg, Six Plays of Strindberg, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge (Garden Citv, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1955), 193. 3
11. Nikolai Gorchakov. The Vakhtangov School of Stt^e Art, trans. G. I\-anov-Mumjief, ed. Phyl
Griffith (Moscow: Foreign Languages, n.d.X 97-199.
The Ceremony within the Play
12. Viktor Shklovsky, “\rt as Technique,” \n Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. LeeT. k-.
Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln; University of Nebraska Press, 1965X 12. r
13. Gassner, 131.

Ceremonies within plays are ubiquitous. In all drama of all cultures at all times
we find plays that contain feasts, balls, pageants, tournaments, games, rituals,’'
trials, inquests, processions, executions, funerals, coronations, initiations. In
comedies, as Northrop Frye (like many others) has noted, there is almost always
“some kind of party or festive ritual, which either appears at the end of the play
or is assumed to take place immediately afterward. Weddings are most com­
mon. Tragedies, of course, do not usually end with such festive, harmonious
ceremonies, but they do not lack for ceremonies of other types or in other parts
of the play. Macbeth, grim though it may be, contains two banquets; King Uar
starts with a formal abdication scene, with the “love” contest; Othello has a trial/
inquest; Hamlet has a drinking party (offstage but audible), a funeral, a fencing
match. Indeed, it becomes difficult to find a play without a ceremony in it of
some kind. Ceremonies are so widespread in drama that a full historical cata-
l(^ing would be impossible.
Like the play within the play, the ceremony within the play invoK’es a format
performance of some kind that is set off from the surrounding action. As with
plays within plays, however, a certain blurring occurs when one tries to cate­
gorize ceremonies within plays. Dramatic events may have a ceremonial quality,
without being full-fledged, formal ceremonies. Othello’s murder of Desdemona,
with its high solemnity and incantations (“Put out the light, and then put out the
light”) is an event of this type; its sacramental quality resembles that of religious
rituals, even though it is hard to identify it with any particular one. Similarly,
much has been written about the supposed ritual origins of theatre, which are
assumed to continue, in vestigial form, in all drama. All plays turn out to reflect
.either the ancient Greek dithyramb or kommos, festive rituals in honor of Di­
onysus, which in turn both reflect a proto-ritual celebrating the death and
rebirth of a vegetation god. I shall not treat ritual in this sense in this book.
Although quasi-rituals like Desdemona’s murder may have a metadramatic
quality (proportional to how much the audience recognizes their ceremonial
nature), vestigial rituals like the speculative resurrection of the “Year King” arc

49
 48 Varieties of the Metadramatic
I 5. Oscar G. Brockett, History cf tbe Theatre (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1968), 205.
6. Nelson, 36-37.
7. Ibid., 47, 49.
8. Ibid., 89.
9. Ibid., 95.
10. August Strindberg, Six Plays of Strindberg, trans. Elizabeth Sprite (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1955), 193. 3
11. Nikolai Gorchakov, Tbe Vakhtangov School of Stage Art, trans. G. Ivanov-Mumjief, ed. Phyl
Griffith (Moscow; Foreign Languages, n.d.X 97-199.
The Ceremony within the Play
12. Viktor Shkiovsky, ‘Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T.
Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12.
13. Gassner, 131.

Ceremonies within plays are ubiquitous. In all drama of all cultures at all times
we find plays that contain feasts, balls, pageants, tournaments, games, rituals,'~
trials, inquests, processions, executions, funerals, coronations, initiations. In
comedies, as Northrop Frye (like many others) has noted, there is almost always
“some kind of party or festive ritual, which either appears at the end of the play
or is assumed to take place immediately afterward. Weddings are most com­
mon.”^ Tragedies, of course, do not usually end with such festive, harmonious
ceremonies, but they do not lack for ceremonies of other types or in other parts
of the play. Macbeth, grim though it may be, contains two banquets; King Lear
starts with a formal abdication scene, with the “love” contest; Othello has a trial/
inquest; Hamlet has a drinking party (offstage but audible), a funeral, a fencing
match. Indeed, it becomes difficult to find a play without a ceremony in it of
some kind. Ceremonies are so widespread in drama that a full historical cata­
loguing would be impossible.
Like the play within the play, the ceremony within the play involves a formal
performance of some kind that is set off from the surrounding action. As with
plays within plays, however, a certain blurring occurs when one tries to cate­
gorize ceremonies within plays. Dramatic events may have a ceremonial quality,
without being full-fledged, formal ceremonies. Othello’s murder of Desdemona,
with its high solemnity and incantations (“Put out the light, and then put out the
light”) is an event of this type; its sacramental quality resembles that of religious
rituals, even though it is hard to identify it with any particular one. Similarly,
much has been written about the supposed ritual origins of theatre, which are
assumed to continue, in vestigial form, in all drama. All plays turn out to reflect
.either the ancient Greek dithyramb or kommos, festive rituals in honor of Di­
onysus, which in turn both reflect a proto-ritual celebrating the death and
rebirth of a vegetation god. I shall not treat ritual in this sense in this book.
Although quasi-rituals like Desdemona’s murder may have a metadramatic
quality (proportional to how much the audience recognizes their ceremonial
nature), vestigial rituals like the speculative resurrection of the “Year King” are

49
 50 Varieties of the Metadramatic
The (Ceremony within the Play- Si
not truly metadramatic, and are of dubious significance. Indeed, critics’ empha­
sis on vestigial ritual has perhaps obscured the importance of rituals in drama parading for their own sake. If he observed the ceremony many times, however,
he would become impressed by recurrent patterns of sound and action; as he
that are not shadowy and ancient, but overt and contemporary, as an important
learned more about the Christian religion and the way it has shaped Western
part of the drama/culture complex.
culture, church liturgy would no longer seem like mindless preening, but would
Structuralists have applied the term “genetic fallacy” to attempts to explain
instead take on high significance.
cultural phenomena entirely in terms of their historical origins. The French
Yet another misconception about the reason for the popularity of ceremony
structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure pointed out that theories about lan­
among primitive cultures is that such ceremonies have a pragmatic purpose.
guage originating as onomatopoeia were of no help at all in understanding how
Primitive ceremonies, the argument goes, are attempts to influence events
language, once developed, actually functions. Language is no longer
through “sympathetic magic,” to gain success in battle, or adequate rainfall, or
onomatopoeia, just as an automobile is no longer iron ore. Similarly, the fact that
the fertility of the soil. Iribesmen act out the roles of rain gtxls or rain clouds or
tragedy may have had its earliest origins in a fertility rite tells us nothing very
rain drops in order to make it rain. Again, Langer easily disposes of this
important about a full-fledged, sophisticated literary work like Sophocles’
Oedipus the King. (And using fertility rites as the basis for production, which has erroneous notion:
been common since the days of Gilbert Murray, always yields failure, for a very
simple reason: a Greek tragedy is not a fertility rite.) It is far more important to A “magic” effect is one which completes a rite. No savage tries to induce a
consider what a dramatic form has turned into than what it once may have been, snowstorm in midsummer, nor prays for the ripening of fruits entirely out of
how it draws upon and relates to its own time rather than how it reflects some season, as he certainly would if he considered his dance and praver the
physical causes of such events. He dances with the rain, he mvftes the
misty past. The fact that an audience today responds warmly to a wedding at the elements to do their part, as they are thought to be somewhere about and
end of a comedy is not because of its relation to a Greek kommos, but rather merely irresponsive.**
because of its relation to weddings in our own culture.
Ib understand the reasons behind the widespread use of ceremony in drama,
In place of pleasure-giving or pragmatic theories of primitive ceremony,
one must first understand the importance of ceremony itself in human societies.
modern anthropologists have substituted a semiological theory: Ceremonies ,
Ceremonies are not only commonly found in plays, they are commonly found
^ways convey, meaning. They contain encoded signs by which their society /
everywhere. While this fact is widely acknowledged, the reasons given for it are
understands both the external world around them, and the emotional world/
often incorrect. Theatre history texts, for example, after stressing at length the
within. Since their purpose is always to provide an order, their pattern or form h
supposed ritual origins of theatre, go on to ascribe the primitive love of ritual to a
always of the highest importance. While they are usually pleasurable, the
desire for fun, or to a love of movement, sound, and color for their own sake. As
pleasure derived from them is at most secondarily caused by the individual parts
Susanne Langer has pointed out, neither of these is a satisfactory explanation for
that make them up, such as sound or movement or costume. Indeed, some of the
ritual’s appeal. Many primitive rituals, far from being much “fun,” can be
parts, to repeat, may be exceedingly unpleasant on their own. The true source
extremely difficult and even involve severe suffering—’’branding, flaying, knock­
of pleasure is the emotional focusing that derives from achieving understanding
ing out teeth, cutting off finger joints, etc.”^ Young boys sometimes die in
of things that would otherwise be confusing or ephemeral. A rain dance, for
puberty ceremonies. As for elements of movement, sound, and color, these
example, is a reminder to the tribespeople of the vital significance of rain;
things by themselves do not explain the importance oiform in ceremony; if the
instead of being merely something wet and cold and rather annoying, rain is the
love of the individual parts of ceremony were truly the basis for its popularity,
sustainer of life.
then a ceremony could be performed differently every time, with no regard to
Looking upon primitive ritual in pleasure-giving or instrumental terms be­
order or pattern. But a ceremony is never haphazard; in fact, it must always be
trays ones condescension toward primitive peoples. As Levi-Strauss has pointed
performed the same way. Fo a person from our culture observing an African
out, all cultures bifurcate the world into people “like us”—civilized, sensible,
tribal dance for the first time, it may indeed seem as if the participants are
controlled, rational—and everybody else, who are seen as primitive, animal-like,
merely prancing about exuberantly to let off steam or to show off their exotic
wild, emotional. (lb primitive people, we are “primitive.”) Seeing ourselves in
costumes. But this is of course an illusion, brought about by not knowing the
this bipolar relationship with tribespeople, we believe that, while we respond
patterns and codes of the particular dance, and their relation to the tribal culture
deeply to our art and music and literature and drama, primitive folk merely
as a whole. A primitive tribesman, brought into a Christian church with no
prance about and make silly noises “for fun.” Where we influence the world
preparation, would otherwise feel that he was observing a lot of moaning and
through technology, primitives foolishly try to bring rain through “sympathetic
52 Varieties of the Metadramatic
magic.” Such simple dichotomies are not only unfair to primitives, they cause us
to overlook the importance of ceremony in our own lives, seeing it at best as a
trivial vestige of our own primitive past. Nevertheless, we too employ ceremony
to understand our world and ourselves.
Consider, for example, a college graduation ceremony. Because it is part of
our own culture, wc do not maintain that graduation is just for fun, for the
delight of dressing up in colorful robes. (Pn)fessors, a notoriously seedy lot,
usually despise any effort of dressing up.) Nor would anyone in our society
seriously maintain that bestowing a diploma or flipping a tassel on a mortar­
board from one side to the other magically transforms the student from an
ignoramus into an educated person. We take the graduation ceremony seriously
not for its pleasure-giving or pragmatic qualities, but rather because it gives
symbolic meaning to the educational pnxress. Education is something very slow
and attenuated; we cannot really see it whole. A ceremony provides a model of
it, something that can be seen and heard, thought about and felt. It is precisely
because the actual turning points and limits of education are vague that we need a
ceremony in order to conceive of it, creating an artificial turning point that will
stand for the slow, gradual, but v-ery important process of beeoming a learned
person. The ceremony also confirms for us the importance of learning, and the
'Importance of the college or university as a cultural institution. Ev’ery time a
ceremony is performed, it is a kind of revalidation of the whole culture in which
it exists.
It is clear, then, that ceremony operates very much like theatre. Both employ
sets of codes that enable people to understand themseh’es and their world,
through the medium of their culture. There are, however, important differences.
Tor one thing, in a ceremony the participants do not take on full-fledged
characterizations as they do in a play. Of course, one can say that the roles in a
ceremony have a certain generalized characterization; a wedding couple are
taking on the archetypal roles of bride and groom. But “bride” and “groom” are
not their total characterizations; they are still John and Mary. Similarly, when
Father O’Brian performs the mass, he is acting the “role” of Christ, but he also
remains Father O’Brian. A ceremony may be even more formal than a play,
having rigidly prescribed roles and an overall structure that allows for no
variation, but the participants do not leave their former selves behind when they
perform.^ The boundaries are like those in Pirandello’s plays within the plays,
sharply defined yet allowing characters to pass across. (Indeed, we might say
that the essence of the metadrama of Pirandello and his successors is that they
treat plays within the plays like ceremonies.)
Another difference between ceremonies and theatre is that ceremonies, unlike
plays, are always performed the same way. Ceremonies can be changed from
without (always a drastic matter), but they do not allow for change as part of
their essential mechanism. Theatre is always changing from within; ceremony is
only changed from without. Ceremony becomes theatre when, among other
The Ceremony within the Play 53
changes, numerous plays come to be performed within the original framework.
The resultant corpus of drama changes itself over time, as new plays are added
and old ones deleted or improved. In static societies, of course, this process may
be very slow. People like the same old plays, and feel no reason to alter them. In
the Japanese Noh theatre, for example, plays went unchanged for centuries,
with no new ones written until modern times; performance itself was always a
slavish copy of the way each play had been done previously. In such cases,
theatre remains close to ceremony, and may even be moving back toward it. (If
theatre can have a ritual origin, so too can a ritual have a theatrical origin.) In
more dynamic societies like our own, however, new wine is always bursting the
old bottles. Instead of audiences taking pleasure in the same old plays, they
become bored with them and insatiably demand new ones.
Another difference between ritual and theatre is that in theatre, there is
always an emphasis on plot, in some sense. This is merely the principle of
change applied within the play itself, rather than from play to play. The plot
need not be an Aristotelian one, with beginning, middle, and end, but it will in
some way focus on a series of events that depict some kind of alteration in the
lives of its characters. Ceremony, on the other hand, is never plot oriented.
There will in fact always be a plot on which a ceremony is based; indeed,
ceremonies always embody some change—from maiden to wife, from student to
graduate, from pollution to purification. Ceremonies accompany the major
turning points of personal life—birth, puberty, marriage, death. They also
accompany changes of social life, changes of season, changes of leadership,
beginnings and endings of war, times of planting and times of harvest. But in the
ceremony itself, the focus is never on the process, or “plot,” of the change, but
rather on the eternal states of being that arc seen as surrounding it. As David
Cole has noted:
Most religions possess the concept of an illud tempos, a time of origins, the
period of Oeation and just after, when gods walked the earth, men visited the
sky, and the great archct^al events of myth—war in heaven, battles with
monsters, the Quest, the Mood, the Fall—took place. . . . 'Fhc illud tempos is
not so much when it first occurred as where it is always happening.further,
since what is always happening is ever-accessible, the tllud tempos has the
potential to be, at any moment, among us.*^
Religious ritual, according to Ole, always relates its central event to this
unchanging, eternal world. But even secular ceremony exists to relate change to
what is unchanging: not to the "illud tempos," but to the tribe, the society, the
state, the institution. This is why, in ceremony, the actual change is usually
done quickly and perfunctorily. Saying “I do,” flipping the tassel, drinking the
chalice of wine, all take but a moment; the remainder of the ceremony, before
and after the transformational event, stresses the importance of a surmunding,
static framework, and takes up the great bulk of the performance time. In a
 54 Varieties of the Metadramatic
graduation ceremony, for example, the medieval costumes, the lengthy
speeches, the traditional music (including songs glorifying the institution), the
presence of parents and alumni, all embody the essence of the ceremony, which
relates the graduations of the particular students at the time to other students,
other graduations, other colleges and universities, other times, other places. A
brief, transitory event is rendered eternal through its connections with the
surrounding culture.
In theatre, by contrast, change is not presented in a quick or perfunctory
fashion; rather than focusing on a static background, plays focus on the very
process of change itself Ceremonies have a “plot,” but exist in order to tran­
scend it; theatre exists to celebrate plot. Instead of an emphasis on what is
eternal, the emphasis is on what is transitory—the shifting events in the lives of
particular individuals. If one were to write a play about a graduating student or
stud^ts, the emphasis would be on the students’ individual lives, the events
leading up to the graduation, the causes and effects of it. The ambient world of
family, society, and university would of course still be there, but would no
longer be in the foreground.
As Aristotle notes, the essential elements of a plot are those that involve
change—peripeteia (reversal) and anagnorisis (recognition), lysis (complication) and
desis (unravelling). These are almost always present in drama in some form, even
when the plot is presented out of order instead of through beginning, middle,
and end. Indeed, when these plot elements are weak, as in the “Performance
Art” of a Robert Foreman or Richard Wilson for example, the result is precisely
the kind of play that we call “ceremonial” or “ritualistic.” 'Fhe focus on elements
of change can be taken as a definition of theatre, as opposed to ceremony, in
which they are found only in etiolated form, if at all.
In the Japanese Noh theatre, again, the movement over the centuries was back
toward ritual. The productions were frozen in content and style, but the
audiences’ reactions were not, since the language gradually became archaic and
difficult to follow. Moreover, the plots became so well known that one hardly
paid attention to them. The audience instead focused on the overall mystical
tone of a play, which was, after all, a manifestation of the Buddhist religion,
which stresses mystical transcendence. Sacred plays of this sort usually turn
into ritual; perhaps even the Christian Mass began as a little play for showing
initiates what had happened at the Last Supper, and then developed into a sacred
ceremony in which the Last Supper story is so elaborately ritualized that one
cannot even find it without a thorough decoding.
^ Thus, despite the many similarities between ceremony or ritual and theatre,
they are not the same. Theatre may have ritual origins, but then, ritual may have
theatre origins, as with the Japanese Noh. Both ceremony and theatre are
performed; both are cultural media for examining the self, society, and the
world. But where ceremony stresses the surrounding culture and moves toward
stasis, theatre stresses plot and character (as Aristotle first noted) and focuses on
The Ceremony within the Play 55
change, both from play to play and ivithin each play. In static cultures, theatre^
becomes ritualized, because the plays become fixed. In dynamic societies, on
the other hand, ritual often becomes theatre, as probably really did happen with
the ancient Greeks or the medieval Christians, both of whose societies began to
change drastically after centuries of stasis. But the pnKess does not end with
“ritual origins.” Theatre remains metaceremonial as long as it continues. If
ceremony is a way in which society examines the eternal, unchanging aspects of
life (which, in a static society, includes almost all of them), theatre is a means for
examining ceremony, and thus for questioning supposedly eternal verities.
Theatre is particularly suited to doing this, since both theatre and ceremony are
performance media; it is easy to incorporate a ceremony within a play. The
reverse is not true, since changes in ceremony arc always resisted. Ceremonies
can only be changed from without—and theatre is often the means for doing so.
In sum, the widespread association of theatre with ceremony is not because
they are one and the same, but rather because theatre is metaceremony. Theatre
incorporates ceremony in order to verify it, to examine it, or even to attack it,
but theatre is ultimately different in nature from it. The ceremony within the
play is thus less inherently metadramatic than the play within the play, although
it shares many qualities with the latter, and is often found in tandem with it—
Hamlet for example, contains both The Murder of Gonzago (‘"The Mousetrap") and
the several ceremonies already noted. 'Fhe widespread employment of cere­
monies within plays does not imply the same underlying cynicism about life
that is implied by the widespread use of the play within the play; nor does the
ceremony within the play necessarily engender the same sense of uneasiness in
the audience. But, as with the play within the play, the ceremony within the'
play is metadramatic in the sense of examining a cultural phenomenon that is
closely related to theatre via the medium of performance, and thus, by exten­
sion, stimulates an interest in the nature of human “performing” generally.
11
Ceremonies within plays are of two broad types: those in which the ceremony
is fulfilled, and those in which, because of ineptitude, interruption, or corrup­
tion, it is not. These two types correspond roughly to the comic and the tragic.
“Tragedy” and “comedy” are of course matters of definition; I am thinking of
them here only in the simple, pragmatic sense of the emotional effect on the
audience. Ceremonies fulfilled, whether onstage or in real life, engender feelings
in us of harmony, peace, and happiness; ceremonies unfulfilled, for whatever
reason, engender feelings of disorientation, discord, and sadness. It is worth
noting that it is more important whether the ceremony within the play is
fulfilled or not, in terms of emotional effect, than is the nature of the ceremony
itself Banquets are inherently jolly ceremonies, but Macbeth’s banquet, when
56 Varieties of the Melodramatic
interrupted, is horrid. Shaw’s Man and Superman begins with the aftermath of a
funeral, an inherently sad ceremony, but because it is presented as having been
properly fulfilled, it comes to stand for the necessary passing of generations; the
laissez-faire liberalism of the dead man, Whitefield, is giving way to the revolu­
tionary socialism of Jack Tanner. Tanner is even made one of the guardians of
Whitefield’s daughter. The succession is all correct and clear-cut, and the au­
dience feels cheerful.
I stress that the fulfilled/unfulfilled contrast relates only to the comic or tragic
tone, not to a play’s content or o\’erall structure, ('omedies may contain some
unfulfilled ceremonies within them, just as tragedies (less frequently) mav
contain fulfilled ceremonies. In comedy, however, the threat of unfulfillment
may be overcome, or an unfulfilled ceremony early in the play mav be matched
by one that is fulfilled later on. In Aristophanes’ Ibesmopboriazusae, Euripides’
kinsman, Euripides himself, and another tragic poet named Agathon, threaten
in various ways to disrupt the women’s celebration of the I hesmophorian
festival; in the end, Euripides, who started all the trouble through his depiction
of wicked female characters, makes his peace with the women chorus, promising
never to attack women again. In The Achamians, the hero, Dikiapolis, in trying
to bring about peace with Sparta, repeatedly partakes in abortive ceremonies,
primarily sacrifices; finally, howev’er, there is a feast in which peace is actually
celebrated. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the trial scene threatens
Antonio with a terrible death, yet thmugh the brilliance of Portia the lawsuit is
resolved both legally and happily. In The Taming of the Shrew, the wedding feast is
a disaster, but the banquet at the end makes up for it, celebrating a marital
harmony the couple has finally achieved.
Many critics have noted how Shakespeare’s tragedies often have an overall
“comic rhythm,” ending happily, with peace and harmonv restored, despite the
horrible events depicted previously. Note, however, that such endings in Shake­
speare’s tragedies are not ceremonialized. The closest thing to it occurs at the end
of Macbeth, where Malcolm makes the Scottish thanes into earls, “the first-that
ever Scotland / In such an honor named” (5.8.63-64), a brief and perfunemrv
ceremony, followed by an announcement of Malcolm’s own forthcoming corona­
tion (5.8.75). 'I'his announcement is also very brief, however, and the coronation
is not going to take place immediately after the play ends (like the marriages in so
many comedies), but at some vague future date. In the endings of Hamlet, King
Lear, and Othello, there is not even this slight suggestion of ceremony. The
appearance of Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet may restore order to Denmark,
but there is not even the mention of a coronation; Fortinbras just says, in a
notoriously blase couplet, “I have some rights of memory in this kingdom /
Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me” (5.2.378-79). The general lack
of ceremony at the “happy” endings of Shakespeare’s tragedies keeps them tragic
in tone, despite the plays’ overall “comic” structure or rhythm.
In cases where tragedies do incorporate ceremonies that are fulfilled, they
The Ceremony within the Play 57
typically take place near the beginning; later ceremonies end badly. The first
banquet in Macbeth is an apparent success (although even it has a perverted goal),
but the second one collapses in horror. Othello’s inquest in front of the Venetian
Senate is a success (although Brabantio expresses strong forelKxiings); at the
end, the quasi-ceremonial nature of Desdemona’s murder makes it all the more
ghastly, because we know that it is a ceremony that has been totally corrupted
by lies and gullibility. As for tragedies that do end with fulfilled ceremonies, we
feel that such plays are actually tragicomedies as with Aeschylus’s Eumenides,
rather than being true tragedies. A “proper” ceremony not only resolves a
tragedy, but also the feeling of fulfillment and communitas that such ceremonies
engender actually renders a final impression of that plav that is untragic,
however horrible the incidents may ha\’c been up until the end, or however
much those incidents may have approached a catastrophic but averted con­
clusion.
There are generally two ways in which ceremonies within plays can be
depicted as going wrong: either a ceremony is disrupted somehow; or else it is
completed, but in some corrupt or perverse manner. The second banquet in
Macbeth is an example of the former type, while the ritual murder of Desdemona
in Othello is an example of the latter. Indeed, the examples of “fulfilled” cere­
monies in Shakespearean tragedy given above are really all of the “perverted”
type of ceremony. They are fulfilled in the sense of lK‘ing completed, but
something in their manner or their goals is wrong. As noted, Othello’s triumph
in his inquisition before the Senate is undermined bv Brabantio’s warning: “She
has deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3.293). However well Othello may
acquit himself in the trial scene, his prior elopement with Desdemona was
hardly proper or fitting, a fact that adds a faint color of impropriety to the
proceeding. Similarly, the first banquet in Macbeth goes off well enough—
Duncan even sends Lady Macbeth a diamond in appreciation of her fine hospi­
tality—but it is corrupted by the fact that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth arc using
it to plot the assassination. 'Fhe deposition scene in Richard // is a j>erfectly
fulfilled ceremony from the point of view of the usurpers, but to the audience it
is a blasphemous perversion, a coronation in reverse, that should never have been
performed.
In ancient Greek tragedy, we see an example of the pen’erted type of cere­
mony in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. The entire play is an inquest, which is a
ty|>e of ceremony, but in addition, the inquest has as its fWther goal the
purification of the city from the plague, which adds to its ceremonial signifi­
cance. In fact, the inquest is successful, the murder being uncovered, but this
“success” turns out to be bitter indeed. In Euripides’ The Bacchae, the final rite of
Agave and the Bacchantes is similarly “successful,” in their tearing apart what
they suppose is a lion’s cub in a ritual frenzy, but the cub turns out actuallv to be
Pentheus, Agave’s own son. In Euripides’ The Trojan Women, there is an offstage
ceremony in which the victorious Greeks divide the spoils of war, but again, the
 58 Varieties of the Metadramatic
The Ceremony within the Plav
59
ceremony is perverted, as result of the Greeks’ cruelty and callousness, seen
The ceremonies m post-Shakespearean tragedy, however, are more specifically
most vividly in their decision to kill the innocent child, Astyanax.
conspicuous by their absence, rather than being only broken. 'Fhe most obvious
The most common kind of perverted ceremony (which is sometimes disrupted
kindofabsence occurs with the ceremony that is placed offstage The offstage
as well) in Greek tragedy is the homecoming. This occurs in such plays as The -c^ony occurs frequently in neoclassic tragedy, where it is the natural result
Persians, Medea, Hippolytus, and Heracles, in which the hero’s welcome home goes
of the principle of restraint; originally intended as prohibition against showing
wrong in some way. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the action centers on Clytem- violence onstage (which would either look foolish because of obvious unreality
nestras triumphal welcoming of her husband, which is perverted by her intent
of the depiction, or vulgar if the illusion were successful), restraint was extended
to murder him, and interrupted by the actual deed. This event is mirrored by
by the French to prohibit almost all overt action. A result is that full-scale
the homecoming of Orestes in the next play of the trilogy, The Libation Bearers, in
ceremonies on stage are relatively rare in neoclassic drama, but they remain
which the homecoming protagonist murders Clytemnestra. Homecoming cere­
important as offstage events. In Racine’s Phaedra, the homecoming of 'Fheseus is
monies are important means of signifying a restoration of order, to both family perverted by illicit passions. I heseus complains:
and state, after the chaos of war. When they are perverted or disrupted, the
feeling engendered is extremely tragic, because of the suffering and dislocation
When to itself my soul returns and takes its fill
that has already gone on, which will not end after all. Of that dear sight, for welcome I receive
In Shakespearean tragedy, as Herbert R. Coursen, Jr., has noted in his book A shuddering fear and horror. All flee; all shrink
Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare's Tragedies, “the tragic hero tends to From my embraces. And I feel the terror
move away from the creative and healing power of the supernature and pulls his That I inspire.^
world with him, so that the world itself plunges away from the possibilities of
In Racine’s Britannkus, there are examples, placed offstage, of the interrupted
Communion, further and further away from the positive potentiality of social
ceremony: Britannicus dies by drinking a cup of poisoned wine given to him by
and religious ritual. Any ‘new society’ emerging at the play’s end does so only
Nero in a solemn ceremony of feigned reconciliation; later. Narcissus drags Julia
over the heros dead body.^ It is interesting how, in Shakespearean tragedy, there
from the altar of the Vestal Virgins, where she had been pledging herself. We do
are so many ceremonies that go wrong in some way: Richard III wooing Anne in
not see these events, but they are elaborately described, and are in fact the ■
interruption of the funeral procession; the trial by combat at the beginning of
climax of the play’s action.
Richard II interrupted and ended by Richard himself; the funeral and the fencing
The^^anti-ceremony ^s a major element in Romantic drama. The most well-
match in Hamlet both going wrong (as does the play within the play); Lear’s
Imown eHmpI^ istRe Witches’ Sabbath scene in Goethe’s Faust. This parody of
deposition scene collapsing; the second banquets in both Macbeth and Timon of
the mass is anticipated in Goethe’s principal source, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and
Athens being disrupted. Furthermore, as (Coursen implies, it is the hero himself
in the witches’ incantations in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but the “black mass”
who, wittingly or unwittingly, is the cause of the ceremonial disruption. In this
becomes much more widespread in the Romantic period than in the Renais­
way, the tragic feelings caused by any broken ceremony center on the hero;
sance; we see it in Cenci’s banquet in Shelley’s The Cenci, the troll scene in Ibsen’s
tragedy is something the hero does as well as experiences.
Peer Gynt, the barroom scenes in Buchner’s Woyzeck, where an apprentice
In tragedy subsequent to Shakespeare, we can note three significant types of
preaches a mock sermon:
ceremony: the offstage ceremony, ;the anti-ceremony‘}and the t^uasi-ceremony:
In all these types, the ceremony is absent in some way, yet also is oif great
Yea, v’erily I say unto you: how should the farmer, the cooper, the shoe­
importance. The significance of what is not there, “the presence of absence,” is a maker, the doctor, live, had not God created Man for their use.^ How should
central idea in contemporary, poststructural criticism, following the ideas of A c endowed Man with the need to slaughter himselP
Jacques Derrida. The importance of absence, however, can be traced to Saus- And therefore doubt ye not, for all things are lovely and sweet! Yet the world
sure’s notion of langue; the speaker and listener are always relating a particular with all its things is an evil place, anT even money passeth into decay. In
utterance (parole) to the surrounding language (langue) as a whole. As we saw in conclusion, my beloved brethren, let us piss once more upon the Cross so that
the first chapter, this notion can be expanded to include all the cultural systems somewhere a Jew will die!^
or codes within which any kind of symbolic expression occurs. The fact that we
Here the Protestant rather than the Catholic service is being mocked, with a
do recognize absence when it occurs is evidence that these cultural systems are
sermon full of biblical language and references, and drinking communally
indeed there, in the background for us. Indeed, the very notion of a tragic,
instead of by the priest alone. The sermon, however, is full of hatred and
broken ceremony implies that we have a sense of what a proper, completed
vulgarity, and the imbibing, of schnapps rather than wine, is drunken and vile.
ceremony should be.
Since Christ himself was a Jew, who died on the cross, the final suggestion to
60 Varieties of the Metadramatic
“piss upon the Cross” is particularly blasphemous. Such “black mass” scenes,
however, are not so much an attack on Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, as
they are a mourning for it, full of the despairing sense of its failure.
Offstage ceremony is again important in mcxlern naturalistic tragedy. Ibsen
provides many examples: the masquerade ball in A Doll House, the dinner and
later the prayer meeting (when the orphanage catches fire) in Ghosts, the bachelor
party in Hedda Gabler. 'I*he impulse for setting ceremony offstage in naturalistic
tragedy did not arise from a desire for restraint, for action was certainly
permissible onstage. Indeed, naturalistic tragedy provides many examples of
ceremonies onstage as well as off. Instead, the impulse came from a desire to
depict an extended world, of which the onstage world is merely a part, a “slice of
life.””’ There is less direct focus on the offstage ceremony, as in neoclassic
tragedy, and more emphasis on the realistic connections between the seen and
the unseen.
(’hekhov is famous for placing important actions offstage in his plays, and
these actions are often ceremonial: the duel in Three Sisters, the auction in The
Cherry Orchard. I'he focus in the plays is on the causes of these ceremonies
(which can be seen as examples of the “corrupt” type), and the results that they
cause in turn. Furthermore, the ceremonies themselves are downplayed in more
ways than just by being placed offstage. The duel in the final act of Three Sisters
is potentially a melodramatic climax such as had occurred in any number of
plays and novels; in this case, however, half the characters arc not even aware
that a duel is going on. Fhe two men are dueling over the love of a woman, a
standard enough motivation—except that the woman herself does not really love
either of them. Irina has agreed to marry Tuzcnbach, de mieux, but feels
little for him except friendship; his love for her seems almost equally pallid, in
'The Cherry Orchard, similarly, the characters that the auction will most affect
simply choose to ignore its existence, despite repeated, insistent reminders.
These are modern examples of perverted ceremonies, but the perversion does
not result from wicked ends, as with Shakespeare, but rather from a general
boredom, a refusal to recognize the ceremonial turning points in life. (Chekhov’s
plays thus in a sense reflect the decline of the importance of ceremony in modern
life, a trend that has continued since his day, to the point where the very words
“ceremony” and “ritual” have become pejorative.
Oddly enough, farce is another dramatic genre to make wide use of unfulfilled
ceremony, ("hekhov’s own farces provide excellent examples: in The Marriage
Proposal, The Wedding, and The Anniversary, the ceremonies denoted by the titles
break down repeatedly. In The Bear, a widow is keeping up formal mourning for
her dead husband far too long; this perverted ceremony, which is due to pride
rather than grief, breaks down when a man arrives to attempt to collect a debt.
This attempt (not exactly a ceremony, but nonetheless a recognizably standard
situation) itself collapses in furious rages, and then, charmingly, in love. In On
the Harmfulness of Tobacco, a lecture on the dangers of smoking barely gets started
The Ceremony within the Play 61
before the lecturer goes off the track, complaining about his wife, and revealing
the frustrations of his largely wasted life.
With regard to ceremony, then, farce is a genre closer to tragedy than to
comedy. It is thus not surprising that ancient Greek tragedy should have
developed out of the farcical satyr play, or that Chekhov himself should have
shifted gracefully from writing farces to tragicomedies. Similarly, postmodern
“theatre of the absurd” drama mixes farce and tragedy; Ionesco’s The Chairs is
even subtitled “A Tragic Farce.”
The,.quasi-ritual is the stock-in-trade of theatre of the absurd. ’I'here are also
some broken ceremonies of the traditional type, such as the ludicrous partly of
"a tutorial in Ionesco’s The Lesson, or the pan)dies implied in the titles of Pinter’s
The Birthday Party, 'The Homecoming (which has connections with ancient Greek
tragedy), and 'Tea Party.. More common, however, are ceremonies resembling
that of Desdemona’s murder, in which the events do not reflect any particular
social or religious ceremony, but instead have an overall ceremonial quality, as a
result of their solemn tone, their structured organization, their independence
from the surrounding action, an.’, above all, the mcaningfulness that the charac­
ters—but not the audience—place in them. Examples are endless: the nonsen­
sical incantations at the end of Ionesco’s 'The Bald Soprano, the “I adore hash
browned p»otatoes” formula in his Jack, or the Submission, the idiot lecture in his
The Chairs, the intern>gation of Stanley in Pinter’s The Birthday Party, the
“training” of Kaspar in Handke’s Kaspar, the stoning of the baby in Bond’s Saved,
the vicious games in Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the playacting scenes
in Genet’s The Balcony, 'The Maids, and The Blacks. (These last can also be seen as
exarnj^es^ plays within the play, but since they apparentiv have been repeated
many times, and seem to be reaching toward some kind of eternal transfigura­
tion, they are at least in the process of becoming ceremony.) Such quasi­
ceremonies have the air of being invented for the nonce, which only adds to their
empty, grotesque qualities. The plays of Samuel Beckett similarly abound in
invented, quasi-ceremonies, as the characters desperately attempt to make mean­
ing out of the mundane elements of their paltry, restricted lives. In the world of
the theatre of the absurd, ritual andy:eremony have JijsLthcir. mining, but the
characters persist in trying to invent them. Ssot only are the results cruel and
perverted, but the very impulses behind them seem mindlessly obsessive. Man
cannot live without ceremony, but the traditional ones arc dead, and the new
ones he invents are meaningless.
The compulsion toward ceremony in contemporary drama has carried over
into theatrical production. Like the characters in theatre of the absurd plays,
stage directors have attempted to create ritual onstage. A manifesto calling for
such a ritualized theatre is found as early as the 1930s, in the writings of Antonin
Artaud:
Every spectacle will contain a physical and objective element, perceptible to
all. Cries, groans, apparitions, surprises, theatricalities of all kinds, magic
 62 Varieties of the Metadramatic
beauty of costumes taken from certain ritual models; resplendent lighting,
incantational beauty of voices, the charms of harmony, rare notes of music,
colors of objects, physical rhythm of movements whose crescendo and decrcs-
cendo will accord exactly with the pulsation of movements familiar to every­
one, concrete appearances of new and surprising objects, masks, effigies yards
high, sudden changes of light, the physical action of light which arouses
sensations of heat and cold, etc."
Artaud never actually staged such performances, however; his ritualized theatre
has been fulfilled only in the past few decades, by directors who either insert
rituals into traditional plays, “ritiwHze” the production style of an entire play, or
occasionally even create an entire, original production in ritual form, as in the
Peter Brook-Ted Hughes Orghast, performed with an invented, meaningless
language in front of ancient ruins in Iran. Such ceremonies, again, are not
directly based on any traditional ones in our culture, although they may borrow
random elements from such things as the Catholic mass, or lake over rituals
wholesale from other cultures, as when Richard Schechner inserted a New
Guinean birth ritual into a production based on Euripides’ TheBacchae. As in the
theatre of the absurd plays, however, the effects of such concocted or sec­
ondhand rituals on an audience are disturbing. They are not part of our culture,
and in no way relate to it. As Richard F. Hardin has noted in a comprehensive
article on ritual in recent literary criticism, ‘‘Rites cannot exist in an aesthetic or
formalist vacuum; they require the context of community'We 'do'not invent the
great ceremonies of our culture butT rather, come to them as parts oFa whole.
Ceremohres that convey no meaning'to an audience,“that make no connections
',^with a surrounding, stable culture, seem merely bizarre or exotic. Unlike true
\ ceremony, which orients its watchers to a whole order of society and the
universe, such quasi-ceremonies confuse and disorient, increasing rather than
1 overcoming our feeling that the world is meaningless.
Thus, attempts to create ceremony fail both in dramatic literature and in
theatrical performance. This failure, however, is sociological rather than aes­
thetic. Indeed, the feelings of dislocation and estrangement generated by such
quasi-ceremonies are similar to those that are common to modern art generally.
Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostraneniye, or defamiliarization, is again relevant
here:
Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel
things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation
of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of
art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the
difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an
aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.’^
It is certainly valuable to “recover the sensation of life,” and the shock value of
the quasi-ceremony in avant-garde drama and theatre may indeed help individu-
The Ceremony within the Play 63
als to see life anew in a semiologically overloaded world, where the slogan, the
image, the abstraction have detached themselves from reality and, instead of
being a means of ordering and understanding life, have become a meaningless
substitute for it. Yet the fact that such avant-garde works are asocial, functioning
for the individual in isolation only, raises grave problems. It means that such art
works will remain avant-garde forever, never becoming integrated into the
drama/culture complex, never appealing to large groups of people, and never
providing the social cohesion that theatre has created in the past. The function of
an avant-garde should be not just to break down culture, but to renew it, to
recreate it. The reader or audience member, similarly, should feel not just
defamiliarization, but reintegration.
The purely private ceremonies that are so widespread in contemporary drama
and theatrical practices have a counterpart in everyday life: in the behavior of
patients suffering from obsessional neurosis. Charles Rycroft writes:
The patient attempts to reduce anxiety by carrying out a more or less complex
and stereotyped series of actions. Obsessional rituals can be regarded as a
private^ constructed system of counter-magic by which the patient attempts
to war(f off fantastic fears by equally fantastic actions, the logic of both bemg
animistic and dependent on primary process thinking. In washing rituals,
patients feel compelled to wasn themselves according to a rigidly prescribed
and complex routine in order to allay a dread of being infected or of infecting
others, the fear of infection being one which their own intelligence does not
endorse. In this respect, obsessional rituals differ sharply from the rituals of
the ignorant, superstitious, and religious. They also <3iffer from religious
rituaE in being private and solitary.'*^
In other words, the patient attempts to create meaning in his inner life, because
it threatens him with chaos, by inventing ceremonies that provide a strict,
though grotesque, order. Similarly, playwrights and theatre practitioners seem
to be trying to provide ceremonial order against the social and existential chaos
that theatens us all. But in the end their ceremonies are merely “private and
solitary,” conveying nothing to the audience except meaninglessness and pain,
such as we might experience in watching an obsessional patient in a mental
hospital. An anarchic world view has led to a neurotic form of theatre.
Ill
Unlike the play within the play, the ceremony within the play is not confined
to a few periods in the history of theatre, but is always common. Its use does
not, in itself, imply any cynicism about life, but the particular way that a given
period of theatre tends to employ the device will both reflect and express the
world view of the society of which the theatre is a part.
Ceremonies themselves always signify stability. They not only promote group
 64 Varieties of the Metadramatic The Ceremony within the Play
65
unuy among the observers but also imply an order and permanence in the disruptions caused by the scientific discoveries in the Renaissance uave wav to
surrounding world, even when the ceremony itself is celebrating a change.
the systematizations of the seventeenth century; thus, Copernicus and Galileo
When a play contains a broken or perverted ceremony, it does not imply an
shattered the traditional view of the heavens, but Kepler and Newton provided a
attack on the ceremony itself. Quite the opposite—it may be the playwright’s
new m^el of the universe that was even more orderly than the previous one In
way of saying “Look how things go wrong when this ceremony is not properly
both these cases, tragedy dwindled with the establishment of the new order-
performed. Nevertheless, unfulfilled ceremony is associated with tragedy and
people continued to write tragedy, but the results were feeble in comparison
tragedy is only found in societies that are rapidly changing. Individual pl^s
With those of the previous era. ^
may seem to deplore such change, but tragedy as a whole in a given period By the late nineteenth century, the Newtonian view of the universe had
becomes a means for understanding and dealing with it. become firmly entrenched; there was a general faith in a universe running
Shakespeare’s Richard If provides an example of this. Certainly the play comes according to fixed scientific laws. It is perhaps stretching things to call thf
down strongly in favor of the divine right of kings and vehemently against
nineteenth-century scientific and technological world view a “religion,” but
deposition and assassination. The central abdication ceremony in particular is
nonetheless like religion, it did provide a wholistic, orderly, safe view of things
shown as a perverted anti-coronation, in which Richard undoes everything a
which Its adherents believed in devotedly. Kant, in saying that the order of the
king properly does when he is crowned. Nevertheless, Richard is depicted in the
heavens and the moral order within both filled him with awe, had earlier
play as weak and inept, personally deser\dng what he gets. The play is strug­
expressed the predominant spirit of the age. Such transcendental optimism
gling with the problem of absolute monarchy in a changing society, trying to
however was gradually eroded by such pessimistic philosophers as
understand how the principle of divine right can be sustained even when the
Schopenhauer Kierk^aard, and Nietzsche, and by the scientific discoveries of
king in question IS incompetent. Fifty years after it was written, the play was
Darwin, Freud, and Linstein. With the traditional view of the world changing
imitated in real life in England, with the execution of Charles I. Of course, the
ragedy again becomes a major literary and theatrical mode of expression, from
play Ri^rd II did not “cause” this to happen. Plays never directly cause any­
he late Romantic plays of Kleist, Biichner, and Hebbel, through the realistic
thing Ihey do, however, provide the means for examining the ideologies by tragedies of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov. ^
which we live. » /
Unlike similar periods of tragic drama in the past, however, the transition in
Richard II’Wiis only one in a large body of plays and other literature examining
Weltanschauung seen in the nineteenth century, in which the entrenched En­
the notion of kingship, which until that time had been more or less unexamined
lightenment view of the world gradually broke down, was not replaced by a
buch works stimulated new ways of thinking about the monarchy, even when
new, stable order. Twentieth-century philosophy, indeed, rejects “system budd-
individually they were promoting old ways of thinking about it. To articulate
mg, and implies that all of man’s knowledge is a kind of groping in the dark
what had previously been taken for granted meant that the traditional order was
Iwentieth-century science finds inherent limits to itself as well. Furthermore it
already in danger; before, it had been possible to think about assassinating a
IS excessively mathematical and esoteric; Newton’s theories could be understood
king, but not about executing one. The killing of Richard II is an assassination,
mathematically, by the scientist, and also visually, by the layman, but modern
rL r conceive of themselves as executioners, carrying out the rule physics provides no visual models or other means of access to anyone lacking
of Bolingbroke, the new king; although Shakespeare depicts the murderers as
mathematical talent and years of training. Finally, the twentieth century has had
wrong, and instantly remorseful of the deed, the play opens Pandora’s box To
a history of continuous social upheaval, wars, genocide, and atomic disaster
raise the question is to raise the possibility of differing conclusions; some
Our view of the world thus remains unstable, and tragedy remains possible, but
people, in viewing the play, would inevitably infer that under some circum­
IS usually reahzi^ m grotesque form. Just as the plav within the play has
stances the deposing and executing of a king might be acceptable. (The earl of
undergone considerable breakdowns in our century, so too has the ceremony
Essex must have drawn such a conclusion when, during his abortive revolution
within the play degenerated. We no longer have any significant ceremonies in
ag^st Elizabeth, he paid the players to perform Richard IU\\ over London )
our everyday lives; the order that they would traditionally embody has long
Fhe three greatest periods of tragedy in Western history—the fifth century
since been rc|ected, and since no new order has replaced it; we have developed
B.C., the Renaissance, and the modern period of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries-all accompanied periods of change from a society based on no new ceremonies in plaee of the old. Indeed, as already mentioned, the very
of ceremony or ritual is widely scorned today. Playwrights and directors
a traditional religion to one based on a new science. In the first two instances,'
have thus had to invent personal ceremonies in the contemporary theatre Even
the period of transition gave way to a new kind of stability. Thus, the skeptical
when these are fulfilled, it is a neurotic kind of fulfillment, an obsessional or
materialism of the Greek sophists gave way to the idealism of Plato. 'Fhe
nostalgic attempt to create order where none exists. When these ceremonies are
66 Varieties of the Metadramatic
depicted as breaking down, the result is not tragic but grotesque, since the
breakdown is not an assault on any traditional ceremony, but upon the very idea
of ceremony itself.
Notes
1. The terms ceremony and ritual will often seem to be used synonymously in this book. I use
ritual, however, to include only ceremonies that have some kind of religious or existential signifi­
cance. Many other kinds of ceremonies are purelv secular.
2. Fry. 163.
3. Susanne K. linger. Philosophy in a S’e-a Key (New York: New American Library, 1948), 138.
4. Ibid., 139.
5. In some primitive rituals, the shaman, or priest, is “possessed” by a spirit; this comes closer to
acting in the theatrical sense than performing does in other rituals, bwause the shaman’s ordinary
self b reduced to a passi\e vessel for the character. The very notion of “possession,” however, implies
some dichotomy between performer and character. The shaman’s ordinary self is still apparent
during possession, though in a quiescent form.
6. David Cole, The Theatrical Event: A Mytbos, A Vocabulary, /I Perspective (.Middletown, C-onn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 7-8. Original italics.
7. Herbert R. (Joursen, Jr, Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare^ Tragedies (Lewisburg,
Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1976), 25.
8. Jean Racine, Five Plays, trans. Kenneth .Muir (New York: i till & Wang, 1960), 206.
9. Geoi^ Buchner, Georg Buchner: Complete Plays and /-Vwc, trans. C^arl Richard Mueller (New
York: Hill & Wang, 1963), 125.
10. For an extended discussion of the naturalistic conventions of continuity, see chapter two of mv
book. Patterns in Ibsen} Middle Plays (Lewisbui^, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1981), 36-52.
11. Antonin .\rtaud. The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove
Press, 1958), 93.
12. Richard t. Hardin, “The ‘Ritual’ in Recent (Yiticism: The Elusive Sense of (Community,”
PMLA 98 (October 1983X 847.
13. Shklovsky, 12.
14. Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams,
1973), 143-H.
4
Role Playing within the Role
1
Like the ceremony within the play, role playing within the role is a common
device, found in the drama of many cultures and periods. It is often found in
tandem with the play or ceremony within the play, whenever we see the
characters in the inner performance also as individuals in the outer performance.
In Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, we see the menials as themselves in the
outer play, and as Pyramus, Thisbe, the wall, the lion, and the man in the moon
in the inner play, Pyramus and Thisbe. In this chapter, however, I shall not be
concerned with role playing in formal performance, separate from the rest of the
play, but rather within the action of the play itself, when a character for some
reason takes on a role that is different from his usual self
Among other things, role playing within the role is an excellent means for
delineating character, by showing not only who the character is, but what he
wants to be. When a playwright depicts a character who is himself playing a
role, there is often the suggestion that, ironically, the role is closer to the
character’s true self than his everyday, “real” personality. Hamlet’s feigned
madness, Horner’s feigned emasculation. Monsieur Jourdain’s pretensions to
nobility, Pirandello’s Henry IV playing out the role of mediev'al king, are all false
faces that reveal deep inner truths about their characters. Shakespeare’s Portia
and Rosalind and Viola dress up as men, and in so doing reveal the “masculine”
side of thie natures, their boldness, levelheadedness, and persuasiveness.
Even when the role within the role is patently false, the dualistic device still
sets up a feeling of ambiguity and complexity with regard to the character. lago’s
“honesty,” so convincing to his fellow characters and so transparently false to the
audience, has no ironic truth about it in the way that, say, Hamlet’s madness
does. Nevertheless, the doubleness of the portrayal does suggest depths of
characterization that would not be suggested if lago operated in a more straight­
forward manner. In other words, the principle of ostraneniye, or estrangement, j
which is applied to the play as a whole when the play within the play device is ’
used, is applied to the individual character whenever role playing within the role
is used. The character may not even be very complex in the obvious sense, of
67
68 Varieties of the Metadramatic
having many facets available for our examination. T. S. Eliot maintained that
Hamlet was a failure as a dramatic creation because there was no “objective
correlative” for his inner complexity, nothing for the audience to see or hear that
would show them, at least indirectly, what makes him tick. Coleridge insisted
that lago had “motiveless malignity,” that his hatred for Othello is ultimately
incomprehensible. Nevertheless, the fact that these characters are represented as
playing roles creates a feeling that they have unplumbed depths, that they have a
fundamental complexity even though we cannot define it. Their characteriza­
tions are fluid, shifting, mysterious, and hence fascinating.
Role playing within the role can be found in all sorts of literary forms,
including the novel, the short story, and the epic poem, but it is of course
particularly suited to the drama, because of the added fascination in having the
roles performed by actors. This adds a third metadramatic layer to the au­
dience’s experience: a character is playing a role, but the character himself is
being played by an actor. Shakespeare in particular loves to set up situations of
this sort; the multiple ironies of having a male play a female who in turn plays a
male, for example, explores interesting areas of gender identification. Just as
using a play within the play raises existential questions, so too does using a role
within the role raise questions of human identity.
Identity theory is a major area of modern psychoanalysis. Indeed, although
the popular view of psychoanalysis still focuses on the repressed desires of the
unconscious mind, as Freud did in his early work, “ego psychology,” in which
the conscious personality is explored, has long since become the dominant form
of psychoanalytic practice. Psychoanalysts such as Erik Erikson, Heinz Lich­
tenstein, and R. D. Laing have written on how the normal ego develops, and
how this development can become disordered. Treatment of ego disorders rarely
consists of simply having the patient confront unpleasant hostile or sexual
feelings, as in the simple, dramatic cases that Freud originally treated. Instead,
ego psychoanalysis takes many years of careful reconstruction of the patient’s
sense of identity.
Oddly, such psychoanalysts have rarely had much to say about the theatre.
For example, Lichtenstein’s major work. The Dilemma of Human Identity, does not
mention theatre, acting, or actors at all; Erikson’s equally major Identity, Youth,
and Crisis has a section on Bernard Shaw’s identity problems (though nothing on
his drama), and another on the character Hamlet, of whom Erikson maintains
(unoriginally) that “where others act, he play acts,”' but has nothing on what it
means to “play act” in the theatre. In general, identity psychoanalysts seem to
be avoiding the subject of theatre, even though it immediately raises fascinating
questions about their central concerns of ego boundary and ego integrity.
Perhaps this avoidance is because the phenomenon of the actor seems to
challenge the basic premise of ego psychology, which is that a strong ego, a firm
sense of one’s identity, is a healthy thing to have. The whole goal of ego
psychoanalysis is to provide a solid, realistic sense of self for patients who lack it.
Actors, on the other hand, would seem to have a weak sense of self, since they
Role Playing within the Role 69
change their selves with every role. From this, it is easy to conclude that actors
are simply neurotic, as some psychoanalysts have done.^ Yet it is hard to
imagine an actor seeking treatment for the very thing that provides him with his
livelihood, and for which he may have trained and sacrificed for years. Nor does
it seem proper to condemn performance as neurotic behavior, when in fact it is
highly valued and rewarded in most societies. Neurotic behavior, by definition,
is supposed to be out of keeping with reality; if acting is delusional or neurotic, it
also provides fame, admiration, and wealth—hardly unrealistic achievements.
Besides, there are notable differences between the unreality of acting and that
of neurotic behavior. The unreality of an actor’s role is fully understood by both
the audience and the actor himself; it is an “agreed-upKjn fiction.” The unreality
of a neurotic person washing his hands a hundred times a day is far from
understood; such a person actually feels that the washing is necessary. Moreover,
in contrast to the actor, who enjoys performing, the neurotic has strong feelings
of anxiety and unhappiness that accompany his behavior.
Categorizing an actor as neurotic, then, is an example of what Jonas Barish has
recently called “the anti-theatrical prejudice.” Barish, who is not a psycho­
analyst but a distinguished literary critic, has ably shown that society’s feelings
toward actors have nearly always been strongly ambivalent. Even today, when
actors receive the fame, wealth, and sycophancy once given to royalty, there is an
underlying feeling that they are unstable, childish individuals,, given to emo­
tional breakdowns, drug taking, and sexual promiscuity. In the past, not only
silly prudes but major philosophers, such as Plato, Saint Augustine, Rousseau,
and Nietzsche, have attacked the theatre, often at the very time when it seemed
to have a high standing in the culture.
The reason for our ambivalence toward actors can be found in identity theory
itself. In Civilization and Its Discontents, first published in 1930, Freud wrote of
the infant’s developing ego:
When the infant at the breast receives stimuli, he cannot as yet distinguish
whether they come from his ego or from the outer world. He learns it
gradually as the result of various exigencies. It must make the strongest
impression on him that many sources of excitation, which later on he will
recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him at any time with
sensations, whereas others become temporarily out of his reach—amongst
these what he wants most of all, his motner’s breast—and reappear only as a
result of his cries for help. Thus an “object” first presents itself to the ego as
something existing “outside,” which is only induced to appear by a particular
act.^
From this first instance, the infant gradually learns to define the boundaries of
its ego, developing a sense of self. Identity theorists maintain that this process
continues throughout one’s lifetime, because we must continually redefine who
we are as we grow older and are called upon to take on different roles—boy or
girl, daughter or son, student, adolescent, youth, adult, lover, worker, parent.
 70 Varieties of the Metadramatic
grandparent, “senior citizen,” etc. Erik Erikson identifies eight stages of man,
each of which involves an identity crisis as the individual has to redefine himself
or herself.** Identity, then, is something that human beings have to learn, and the
learning is an inherently painful process. Freud wrote that “the tendency arises
to dissociate from the ego everything which can give rise to pain, to cast it out
and create a pure pleasure-ego, in contrast to a threatening ‘outside,’ not self.”^
The mechanism is thus very much the same as that of sexual repression gener­
ally, as we learn to limit our desires through contact with what Freud called the
reality principle, the harsh fact that reality is a source of pain as well as pleasure,
and that pleasure itself must be severely limited, in contrast to our drives, which
are originally limitless. In developing an identity, we are similarly forced by
reality to limit our sense of self, which was also originally without limit:
Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the exter­
nal world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken
vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the uni­
verse.®
There are times in our later life when we return to this infantile state of “limitless
narcissism.” Under the influence of alcohol or drugs, lost in the raptures of love,
carried away by religion, we experience an “oceanic feeling.”^ This is distinctly
pleasurable, in contrast to the rigid, limiting sense of identity that ordinarily
burdens us. 'Fhe boundaries of the ego seem to dissolve, and we feel at one with
the universe.
Thus, human identity has a clear psychosexual component. The ambivalence
we feel about identity is the same as that which we feel about sexual matters
generally. The “anti-theatrical prejudice” is an expression of this ambivalence.
This is the reason that moral philosophers have always been made uneasy by
theatre, and also the reason that actors, in addition to being castigated for
playing with their identities, are popularly characterized as being libidinous. We
unconsciously fear that letting down the boundaries of identity will lead to
letting down all constraints for our animal impulses, leading to loss of control, to
unlimited promiscuity and perversity.
Bisexuality is a particular threat associated with acting, since gender identity
too is something that human beings have to learn. The infant, who is completely
bisexual by nature, is gradually forced to define himself or herself as a little boy
or a little girl, and to behave strictly in the manner expected by society for males
and females. Henceforth, taking on the role of the opposite sex, or reverting to
the bisexual “polymorphous perversity” of infancy, forever remains a fascination
and a threat. Thus playwrights from Euripides to Shakespeare to Shaw have
explored gender identity, whose psychosexual underpinnings make extremely
potent theatre. (With the rise of the women’s liberation movement, there have
been many films in recent years, such as VictorIVictoria, Tootsie, and Vend, which
make use of the same gender role playing within the role.)
Role Playing within the Role 71
The “anti-theatrical prejudice” is rooted in powerful unconscious desires and
fears. These fears are of course largely irrational. Sexual drives need outlets as
well as constraints; sexual promiscuity is antisocial, neurotic behavior, but
sexual impotence or frigidity are also neurotic. Similarly, if people remained
forever in a state of infantile “limitless narcissism,” never developing any sense of
identity, they would be unable to function or even survive, but to be unable ever
to let down the mask of one’s identity would be equally bad, since, as already
noted, life requires us continually to redefine our identities. Furthermore,
societies themselves change the grounds for role playing from time to time, as
seen in our society today, in which the feminist movement is changing the way
we define masculine and feminine behavior. Thus all societies have identity
safety valves, festivities where one may take on different roles, at masked balls,
disguisings, costume parties, Mardi Gras, Halloween. Societies also have the­
atre.
Theatre, in which actors take on changing roles, has, among its many other
functions, the examination of identity. For the individual, theatre is a kind of
identity laboratory, in which social roles can be examined vicariously. In a safe
environment, detached from everyday reality, the audience member can forget
his own identity for a while, and identify with the characters he sees. Both
performers and audience members are in a sense “actors” in the theatrical
experience, dropping their regular identities and trying out new ones. This is
\^luable for both the individual and for society. Just as the individual must
revise his identity at crucial times throughout his lifetime, so too must a
dynamic society frequently revise the way in which it wants its members to play
roles. The roles of male and female in our society have been undergoing radical
redefinition in recent years, which is the reason for the many films and plays
dealing with gender. But ev’en in static societies, where roles change slowly if at
all, theatre is still an important device for teaching what it means, in a given
society, to be a man, a woman, an adult, a worker, a parent.
Beyond this, there is an additional individual and social value in learning to
identify with others. To see another person as a full-fledged, conscious human
being, capable of thinking and feeling and suffering, is the first step toward true
morality, which is why Christianity embodies the process in its golden rule, “Do
unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Much of the evil in the world
is caused by seeing individuals or groups of people as objects, as “other,” rather
than as oneself. Theatre teaches the skill of identifying with others rather than
objectifying them—to recognize the humanity they have in common with us,
rather than treating them as mere things to be shoved aside or stamped out.
What more valuable skill could there be?
Thus, the actor is definitely not a neurotic; he performs a valuable social
function. Of course, individual actors may suffer from neuroses, just like
individuals in other professions, but these neuroses are by no means central to
their work; indeed, just as with other professions, a neurosis is an illness that
72 Varieties of the Metadramatk
hinders the actor from performing fully. Neurotics, in fact, make bad actors
generally. Their own sense of identity feels so perilously weak that they find it
threatening to take on another. Successful actors, on the other hand, typically
have a stn>ng sense of identity, which is why they can safely put it aside for a
while. E^o psychoanalysts have been so concerned with the value of a strong
identity that they have avoided the subject of acting, but it in fact verifies their
theory. In general, it is a sign of a strong identity to be able to put it aside for a
time; a person who is secure in the role of parent, for example, has no difficulty
in joking and playing casually with his children, knowing that he can easily
reassert his authority if it should become necessary. It is the insecure parent who
is likely to be aloof and authoritarian, because he fears that showing another side
of himself to his children would lead to a total loss of control over them.
Similarly, there is a world of difference between a successful actor in the theatre,
who can easily put aside his everyday identity (with genuine benefits to both
himself and society), and the neurotic in real life, whose sense of self is so weak
that he dare not. 'Fhc existential psychoanalyst R. D. Laing has used the term
“elusion” to describe how a person with a weak identity feels as if he must play
the role that he in fact actually has.® The life of such neurotic individuals seems
an endless, sad masquerade. But elusion is no more real acting than sexual
frigidity is normal self-restraint. Unlike elusion, good theatrical acting is a result
of having a strong “ego boundary,” not a weak one.
It is ironic that actors are popularly characterized as being arre^ant and
egotistical, but also as being weak and childish. Yet these apparently contradic­
tory disparagements embody a subtle truth. To be successful as an actor, one
must indeed be strong and confident, because only then can one become again
like a child, playing at artificial roles with all the intensity and delight of
childhood. The paradox of acting is that to fear making a fool of oneself
guarantees that it will happen, because only by letting go of one’s ordinary,
dignified adult self can one be successful. A person cannot let go of that self,
however, if he fears that it will thereby vanish forever. The actor’s “childishness”
comes from his self-esteem, from his firm sense of being fully adult.
11
Role playing within the role sets up a special acting situation that goes beyond
the usual exploration of specific roles; it exposes the very nature of role itself.
The theatrical efficacy of role playing within the role is the result of its remind­
ing us that all human roles are relative, that identities are learned rather than
innate. Unconsciously, we are made to recall the infantile state of “limitless
narcissism,” when there were no roles, no boundaries, only an oceanic feeling of
being at one with the universe. This oceanic feeling is both pleasurable and
Role Playing within the Role 73
threatening; in other words, it is a state of ostraneniye toward ourselves. Indeed,
the state of ostraneniye generally is one in which we “forget ourselves,” over­
whelmed by the power of the art work. Philosophers of aesthetics have long
noted the quasi-religious nature of the artistic experience; Mukafovsky, we may
recall, stated that art always reflects reality as a whole, by which he may have
been thinking of the same “oceanic feeling” of connectedness with the universe
that Freud wrote about. Certainly, like religion, a work of art does take us out of
our ordinary selves.
With regard to the theatre, we should recall that actors in many cultures have
often been considered shamans, magicians, or priests. David (>)le has described
how, in such cultures, the actor, like the shaman, takes his audience back to the
illud tempus—”a time of origins, the period of Creation and just after, when gods
walked the earth, men visited the sky, and the great archetypal events of myth
. . . took place.The time of origins for the universe can be seen as a metaphor
for the time of our own personal origins, the state of “limitless narcissism" again.
Role playing within the n>le is particularly shamanistic in this sense, since it
seeks directly to take us back ot our original, limitless selves. The actor toys with
role, to help us temporarily rediscover rolelessness.
Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, seems to write disparagingly of the
oceanic feeling—the very phrase “limitless narcissism” suggests that it is some­
thing unseemly. Nevertheless, this concept is a rare case where science, art, and
religion all meet. Although it is literally a regression to infantilism to experience
the oceanic feeling, it is wrong to consider it therefore to be trifling or con­
temptible. lb recncounter our origins, to l)e reminded of who we truly are,
creatures of-—rather than merelv in—the universe, is valuable whether consid­
ered mystically or scientifically.
Ill
Role playing within the role occurs in three broad types: voluntary, involun­
tary, and allegorical. Voluntary role playing is the most straightforward kind; a
character consciously and willingly takes on a role different fmm his ordinary
self in order to achieve some clear goal. Thus, in The Merchant of Venice, Portia
takes on the role of “Balthasar,” a Doctor of Laws, in order to get into the
Venetian law court, serve as judge, and save Antonio’s life. Horner, in Wy­
cherley’s The Country Wife, plavs the part of eunuch in order to have access to
women, to seduce them in safety. Engstrand, in Ibsen’s Ghosts, plays at being
pious in order to deceive and manipulate Pastor Manders. Sometimes the role
played is a complete disguise, a totally different person from the character’s
ordinary self—with a different name, a different background, even a different
sex, as with Portia/Balthasar. At other times, the role may simply be a false
attitude or pose; when lago manipulates Othello, he is still “lago,” but in the
74 Varieties of the Metadramatic
guise of being “honest” (every other major character calls him that), although his
true self is utterly wicked. The effect on the audience is much the same in either
case; the fact that the character is consciously, wittingly feigning creates a
distinct uneasiness about role generally, especially since we cannot help but
remember that the character himself is being feigned by an actor. Voluntary role
playing within the role is theraost metadramatic type. ------ -
rhvoTuntary role playing within the role may be caused by factors outside the
character, or caused by some inner weakness, or, quite commonly, caused by
some combination of outer and inner factors. Christopher Sly, in the Induction
of The Taming of the Shrew, provides an example of externally caused, involuntary
role playing: the other characters convince him that he is actually a noble
gentleman, who has been asleep for fifteen years, during which time he has
presumably dreamed of being the lowly Sly. (The device is similar to that used
in Calderon’s Life is a Dream and Pirandello’s Henry IV.) Used in tandem with the
play within the play. Sly’s externally caused role playing enhances the meta­
dramatic effect of The Taming of the Shrew as a whole. In Wycherley’s The Country
Wife, Sparkish provides an example of involuntary role playing that is primarily
caused from within. Although his feigned elegance has a conscious goal of social
success, it actually achieves the opposite; Sparkish’s foppishness is so exagger­
ated and ridiculous that its actual cause is to be found in his own inner
insecurities. Finally, Malvolio in Twelfth Night provides an example of role
playing within the role that results from both external and internal forces; the
manipulations of Maria and her crew as well as Malvolio’s own inner weaknesses
cause him to put on yellow cross-garters and behave like a fool. In all such cases
of involuntary role playing, we feel less estranged than when the role playing is
voluntary, because we are more secure as to who the character really is. His false
self has been forced upon him. Even when the role playing is his own fault, as
with Sparkish or Malvolio, he cannot really help himself; his sin is venial, not
mortal.
Allegorical role playing within the role is more subtle than the voluntary or
involuntary types. It can, in fact, be seen instead as an example of the fourth
type of metadrama, references to other literature, rather than strict role playing.
Allegorical role playing within the role arises whenever the play’s situation,
action, or imagery contrive to relate a character to some well-known literary of
historical figure. Religious allegory, for example, occurs often in Shakespeare.
Thus, the opening scene of As You Like It has for its action the falling out of two
brothers, Orlando and Oliver. The scene takes place in an orchard; a third
character, not Orlando’s biological father but a father figure to him, is named
“Adam.” For the original audience, drilled since childhood in biblical lore, there
was an obvious reference here to the story of the rivalry and hatred of Cain and
Abel, whose father was Adam, who was expelled from an “orchard,” the
Garden of E^en.
These allegorical associations are not noticed by the characters, nor made
Role Playing within the Role 75
explicit in any other way, but are nonetheless apparent. Under the doctrine of
correspondences that was widely accepted in Shakespeare’s time,'*' events in the
Bible were believed to be continually reenacted in real life; everyone was
replaying the archetypal roles found there. In the drama of the period, there are
two main types of allegorical role playing; cither it is made explicit in the play,
and fully noticed by the characters, or it is implicit only, as in the Orlando/
Oliver quarrel at the beginning of As You Like It.
When the allegorical role playing is explicit, it can also simultaneously be
voluntary or involuntary. An example of explicit allegorical role playing occurs
in The Merchant of Venice, where Launcelot Gobbo kneels down, backward, in
front of his blind and senile father and asks for his blessing (2.2). Old Gobbo
feels his hairy head and, thinking it is Launcelot’s face, exclaims, “Thou hast got
more hair on thy chin than Dobbin my fill-horse has on his tail” (2.2.87-88).
There is a clear reference to the biblical story of the wily Jacob fooling his blind
father, Isaac, by placing a hairy goat skin on his smooth neck. Here Launcelot is
fully aware of the story, and indeed, sets up consciously to play the allegorical
role in order to fool his father. Later in the play, there is another example of
biblical allegory. Actually, the allusion is to the Apocrypha, widely known in
Shakespeare’s time: when, in the trial scene, Shylock thinks he is about to win,
he praises Portia (here playing Balthasar), crying “A Daniel come to judgment!
yea, a Daniel! / O wise young judge, how I do honor thee” (4.1.221-22). Here
there is double-layered role playing, or, if we count the boy actor who played
Portia, triple-layered: a boy is playing Portia, who is playing Balthasar, whom
Shylock praises for playing Daniel. But the allegorical role playing, inter­
estingly, turns out to be implicit as well as explicit. The story in the Apocrypha
to which Shylock is referring is of Susanna and the Elders. In it, the Elders try
to pervert the law to gain vengeance on Susanna, but Daniel, as a wise lawyer,
turns the law against them, and exposes their wickedness. Shylock recognizes
! -Portia/Balthasar as a Daniel, but does not recognize himself as an Elder, who is
trying to use the law in a perverse way to gain vengeance on Antonio. Like
-Daniel, Portia turns the law against Shylock, which is why Gratiano mocks him
by repeating his own words, “A second Daniel! a Daniel, Jew!” (2.2.331).
In general, the interesting types of role playing within the role are like this one
in The Merchant of Venice, where one type of role playing turns into another. I
have already mentioned how playwrights often use the role within the role to
suggest something basic about the character. Hamlet’s feigned madness seems
especially appropriate for him, not because he is literally mad, but because there
appear to be hidden, unconscious elements in his character that are at least akin
to madness. His procrastination and generally erratic behavior suggest that his
madness is not entirely feigned; his role playing is both voluntary and involun­
tary. Similarly, lago starts out by giving numerous justifications for using the
role of “honest” friend to destroy Othello; he says he is angry at having been
passed over for promotion, that he fears that Othello has cuckolded him, even
76 Varieties of the Metadramatic
that he himself is in love with Desdemona. Here would seem to be voluntary
role playing indeed. As the play progresses, however, these apparent motivations
become almost forgotten, while lago comes to act not so much like someone in
pursuit of a conscious goal, but rather like a man who has at long last found his
true vocation. Using g(x>d in the serv’ice of evil is no longer a voluntary act
toward a conscious end, but an end in itself, the delightful satisfaction of an
obsession. ('Fhis is the reason for Coleridge’s “motiveless malignity” theory.)
In Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Horner’s playing a eunuch also seems
particularly appropriate to the character. It is obvious to the audience—and to
the female characters—that he is not literally castrated, but his supposed state
does reflect a certain emotional emptiness in the character, an inability to feel
love or even lust. The women cease to interest him sexually the moment he has
had them. For him, the chase is everything, the prize nothing; the offstage act of
sexual intercourse in the famous “China Scene” lasts about thirty seconds. He is
not a eunuch of the body, but of the emotions.
In all these examples, then, the role playing shifts from the voluntary type to
the involuntary, inner type. In ancient Greek drama we find numerous examples
of role playing within the role that have the same quality of shifting from the
voluntary to the involuntary, or from externally caused to the internally driven.
In Greek comedy, the two stock characters of alazon and eiron arc both role
players; the former, a boaster and imposter, presenting himself as better than he
is, the latter, a self-dcprecator, presenting himself as worse. A famous example of
imposter occurs in Aristophanes’ I'hesmopboriazusae, in which Euripides at one
point impersonates a woman. (Two other impostors, his kinsman and the tragic
poet Agathon, do the same.) Euripides’ ostensible purpose is to intrude on the
chorus of women’s Fhesmophorian festival, where they are planning to attack
him for his treatment of women in his plays, but again, the role playing device
exposes Euripides’ effeminate nature, which Aristophanes is lampooning.
The tragic counterpart of gender role playing occurs in f^uripides’ own The
Bacebae, where the protagonist, Pentheus, dresses as a woman in order to
observe the Dionysian rites of the ecstatic bacchantes. Here there is a double
shift: the impersonation has a conscious goal, but it is also brought about by
Dionysus casting a spell on Pentheus. At the same time, the lurid fascination
that Pentheus feels toward the women, and his delight in dressing up as one of
them, expose an inner cause of this involuntary aspect of role playing: dressing
as a woman expresses the feminine side of his essential nature, which for the
male chauvinist Greeks meant the irrational, emotional, sensual side.
IV
There are many other examples of role playing within the role in Greek
drama, and in subsequent drama as well. As critics have long noted, the alazon
Role Playing within the Role 77
and eiron types of role players are stock figures in all comedy subsequent to
Aristophanes. Terence’s The Eunuch provides a good example in Roman comedy,
since it is the source of Wycherley’s The Country Wife; in 'The Eunuch, a young
man passes himself off as a eunuch in order to get into a courtesan’s house to
seduce a girl living there with whom he is in love. He is thus an example of the
eiron type, passing himself off as less than he is. 'Fhe play’s cast also includes a
boastful soldier as an alazon type; the boastful soldier, or miles gloriosus, was a
popular figure in Roman comedy, appearing as the title character in a play by
Plautus, and having since become a stock figure in its own right. In Plautus’s The
Menaechmi we find a hilarious example of involuntary role playing of the exter­
nally caused sort, as a pair of twins find themselves each unwittingly playing the
role of the other.
Medieval drama also contains many examples of role playing within the role.
In the secular Robin Hood plays, the outlaw Robin Hood often goes about
disguised; similarly, in the twelfth-century religious play hregrini, performed at
the Cathedral of Rouen, Christ appears to his disciples after the crucifixion; they
fail to recognize him until, seated at the table, he breaks bread “unto them” and
disappears." In the German Play of Frau Jutten (1480), the Devil leads krau
Jutten to pursue learning in male attire, until she becomes popc.'^ The central
device of gender role playing is similar to that of the recent Barbra Streisand
film Yentl, but with a different moral conclusion, since in the medieval play she is
ultimately damned for having presumed to play the wrong sex!
In the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play of the fourteenth century, Mak the
Shepherd steals a sheep, which his wife passes off as a baby to which she has
supposedly just given birth. I'his is interesting in that there is an animal
impersonating a human, in a re^rsal of the standard fairy tale action of a human
becoming an animal, but also in that there is a religious allegorical role playing
going on as well. The “newborn” sheep suggests the lamb of God, or Jesus, and
since the play also contains the birth of Jesus, the allegory is made clear in a
comic correspondence.
I have already given several examples of role playing within the role in
Renaissance drama in the plays of Shakespeare. All types of role playing within
the role can in fact be found in Renaissance drama in abundance, but two types
are of special interest. First is the “white devil” sort of role playing, as in
Webster’s play of that title, or in Othello or Macbeth. I he white devil, or devil
with a fair outside, whose “false face must hide what the false heart doth know,”
was of special fascination in Shakespeare’s time, since it challenged people’s basic
Christian ideas about identity. In theory, the soul was supposed to be stamped
on the face; beauty supposedly reflected a person’s g(X)dness, and ugliness a
person’s wickedness. Duncan, in Macbeth, is expressing a traditional view when
he says, “'Fherc’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face”'^ (1.4.11-
12). Similarly, lago is playing on Othello’s traditional mind when he says, “Men
should be what they seem; / Or those that be not, would they might seem none!”
78 Varieties of the Metadramatic
(3.3.126-27), to which Othello immediately replies, “Certain, men should be
what they seem” (3.3.128).
The fact that both Duncan and Othello turn out to be wildly wrong about
identity would have been seen in Shakespeare’s time as a result of man’s fallen
state; in the Garden of Eden, presumably, everybody’s outward identity would
have accurately reflected his soul, but since then, one had better be careful about
jumping to such a conclusion. Probing a little deeper, however, we can see that
such misgivings about identity reflect the growing size of cities, the rise of
international commerce, the increases in the size and complexity of gov’crnment,
and the resultant increased amount of social intercourse in the Renaissance as
compared to the Middle Ages. In a small medieval town, or on a medieval fief,
everyone knew everybody else at least by sight, encountering more or less the
same small group of people every day throughout a lifetime. In such circum­
stances, one can be fairly comfortable about identity. People do not try to hide
who they are, or cover their dealings with a false face of honesty, when all of
their dealings are with the same group of people, over and over, because it would
do no good. But when one is always dealing with new people, whether in
government or in commerce, trickery becomes eminently possible. Conversely,
one must now be on one’s guard against false identities, because men may not be
“what they seem” at first. The examples of role playing in medieval drama were
rarely of the good-covering-evil type; usually the hidden identity—Robin Hood,
Jesus, Frau jutten—was a good one. As society became more complex, identity
became more of a predicament, and the drama explored it in more subtle and
intriguing ways.
'llie other interesting type of role playing found in Shakespeare and his
contemporaries is the converse of the “white devil” type; instead of hiding his
true identity, a character plays at l>eing himself. This is most striking in Richard
II, where Richard appears to be playing at being king, even though he actually is
one.
Yet looks he like a king. Behold, his eye.
As bright as is the eame’s, lightens forth
(^ontrmling majesty. Alack, alack, for woe,
. That anv harm should stain so fair a show!
(3.3.68-71)
But alack, alack, Richard’s kingship is all “show”; his actual rule is weak and
erratic. (Ironically, he only begins to seem like a real king when he is deposed.)
The same sense of playing a role in life, a false outward show even when it is
reasonable and proper behavior, occurs from time to time with many of Shake­
speare’s heroes, including Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Antony, and Richard’s
successor, Henry IV. This is Laing’s “elusion” again, in which a neurotic
individual, because of fundamental insecurities, feels that his self is a sham.
Hamlet expresses such feelings in the “O what a rogue and f>easant slave”
Role Playing within the Role 79
speech, contrasting the player who has just finished a tearful performance to his
own inept “performance” as a prince seeking rightful vengeance. Similarly, in
Twelfth Night, .Malvolio (a comic Hamlet in some ways) really is in love with
Olivia, but can express his love only through play-acting, first all alone in his
fantasies and then, after finding the forged letter, to Olivia, with his yellow
cross-garters and faked smile.
Elusion is perhaps most clearly seen in Shakespeare in the “seven ages of man”
speech of Jaques (another comic Hamlet) in As You Like It. Jaques seems always
to be performing, as his fellow banished lords often comment, describing his
“weeping and commenting / Upon the sobbing deer” and drawing “a thousand
similes” (2.1.66, 45), like an actor in a poetic drama. Now he sees all the world as
a stage, and all the men and women “merely” players, with life a meaningless
charade, a “strange eventful history” (2.7.139-66). Ihis alienation from life is
what Laing calls “ontological insecurity,” in which a person lacks “a centrally
firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity.”'** For Jaques, all
the world is a stage, and all identities, including his own, are bogus. All men
and women are “merely players,” role playing their own roles.
Because society has grown ever more complex since the Renaissance, identity
continues to fascinate us, and hence to provide a major subject for playwrights. 1
have already mentioned, in a previous chapter, that role playing within the role
is Moliere’s stock in trade. Every single Moli&re play contains role playing as a)
major element. He explores all types: 'lartuffe, for instance, is a strong examplej
of voluntary role playing; Sganarelle, in The Doctor in Spite of Himself an
example of involuntary role playing, externally caused; .Argan, Monsieur Jour-
dain, and the Precious Ladies examples of involuntary role playing, internally
caused.
Moli^re’s masterpiece. The Misanthrope, is the perfect counter-example, since
its hero, Alceste, is a character who despises role playing, and devotes himself to
attacking it. When asked how people should reasonably behave, he insists:
I’d have them be sincere, and never part
With any word that isn’t from the heart.
All the other characters in the play are elaborate role players, most of them
obsessively; even Alceste’s servant. Monsieur Dubois, when he arrives to bring a
message, comes in disguise—for no particular reason! But even Alceste himself
turns out not to be immune to role playing, as he takes masochistic delight in
taking on the identity of wronged innocent:
It may cost twenty thousand francs; but I
Shall pay their twenty thousand, and gain thereby
The right to storm and rage at human evil.
Since he would rather “storm and rage” at injustice than see it corrected, his role
of moralist has clearly overwhelmed its function. 'Fhe message of the play is that
 80 Varieties of the Metadramatic
role playing is not only a social necessity, it is a matter of inner compulsion, and
is thus inescapable.
This would seem to be similar in attitude to the cynicism expressed by
Shakespeare’s Jaques in the “seven ages of man” speech, but there is a crucial
difference.[TnTV1olidre’s plays, all the men and women are indeed players, acting
out roles by design, by coercion, or by impulse, but all the world is not a stage.
Some of his lesser characters seem to be actors all the time, like his pompous
doctors who talk medical mumbo-jumbo even among themselves, but Moliere’s
principal characters usually have real, “offstage” identities to show us.
Sganarelle is not always shown as a bogus doctor; the audience has seen that he is
a simple workman underneath. Tartuffe lets his mask fall in the scene in which
he pursues Elmire, and is further unmasked in the final scene, by an officer of
the king, as a long-time villain and con man. Moliere, an actor himself by
profession in addition to being a playwright, shows_rflle playing as ap inescapa-1
hie human need, but not an overwhelming one. The ideal is to be like Philinte,'
Alceste’s friend and raisonneur in The Misanthrope, who plays roles (infuriating
Alceste) out of a sense of propriety and common sense:
It’s often best to veil one’s true emotions.
Wouldn’t the social fabric come undone
If we were wholly frank with everyone?
In role playing, as with everything else in the neoclassical age, balance and
moderation were the ideals; to try to avoid it altogether was as foolish as to be
“on” all the time. Comedy of Manners, developed in this period, has ever since
stressed the importance of “proper” role playing, which amounts to presenting a
witty, elegant focade to the world. I his is to be done voluntarily, rather than
compulsively, while one’s true self remains aloof but solid, to be exposed at rare
genuine moments, as in declarations of true love.
By contrast, a good deal of modern drama has depicted principal characters
who role play incessantly, and who seem to have no true identities at all. Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt is the classic prototype. In the famous onion scene (5.5), Peer peels an
onion, attempting to find its kernel, relating the peels to the multitudinous roles
he has played in his own life. He mentions shipwrecked man, passenger,
prospector, fur trader, archaeologist, prophet, man of pleasure, slave trader,
which arc actually only a few of the many identities that he has had. “These
layers just go endlessly on!”"^ he remarks in frustration, finding that the onion
has nothing but layers, with no kernel at all. In relation to the Christian
tradition, which depicted man as having an immortal soul, this is a frightening
idea. Moliere’s characters may have been compulsive role players, but, as noted,
they also had true selves. At the end of Tartuffe, the officer maintains that
Tartuffe’s uncovering was inevitable:
We serve a Prince to whom all sham is hateful,
A Prince who sees into our inmost hearts,
Role Playing within the Role 81
And can’t be fooled by any tricker’s arts.
His royal soul, thougli generous and human.
Views all things with discernment and acumen.*^
In other words, the Prince (who does not appear) is just like God, who sees into
men’s true souls, no matter how deeply hidden. But Peer Gynt has no soul, no
“inmost heart,” only layers, like the onion. All the world is once again a stage.
Modern drama (and modern literature in general) is full of characters who are
like Peer Gynt, those identities are like the peels of an onion, covering no core.
Unlike Moliere’s characters. Peer and his successors are cither depicted as being
always “onstage,” or else their “backstage” personalities seem just as forced and
artificial as their onstage ones. In Strindberg’s Dream Play, already discussed in
chapter two, “the characters are split, double and multiply; they CN'aporate,
crystallise, scatter and converge.It is thus impossible to say which are their
true personalities, or, indeed, if they have any, since they may all be the
imaginings of an unseen dreamer. (In this play, even the scenery seems to play
roles, a cupboard becoming a stage door, a tree a hat stand and then a can­
delabra, an organ the walls of a grotto, etc.) Pirandello’s six characters, similarly,
may have no true selves, but may be only the chimeric creations of a playwright
who dropped them, half-created, without finishing their play.
'Rie same kind of cynicism about life in general that is found in modern
drama is also found about identity. In this regard, characters who exhibit elusion
and ontological insecurity occur in abundance. Shaw, who usually wrote in the
Comedy of Manners tradition, in which role playing is balanced and controlled,
also wrote Heartbreak House, in which aristocrats play at being aristocrats, a
burglar plays at being a burglar, an industrialist plays at being an industrialist
(imitating the big bosses he has seen in the movies, he is forced to admit), and a
hero. Hector Hushabye, plays at being a hero—even though he is really brave,
and has “a whole drawerful of Albert medals,”^* he makes up lies about things
he never did in adventures that never happened.
Bertolt Brecht, in The Good Person of Setzuan, created a woman, Shen Te, who
takes on the identity of a man, Shui Ta. Unlike Shakespeare’s heroines who do
the same, however, this split character seems to have no genuine identity; when
she becomes a man, her new persona completely overwhelms the old. Kind,
generous Shen Te becomes ruthless and brutal as Shui Ta, losing all traces of her
(his?) former self. This is not so much one identity covering another as two
identities covering nothing.
More traditional forms of role playing arc also widely found in modern
drama. The (Comedy of Manners tradition, carried on by playwrights like
Wilde, Shaw, and Coward, gives us plays in which role playing is voluntary,
positive, and balanced. In Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, it is important
to be named Ernest, but not be too earnest, to be somewhat aloof and light­
hearted about one’s identities. One must take one’s social role seriously but not
too much so. Shaw, in Misalliance, depicts this philosophy very clearly; the prim
82 Varieties of the Metadramatic
young man, Joey Percival, tells Hypatia, “I’m not prepared to cast off the social
bond. It’s like a corset: it’s a support to the figure even if it does squeeze and
deform it a bit.”^^ Hypatia, however, ends up chasing him through the woods,
finally convincing him that there are times when it is important to take off the
role of proper English gentleman, to let oneself go, to loosen the corset of
identity, and submit to one’s sexual instincts. Identity and sexual propriety,
which are always related in our unconscious minds, are depicted in the same
way in Comedy of Manners; both are necessary, but one must be able to cast
them aside.
Examples of involuntary role playing, externally caused, in modern drama
occur in Brecht’s A Man's a Man, whose hero, Galy Gay, is transformed by
soldiers from a simple porter into a “human fighting machine”; O’Neill’s Beyond
the Horizon, in which two brothers exchange roles, the good farmer going away
to sea while the dreamer stays home to farm;^^ Pinter’s The Birthday Party, in
which the hero is brainwashed into becoming an aphasic moron; Ionesco’s Jack;
or the Submission, in which rebellious Jack is made to conform, by being forced to
recite a ridiculous phrase; and Peter Handke’s Kaspar, in which unseen prompt­
ers drill the title character through language to become “normal” and sub­
missive. In examples written prior to World War II, the forces that coerce the
characters to become what they are not are usually obvious. Either “society” is at
fault, as in A Man's a Man, or else a simple human weakness like sexual
attraction. The totalitarian horrors of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, how­
ever, have led later playwrights to show characters manipulated by an unseen,
mysterious, powerful authority. 'Die literary influences here are Kafka and
Orwell; the real-life influences are Stalin, Hitler, and the ruthless authoritarian
systems they created, which are seen as continuing today in subtler forms.
Some examples of involuntary, compulsive role playing in modern drama
include Strindberg’s Miss Julie, in which the servant, Jean, feels compelled to act
like an aristocrat, while Miss Julie, his mistress and briefly his lover, feels
compelled to act like a servant; Shaw’s Heartbreak House, whose characters, as
already mentioned, compulsively play at being themselves; O’Neill’s A Touch of
the Poet, in which the Irish immigrant hero is obsessed with l>ehaving like an
English aristocrat and military hero; and Pinter’s The Lover, in which an ordinary
middle-class couple act out roles in an elaborate sexual fantasy. The plays of
Samuel Beckett provide any number of examples, perhaps the most interesting
of which is Hamm, the protagonist of Endgame, who is apparently carrying on a
running performance all during the play; his opening line is “Me—to play,” and
from time to time he comments on his own delivery, saying things like “Nicely
put, that,” or “I’m warming up for my last soliloquy.”^"*
As previously, interesting examples arise in the areas of voluntary and invol­
untary role playing when one form turns into the other. In Shaw’s Pygmalion,
Eliza’s role playing as a fine lady is at first voluntary (she is even ready to pay
Role Playing within the Role 83
Hi^ins to help her make the transformation); then coerced, as he turns her into
a ridiculous mechanical doll, aping the speech and outer qualities of a lady while
maintaining the attitudes of a street girl; and finally voluntary again, as she
becomes an integrated person, who throws off the lx)nds that Higgins created,
and takes control of the role that he had enabled her to play. Eliza reaches the
point where she has no “role” separate from her self; like Galy Gay, she is
tranformed, rather than merely having a new layer added to her personality, but
it is a transformation into a true person rather than into a soulless machine.
Pirandello also uses shifting types of role playing, in a characteristically
interesting manner. (Pirandello did not invent metadrama, but he did use it in
nontraditional ways.) Before, playwrights like Shakespeare depicted voluntary
role playing that became involuntary, as the character either got carried away by
his role, like lago, or revealed that he had always had a special affinity for it, like
Hamlet. Pirandello, in Henry IV, provides a character who goes the other way,
his involuntary role plaving becoming voluntary. An Italian nobleman, injured
in a fall from a horse during a masquerade, came to believe that he was the
historical German emperor Henry IV. After twelve years, he recovers his sanity,
but continues voluntarily to play the role because he finds the real world, in
which he has lost the woman he loved, to be a j>oor substitute for his imaginary
one. Finally, he murders the woman’s lover, which means that he must keep up
the pretense of insanity if he is to avoid prosecution. His n)le playing has
become involuntary again—though as a result of his own choice.
The shift from voluntary to involuntary role playing became a device ex­
ploited by the theatre of the absurd playwrights, most notably Jean Genet. The
brothel patrons in The Balcony and the maids in The Maids shift from compulsive
role playing to voluntary, while the oppressed Blacks in The Blacks shift from
coerced role playing to voluntary, as they delightedly carry out elaborate rituals
of nigritude.
Allegorical role playing occurs in modern drama, biblical allegory being a
popular sort, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that Christianity has
declined in our culture. In T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, the death of Celia is
described at the end as a crucifixion by plague-stricken cannibals in Africa, has a
rather too obvious Christian meaning. Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame at times
seems to be Hamlet (one meaning of his name), but at other times. Ham, the son
of Noah. In Synge’s Playboy of t^ Western World, there are multiple layers of role
playing. The hero, Christy, is a compulsive role player who passes himself off as
a parricide, but the character has resonances of mythical figures like Oedipus
(another father killer) and Christ—his name “Christy Mahon” implies that he is
both Christ and Man; he is also the son of Mahon; he undergoes a mock
crucifixion in the play’s final scene.
Finally, any number of modern playwrights, influenced by Sir James Frazer
and the Cambridge anthropologists, have used the hypothetical, prehistoric
84 Varieties of the Metadramatic
“Year King” ritual as an allegorical layer to their plays. Fxhoes of this ritual
occur in such unlikely places as Shaw’s Major Barbara, Pinter’s The Homecoming,
and Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, among many other examples. In the long run,
however, allegorical role playing is probably less important in modern drama
than it is in other literary forms, such as fiction (especially that of James Joyce)
and lyric poetry (especially that of T. S. Eliot).
V concerns of the individual. I his is not the individual in isolation, however, but
It is interesting to consider what has happened to the notion of role playing in
the practical theatre. As Jonas Barish has noted, the anti-theatrical prejudice has
carried over into the theatre itself in modern times. Theorists of acting have
moiftited campaigns against role playing; the Stanislavskian actor, notes Barish,
“undergoes an arduous discipline to learn how not to mimic. . . . Instead, he is
to copy the romantic poet. He is to look into the deep well of his own
consciousness.”25 Actually, this approach characterizes Stanislavski’s American
followers more than it does Stanislavski himself, who encouraged self-transfor­
mation (in Building a Character, a book not widely read in the United States), and
did not promote excessive introspection. It was the New York Actors’ Studio,
under its influential leader, Lee Strasberg, that created the non-acting actor.
Sirasberg’s advice to his student actors was “don’t act—be.”2*5
It is usual to contrast the Stanislavski-Strasberg type of actor with the type
promoted by Bertolt Brecht, who wanted an “alienated” or “estranged” style of
acting. The good Brechtian actor was supposed to separate himself entirely from
his role: “The coldness comes from the actor’s holding himself remote from the
character portrayed.” Thus if an actor were to play Richard III, Brecht main­
tained that he should say to himself, “I don’t want to feel myself to be Richard
III, but to glimpse this phenomenon in all its strangeness and incomprehen­
sibility. ”2^ This is certainly different from the Stanislavski-Strasberg approach
to acting, but there is an underlying similarity that has gone unnoticed. In both
cases, the actor’s ego boundary remains intact; one places the performance
entirely inside that lx)undary, the other, entirely outside, but the boundary (i.e.,
the actor’s sense of everyday self) does not change. If the Brechtian actor says, “I
am not Richard III; I remain myself, aloof and detached from him,” the actor
influenced by the Actors’ Studio says, in essence, “I am not Richard III either; I
too continue to be myself onstage, exploring my own identity rather than taking
on another one.” The former type of actor is like a voluntary role player in
Comedy of Manners, completely in control of his role, which he can take on or
remove at will; but since there is no unconscious component, no compulsion, in
his acting, it will have little cohesion of force. The latter type is like .Molicre’s
Alceste, trying desperately to avoid role playing entirely, even when the situa-
Role Playing within the Role 85
tion demands it. Both types of actor are under the influence of the antii-
theatrical prejudice; both aa* avoiding acting.
vi
In summation, where the play within the play was a device for exploring
existential concerns, and the ceremony within the play a device for exploring
social concerns, role playing within the role is a device for exploring the
in relation to his society. Human identity is a social phenomenon, which has to
be learned; the first stage of this learning occurs at our earliest social interac­
tion—with our mother’s breast. The infant is originally roleless, because he does
not distinguish self from other. In Freud’s theory, the infant learns this distinc­
tion at the breast, an “other” that is sometimes there and sometimes not,
sometimes providing pleasure and sometimes withholding it. The infant thus
develops a sense of a boundary between himself and the rest of the world. This
“ego boundary” is redefined at various stages of life. Theatre exists as a device to
enable us to redefine it, teaching us how to play roles and, equally important,
how and when to drop them.
Thus, role playing within the role, like the ceremony within the play, is a
widespread dramatic device. There has been a definite acceleration in its usage
since the Renaissance, however, because of the growing complexity of society,
which has made identity an ever more complex problem. There is a parallel
between the strongly dualistic characters found in the plays of Shakespeare or
Moliere, and the dualistic model of man posited around the same time by
Descartes. As with role playing within the role, Cartesian dualism was not new.
Bipolar oppositions such as soul and body, reason and emotion, or mind and
body had been acceptt'd since antiquity, and are even found in primitive so­
cieties. What was different was that Descartes exaggerated such dualities, by
proposing a self that was perpetually, inescapably hidden. Previous ideas of the
soul had seen it as a kind of blueprint, which could be seen stamped upon the
body; it was an immortal, ideal self, in the Platonic sense, that would outlast the
body, its imperfect reflection. It was thus not mutually exclusive from the body,
but was at least roughly congruent with it. For Descartes, however, the two were
forever apart. This implied that everybody was a role player in life, having a
double identity, the one visible, the other not.
This doublencss is found in the drama from the Renaissance forward, as role
playing within the role becomes more widespread, and more obsessive. Role
playing within the role becomes a norm rather than an aberration in modern
drama. Similarly, in the practical theatre, Cartesian dualism has come to domi-
( nate. Whether proponents of “Method” or of “Technique” acting, teachers
assume that a human being is made up of two polarized parts, an inside and an

86 Varieties of the Melodramatic
outside; they differ only as to which parts should be trained. Lately, theatre
schools have begun to train both parts, but still in a typically unintegrated
fashion: voice, speech, and movement are taught by one set of teachers, while
improvisation and scene work are taught by completely different teachers in
different classes.
The two polarized approaches to acting, under various names (Method vs.
Technique, internal vs. external, realism vs. style, etc.), have dominated Amer­
ican acting for many decades. The fact that they are polarized tends to limit
people’s thinking about them, since they seem to cover all possibilities. Yet
neither allows for character acting, which resembles involuntary, inwardly con­
trolled, compulsive role playing, as found in many plays. In character acting, the
actor’s ego boundary is temporarily let slip, as the actor, under the influence of
powerful unconscious forces, is transformed into another identity. He is not
detached from the character; nor does he remain himself, exploring his own
iderftity introspectively. Instead, he becomes a nev) self, is possessed and driven
by ir.
This kind of acting is neither taught nor much appreciated in the United
States, with the result that our acting so often seems so timid and narrow. At
recent auditions held by the University Resident Theatre Association (URTA),
which were used by most major theatre schools in the United States in selecting
students for admission, the instructions insisted that the auditionees pierform
only pieces that corresponded to their own age and type; they also solemnly
warned against using dialects. A brilliant character actor like Peter Sellers would
not only never have succeeded in our theatre, he would not even have been able
to receive training.
The situation in the Broadway theatre or in Hollywood is really no different.
'Hie commercial theatre shares with serious theatre a contempt for character
acting. The commercial actor is supposed to have a “personality,” a gaudy
identity created for him by agents and publicity people, which he must cling to
at all times, in films and plays as well as in real life, and which he never dares to
change.
Again, Stanislavski should not really be blamed for this; in fact, he rated
character acting highly, and was actually an outstanding character actor himself,
as photographs of him in his many, wide-ranging roles make vividly clear.
Instead, our restricted approach to acting is related to our fears about identity
generally. In a society where people’s roles seem so fluid and unpredictable, so
weak and undefined, we fear letting go of the feeble identities that we have. Not
only actors, but politicians and business leaders hire press agents to give them
identities. Our political stance as a nation is one of forever having to prove
ourself around the world, to stand up to real or imagined challenges by stri­
dently pressing our “Americanism,” as if we would lose this identity if we dared
to relax and be conciliatory. The weaknesses in American acting are a reflection
r
Role Playing within the Role 87
of our national “ontological insecurity,” the weak sense we have of who we are as
a people.
Notes
1. Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth, and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1V63X 237.
2. For a classic example, see the chapter on “The .\ctor” in Philip Weissman’s Creativity in the
Theater: A Psychoanalytic Study (New York: Basic Books, 1965). Weissman starts by saying that actors
are “individuals who have failed to develop a normal sense of identity and body image during the
early maturational phases of infancy” (p. IIX and he becomes increasingly negative.
3. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (I930X trans. Joan Riviere (Garden (jty, N.Y.:
Doubleday, n.d.), 4-5.
4. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd. eti. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).
5. Freud, 5.
6. Ibid., 6.
7. Ibid., 11.
8. R. D. Laing, The Self and Others (New York; Random I louse 1969), 30.
9. <yole, 7.
10. E. M. W. Tiliyard, The Elizabethan World Picture Oiev, York: N’intage, n.d.X 87-106.
11. Gassner, 142.
12. Ibid., 147.
13. This can be interpreted two ways, meaning either that divining a person’s inner character
from his face is easy, or that it is impossible. I think the context strongly supports the former
meaning, with the latter an ironic undercurrent, of which Duncan is completely unconscious. The
contradictory meaning is typical of the many antitheses in Macbeth.
14. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madnas (I larmondsworth:'
Penguin B<x)ks, 1965X 39.
15. Moli^re, The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, trans, Richard Wilbur (New York: Ilarcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1965), 17.
16. Ibid., 131-32.
17. Ibid., 19.
18. Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, trans. Rolf Fjelde (.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1980X 177.
19. Moli^re, 323.
20. Strindberg, 193.
21. Bernard Shaw, Complete Plays with l*rrfaces, 6 vols. (New York: Dtxld, .Mead, 1963X 1:511.
22. Ibid., 4:165.
23. In a sense, this is internally caused, by Robert’s love for Ruth, but this cause is external to the
role playing. The characters in Beyond the Horizon exhibit no inner compulsion to play roles.
24. Samuel Beckett, Endgame fStw York: Grove Press, 1958X 2, 51. 78.
25. Jonas Barish, The Antitbeatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of (California
Press, 1981), 344.
26. David Garfield, The Actors' Studio: A Player's Place (New York: .Macmillan, 1984X 285.
27. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. and ed. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964X
93. 27.

5 The opposite situation, when a reference is too well known, produces the same
Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play
1 “Borrow Cupid’s wings / And soar with them above a common bound” (1.4.17-
There are many ways in which a play can refer to other literature. In each case,
the degree of metadramatic estrangement generated is proportional to the degree
to which the audience recognizes the literary allusion as such.
When they do recognize it, the result is like an inset type of play within the
play in miniature; the imaginary world of the main play is disrupted by a
reminder of its relation, as a literary construct, to another literary work or
works. For example, in Strindberg’s The Father, during a discussion of women,
the Doctor remarks to the Captain, “When I heard that Mrs. Alving blackening
her late husband’s memory, I thought what a damned shame it was that the
fellow should be dead.”' This direct reference to Ibsen’s well-known play Ghosts
(only six years old when The Father was written, and very controversial) has the
effect of a Brechtian Verfremdmgsejfekt, breaking the dramatic illusion for a
didactic purpose, in this case to emphasize Strindberg’s anti-feminist message.
The play stops being a play for a moment, as the audience is reminded of Ibsen,
his feminism, and Strindberg’s notorious opposition to it. This in turn reminds
the audience that the play they have been watching is all Strindberg’s construct,
that it is a statement of a philosophical position as well as being an imaginary
world whose events they have been enjoying.
Most literary references within the play are not metadramatic, however. For
one thing, an allusion may be an obscure one. Romeo’s famous lines, “But soft!
What light through yonder window breaks? / It is the East, and Juliet is the
sun!” (2.2.2-3) are an adaptation of Marlowe’s “But stay! What star shines
yonder in the east? / The lodestar of my life, if Abigail” from The Jew of Malta
(2.1.41-42).^ The purpose of Shakespeare’s lines, however, is not to introduce an
element of disruption; quite the contrary. Shakespeare simply borrowed and
adapted a lovely sounding couplet because he needed one at this point in Romeo
andJuliet, which was the sort of borrowing and adapting that he did constantly.
Even if the lines were supposed to be metadramatic, however, it is doubtful that
anyone in the original audience but a theatre zealot would have noted the
allusion. Subsequent audience members would not be aware of the reference at
88
Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play 89
all, unless they happened to be scholars of Marlowe, since The Jew of Malta is
rarely performed. Literary borrowings of this sort, although more common than
is popularly realized, and providing great fun for scholarly sleuths, are too
hidden and personal to have any metadramatic impact.
result. Stock phrases like “all that glisters is hot gold” are certainly recognizable
as such, but they do no damage to the fabric of the play. Similarly, the references
to well-known Bible stories and characters, standard mythology, and popular
folk tales that abound in our literature are no more disruptive than a description
of a tree or a rock. Fhey are so much a part of the literary landscape that
references to them are simply taken for granted. When Mercutio tells Romeo,
18), only a very naive audience member (the counterpart to the devotee who
recognizes the Marlowe allusion) would take it metadramatically. One can
imagine a child saying to his mother something like, “Cupid? Why, we read
about him in school just the other day!” For our hypothetical child, the allusion
jolts him back from the world of the play to everyday reality, but for most of the
audience, in Shakespeare’s day and in ours, Cupid is so well-known and widely
used that a reference to him would cause no estrangement. Instead of intruding
on the play, such references are swallowed up by it.
A related issue is whether or not the reference is to a particular work, or to
many works. Figures like Cupid or Christ or Robin Hood appear in so many
literary works that a reference to one of them is generalized and unfocused; it
could not zero in on a particular work in the way that the reference to Ibsen’s
Ghosts does in Stindberg’s The Father. In the first chapter, I argued that plays are
constantly reflecting other drama (and beyond that, the drama/culture complex),
employing standard plots, situations, characters, ideas, phrasings, etc. But such
references are unconscious; the audience is no more aware of them than it is of
English grammar when it hears someone speak. Again, one can imagine a
hypothetical audience member who, like Monsieur Jourdain recognizing that he
is speaking prose, takes some standard device in a conscious way; perhaps a
student of English literature would suddenly notice that lago is at times an
example of an eiron, or self-deprecator. This, however, is again an individualized
reaction; the bulk of the audience would simply incorporate this recognition
unconsciously and automatically into their overall understanding of the play.
An exception occurs when a generalized reference is treated in parody. When
the Mounted Messenger arrives at the end of Bertolt Brecht’s 'Threepenny Opera,
and announces that Macheath, who was about to be hanged, will not only be
released but raised to the nobility, with a castle and a pension of ten thousand
pounds a year, the play is employing the stock literary device of deus ex
machina, but in such a ludicrously exaggerated and improbable fashion as to call
attention to the device per se. Instead of being swallowed up by the action of the
play, as would happen in a straightforward use of the deus ex machina, the
90 Varieties of the Metadramatk
device is made intrusive and disruptive. It destroys the audience’s involvement in
Macheath’s plight, and instead makes them contemplate the absurd nature of the
drama they have seen in the past that used such awkward and sentimental
endings. But parody is the exception that proves the rule, which is that or­
dinarily we do not consciously notice standard elements and techniques drawn
from the drama/culture complex, despite their omnipresence.
Other factors that affect the metadramatic impact of a literary reference
include the degree of emphasis given to it by the playwright, and how recent and
controversial the literary work referred to is. The Mounted Messenger incident
in Threepenny Opera is extremely prominent, bringing the play jarringly to a
close, but the reference to Ibsen’s Ghosts in Strindberg’s The Father is far from
major; it is tossed off very quickly, with nothing further made of it. The
audience’s involvement detours only briefly, and then quickly returns to the
play’s main action. There would have been even less metadramatic disruption if
Ibsen’s play were an obscure one, or conversely, if it were a standard work to
which references were common. Some literary works, like standard characters
or folk tales, become “mythologized”; a play like Hamlet does not recur in
numerous variants the way, say, the character of Hercules has (though some
would argue that the many differing performances of the play amount fo much
the same thing), but nonetheless it is so well-known, so standard, that references
to it cause no disruption. Even people who have never read or seen Hamlet have a
good idea what the play is about; it is embedded, as a whole, in the drama/
culture complex. '—
11
In sum, metadramatic literary references are direct, conscous allusions to
specific works (except for parody, which may be more general) that are recent
and popular. The work or works referred to must not yet be part of the drama/
culture complex, but should preferably be avant-garde, or at least somewhat
controversial.
I shall consider four types of direct, conscious literary references that are
metadramatic: citation, allegory, parody, and adaptation. These types sometimes
overlap with one another, or with other forms of metadrama, but they are
nonetheless clearly distinguishable whenever they appear.
By citation, I mean a quotation or other direct reference to another literary
work. In the example given previously from Strindberg’s The Father, the Captain
does not quote Ibsen’s Ghosts direetly, but he does refer very specifically to events
and dialogue within it. In Chekhov’s plays, characters constantly cite literary
works, ineluding many direct quotations, as when Serebryakov jokingly an­
nounces, in Uncle Vanya, that “the Inspector General is coming,” quoting the
opening lines of Gogol’s well-known play. More metadramatic, because more
Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play 91
reeent and more stressed, is Chebutykin’s repeated singing of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-
de-ay” through the last act of 'Three ^wrert.This song is so inappropriate in its
frivolity and nonsensicality to the sad themes of the end of 'Three Sisters that its
use would be jarring enough even if Chekhov had invented it, but in fact it was
well-known. Originally an English-language street song, it had become popular
throughout the world in the 1890s, just before the play was written, which
added to the song’s disruptive effeet on the original audience.
A similar citation occurs in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, when, in the third act,
the stationmaster reeites a few lines from a poem. The Sinning Woman, by the
late-romantic poet A. K. Tolstoy. As Donald Rayfield has pointed out:
It does not matter that the stationmaster reeites only the first few lines: in
Chekhov’s day the poem was notorious. It is a long poem about a courtesan
who boasts she can seduce anyone, even Christ: John the Baptist enters; she
mistakes him for Christ and starts charming him; then the real Christ appears
and the sinning woman is overcome with repentance. This is a poem that
Chekhov refers to on several oceasions in his work of the early 1880s; here it is
a sign not only of provincial taste, but also of a guest’s tactlessness toward his
hostess. Most important, it is a warning of the intrusion of Lopakhin into
Ranevskaya’s world and of the catastrophe to come that will silence her gaiety
for all time. ^
But there is also the additional element in that Chekhov did not invent a poem
for the oecasion, as he might easily have done, nor borrow one that was obscure,
but instead used a poem that was, as Rayfield says, “notorious” for the audience.
This added to its shock value, distancing the dramatic action for them.
But, as Rayfield also points out, this citation is “the most ephemeral of
Chekhov’s literary allusions.”'* The poem is no longer important in Russia, and
never became known outside it. Here is a significant problem with literary and
real-life references generally. Even when their use is strikingly metadramatic for
the original audience, this effeet dies away with the passing years. Since the
greatest metadramatic impact occurs when references are to recent and contro­
versial works (or, as we shall see, to recent and controversial people), with the
passage of time, the works either beeome too obscure, or, conversely, too well
known, passing into the eommon coin of the drama/culture complex, to have
their original disruptive power any longer.
Oceasionally there have been plays in which citation is used as a form of
literary critieism. Aristophanes’ The Frogs is the earliest extant example of this.
Here the citations are in the form of direet quotations from plays of Sophocles
and Euripides, in a ludicrous contest to see who is the better playwright. The
play also provides an example of real-life as well as literary reference, since
Sophoeles and Euripides, along with Aesehylus, actually appear. (By “real-life”
reference, I of eourse do not mean necessarily alive, but drawn only from
aetuality.) The mock contest shows how the Greeks tended, before Aristotle, to
think of playwrights primarily as versifiers, since it is in terms of the philosophi-
92 Varieties of the Metadramatic
cal and metrical qualities of individual lines, rather than in terms of plot or
character. At the same time, the eontest is a type of ceremony within the play,
which was a reminder to the audience that what they were watching was also
part of the larger ceremony of the comie festival—which was also a contest
among contending plays.
Thus, when literary eitation within the play moves toward literary criticism,
it also moves toward the play as self-referenee. The audience cannot help but
apply the same standards that are being propounded against the play itself. Ben
Jonson often put his literary theories directly into his plays, either as part of
prologues or even the main body of the play, most notably in Poetaster and Every
Man Out of His Humour. He was thus boldly offering his own work for judgment
at the same time that his eharacters were ostensibly judging the works of others.
In Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, Freplev has a soliloquy in which he compares his own
writing with that of Trigorin, the older writer in the play:
Trigorin has worked out a method, it’s easy for him. . . . With him a broken
bottleneck glitters on the dam and the mill wheel casts a black shadow—and
there you have a moonlight night; but with me there’s the shimmering light,
the silent twinkling of the stars, the distant sounds of a piano dying away on
the still, fragrant air. . . . It’s agonizing. (A pause) Yes, I’m becoming more
and more convineed that it’s not a question of old and new forms, but that one
writes, without even thinking about forms, writes because it pours freely
from the soul.^
But this speeeh not only turns the audience’s attention to the writing of the
characters Trigorin and Treplev, it also turns their attention to the play they have
been watching, which follows the “Trigorin” style—except for the symbolist
play within the play, by Freplev. Fhe metadramatic effect is enhanced by the
fact that this Trigorin bears strong resemblanees to Chekhov himself. The effect
is rather like the double mirrors on opposite walls of a barber shop, ereating
multiple reflections of both an outer and inner world, without limit.
As with literary criticism, theatrical criticism within the play also has the
effect of turning into self-reference. Hamlet’s advice to the players, “Do not saw
the air too much with your hands,” etc. (3.2.4ff), was in part an attack on the
grandiose acting style of Edward Alleyn, the leading actor of the Lord Admiral’s
Men, the prineipal rivals of Shakespeare’s company. But at the same time it was a
positive commentary on the more restrained aeting of Richard Burbage, who
played the part of Hamlet and thus spoke these very words. Again there are
multiple reflections, inward and outward, to Alleyn, to Burbage, to Hamlet, to
the players within the play, to the players of the play.
Allegory, in terms of role playing, has already been dealt with in the previous
chapter. I have little to add here, except to point out that sometimes the allegory
is not of a general nature, relating to some stoek figure like Christ, but to a
specific, recent, and controversial play. Critics have eompared Shaw’s Pygmalion
Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play 93
to the stories of Cinderella and the Ugly Duckling; this is generalized allegory,
since these are stock figures that can, in turn, be related to the fairy tale
archetype of the maturing adolescent. There are in fact a multitude of tales, in
many different cultures, that Eliza’s situation in Pygmalion can be related to
(including, of course, the myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with
his statue). But the play contains a direct, modern allegory as well: its heroine is
treated as an object by men, and ultimately breaks free of male control, walking
out of the house. As Bernard Dukore has pointed out,*^ this is a referenee to
Ibsen’s A Doll House; Eliza is even referred to as a “doll.”^ Pygmalion is loaded
with metadramatic devices; it begins with characters standing in front of a
church attended by theatre people, in the theatre district, whose arehitect was a
theatre designer (Inigo Jones). The characters themselves have just come from
the theatre.® Role playing is the play’s main theme. The reference to A Doll House
here underlines the theatrical nature of Shaw’s social vision: theatre has impact
on society, it is important because life reflects it. “Life imitates art,” as Shaw’s
friend Oscar Wilde put it.
As with allegory, I have already dealt with generalized parody, where an
archetypal character, situation, speech, or action is held up to ridicule. Again,
such parody can be more specific, relating to recent works that are very much in
the audience’s consciousness. Aristophanes’ the Frogs, as noted, parodies Eu­
ripides’ poetic style; every time Euripides recites lines from one of his plays,
Aeschylus completes them with a silly phrase, “Lost his bottle of oil,” which, in
the original Greek, fits perfectly in meter and grammar with the established
Euripidean pattern. Since Euripides was a controversial figure, recently dead
(the premise for The Frogs, which takes place in Hades, where he has just
arrived), whose plays were very popular, this kind of parodying was immediate
and potent for its original audience.
Similarly, an overall style can be held up to ridieule, as in the neoclassical
parodies The Rehearsal, The Critic, or Tom Thumb, where the popular heroic
tragedy of the day was deftly imitated and mocked. Specific characters may be
parodied, as in Barrie’s the Admirable Crichton, in which a character named
“Ernest” obsessively invents a series of inept epigrams, parodying the two
leading male roles in Oscar Wilde’s enormously suceessful The Importance ofBeing
Earnest, written only seven years earlier. Finally, specific plot devices may be
spoofed; the door slam at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll House, or the sudden attaek of
insanity at the end of his Ghosts, were parodied endlessly by late Victorian
playwrights. By and large, however, such specific parody is not very meta­
dramatic, when placed within a play that is entirely a burlesque; in such cases,
the parody is not intruding on the main action, but is merely part of the
generalized ridieule and merriment.
Adaptation has already been diseussed to some extent in chapter two. As
usual, adaptations of other plays are not metadramatie for the audience unless
they are to some extent “seeing double”; they must perceive the current play and
94 Varieties of the Metadramatic
the parodied play as separate entities rather than as blending into a single
experience. (Otherwise, since most plays written throughout the ages have been
adaptations of other literary works, we would again have to consider practically
every one to be metadramatic.) Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an adaptation of an
'"ur-Hamletf probably written by Thomas Kyd, but, even for its original
audience, Shakespeare’s version would have seemed self-contained; Tom Stop­
pard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an adaptation of Hamlet, although it
makes perfectly good sense on its own, depends for much of its effect on the
audience’s awareness of Shakespeare’s play. The queer feeling it engenders, as we
repeatedly recognize familiar scenes, now being played mostly off stage, is
distinctly metadramatic. A more extreme case of adaptation is in the Hamlet of
Charles Marowitz, who has also adapted many other classical plays. Marowitz’s
“spiced up version,” to use his own phrase,^ employs extensive cutting, rear­
ranging, repeating, and exaggerating. (He is particularly fond of the bawdy
puns.) This, however, is something more like the nineteenth-century burlesques
of Shakespeare’s tragedies (only not funny) than it is like Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead, because Marowitz’s version has no independent existence
at all. Stoppard’s play is metadramatic because he repeatedly shifts us from one
framework to the other, but Marowitz’s play is entirely parasitic; it not only
would fail to entertain someone who did not know Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it
would make no sense.
In the past few decades, there have been many adaptations of classic plays,
more often by directors than by playwrights. In fact, upbeat, updated, adapted
productions were more common than straightforward ones for a number of
years, although lately they seem to be dying out. Such productions were often
inadvertently metadramatic. The avowed purpose of the directors was to make
the classics “relevant for today” (although, by definition, a classic is supposed to
be something that does not need such updating), but instead, they often pro­
duced a strange doubleness. There was a surrounding performance, often very
powerful with the use of striking visual effects, and a playtext that interfered
with it. To see a production of, say. King Lear set in Nazi Germany, with
Gestapo men speaking blank verse expressing a Renaissance world view, and
storm troopers fighting with swords, was an odd experience to say the least. The
performance became a framing play, into which the traditional play made
bizarre intrusions. Such productions certainly did not make the plays philo­
sophically or socially relevant to a modern audience, but they could sometimes
produce an “estranged” view of the play itself Such estrangement, as always
with literary reference, was proportional to how well the audience members
already knew the play, which meant that the productions could only interest
intellectuals. Far from being an egalitarian, democratic approach to play produc­
tion, the updating kind of adaptation turned into a distinctly elite form of
theatre.
Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play 95
iii
Real-life reference is in many ways congruent to literary reference. Real-life
reference includes allusions to real persons, living or dead; real places; real
objects; real events. As with literary references, the metadramatic effect is
proportional to the degree to which the audience recognizes what is being
referred to, and whether it is recent, controversial, and unique.
Again, much real-life referenee is thus not metadramatic. A playwright may
model a character on a person he has known, but whom the audience does not,
or, conversely, on a person who is so well-known and frequently depicted that
referring to him produces no disruption. The character of Willy Loman in
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, for example, is based on Miller’s father, but
since all but a few of the audience neither knew nor had ever heard of him, the
result was hardly metadramatic. A reference to Julius Caesar or George Wash­
ington would also produce no metadramatic estrangement to a modern Amer­
ican audience, but a reference to Jerry Falwell or Ronald Reagan might.
Furthermore, as with literary reference, a reference to a particular person, place,
or thing is much more likely to be metadramatic than a generalized one.
Mentioning Jerry Falwell would be more intrusive on a play than mentioning
Southern Baptists generally; a reference to the American invasion of Granada,
soon after the event, would be more intrusive than merely referring to American
imperialism generally. Finally, the metadramatic effect of real-life reference, like
literary reference, tends to pass with time. A reference to the Reverend Falwell
will obviously have no special impact after most people have forgotten who he
was. When Andre Antoine put real carcasses of beef into the setting for a play
called The Butchers in 1888, the effect was shocking, because the audience was not
used to seeing such large, tangible, disagreeable objects on stage. (Had they
been painted on the scenery, no one would have been surprised.) Nowadays,
using such real objects on stage has become standard; they no longer seem an
intrusion from outside life, but are instead accepted as part of the fictive world of
the play.
Citation, allegory, parody, and adaptation all have their equivalents with real-
life reference. By citation, I mean here the direct quotation of a real-life person’s
words, or the depiction of such a person as himself, or the depiction of real-life
objects, places, or things as themselves. Aristophanes, in addition to having
used literary citation, is famous for having used real-life citation, which indeed
must have had a disruptive effect. On the one hand, his plays were (and are)
more than mere burlesques or satirical reviews; they create a complete sense of
dramatic illusion, through the use of plot, characterization, poetry, music,
dance, and spectacle. Thus, even though his plays are obscure in style for us
today, many of them still hold an audience. On the other hand, the real-life
persons in them are depicted as their real selves, with their real names. When
96 Varieties of the Metadramatic
Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play 97
such well-known, controversial individuals appeared in the midst of full scale
“real” and what is “unreal” in this sense has little significance in terms of the
plays, the effect must have been quite striking on the original audience. (Again,
experience of a play, however. In responding to the self-contained, fictive world of
of course, this effect has worn off, for all but scholars of Greek society.) In
the play, the audience does not distinguish between elements adapted from real
satirical reviews common to all periods, such as the one given each year by the
life and those that are not; the witches in Macbeth, based on folklore, seem just as
Washington Press Club, ridiculing major political figures, there is very little
tangible and vivid as Macbeth himself, based on a real Scottish king. As I have
dramatic illusion; the audience is constantly thinking of the real-life persons or
stressed, the mimetic approach looks at the problem of real life adaptation
events referred to. There is no disruption, because there is nothing to disrupt.
backward, examining the real-life elements per se in a play, rather than consider­
Aristophanes, however, created a fictive comic world rather than just a series of
ing what has been done to them, for if “reality” were truly the essential thing
jokes and jibes, making the real-life figures an odd intrusion, breaking a dra­
about a play, the “real” elements would be a distraction from rather than an
matic illusion that he had carefully established.
enhancement of what takes place on stage. Experiencing Antoine’s beef carcasses
In Aristophanes’ case, the real-life characters appear as themselves, with their
as real destroys the dramatic illusion rather than heightens it; they are meta­
own names. More common over the ages is the allegorical reference to real life,
dramatic elements rather than dramatic ones. They only become dramatic when
where a person is well-known and controversial, but, to avoid prosecution or
they no longer seem real, but fictitious.
simply to make the real life figure less shocking, the playwright alters him
Some of the most interesting examples of metadramatic real-life reference
somewhat, including changing his name. The piece a clef is probably no less
occur in contemporary theatrical practice. Avant-garde stage directors, follow­
common than the roman a clef. J. Pierpont Morgan becomes “Pierpont Mauler,”
ing the tradition of Antoine, often delight in introducing “real” elements into the
John Wanamaker and John D. Rockefeller are telescoped into “Ezra D. Wan-
otherwise fictive world they have created. The very nature of theatrical perform­
nafeller,” Lyndon B. Johnson becomes “Macbird.” The Earl of Essex, sup­
ance makes such toying with the dramatic illusion all the more fascinating. It is
posedly, becomes “Hamlet.” Such allegorical real-life reference is inherently less
possible to introduce reality into any literary or artistic work; Braque and
metadramatic than direct citation—indeed, as mentioned, avoiding too strong a
Picasso, for example, would paste bits of real objects, such as a matchbook cover,
metadramatic disruption may be the very reason the playwright chooses to
a rag, a piece of newspaper, or a torn playing card, into the midst of their cubist
disguise his real-life allusion to some extent.
paintings. Two modes of reality, a two-dimensional, virtual one, and a three-
The real-life referential equivalent to literary referential parody is satire.
dimensional, real-life one, intersect in the same work of art, both complement­
Satire, indeed, is the purpose of most real-life reference on stage, including the
ing and interfering with one another. The technique need not even be limited to
citations and allegorical references just discussed. Satire differs from literary
artistic works; I can state, truthfully, that this paragraph is being written at 9:15
parody, however, in that generalized satire is never metadramatic. To parody a
A.M. on the morning of 3 Eebruary 1984, and that there is an ant climbing up the
well-established literary convention, as Brecht does at the end of Threepenny
wall beside my elbow. Here, the timeless world of reasoned discourse that you
Opera, may well have the metadramatic effect of destroying the dramatic illusion,
and I have created inside your head is shattered by the intrusion of a reality that
but to satirize generalized real life types—say, politicians in general, or certain
reorganizes your relationship to what you have been reading. For a moment, at
nationalities or professions—does not. The only exception is when such gener­
least, you are estranged from the words on the page, still reading them but
alized satire has itself become a literary convention, which can then be parodied.
responding to them from a very different angle.
A play in which a farmer swindles a visitor from the city by selling him a phony
There is a significant difference, however, when this kind of thing is done in
deed to a rural bridge might be metadramatic, because it would reverse the
the theatre. In the last paragraph, I, as author, had to insert this other mode of
standard stories mocking the gullibility of country folk in the big city. The
reality into my writing, as Braque and Picasso had into their paintings. Such
audience’s attention would thus be diverted from the plot line of the play to an
real-life insertion is also possible in the theatre, as with Antoine’s beef carcasses.
expose of the hackneyed nature of such traditional stories, which no longer are
A more technological and p>olitical insertion occurred when Erwin Piscator,
suitable to modern America. But the traditional story itself, if presented di­
inventor of the epic style of theatre later associated with Bertolt Brecht, would
rectly, would not have any diversionary effect, no matter how satirically it
insert slides and films of current political figures into traditional plays to point
depicted its country bumpkins and city slickers.
up the contemporary parallels between drama and life. In the theatre, however,
Similarly, real life adaptation, unlike literary adaptation, is never meta­
there is always readily available a special type of real-life reference that does not
dramatic. Playwrights frequently adapt real-life persons, events, and experi­
require any insertion at all. On stage, real life itself is omnipresent, as the
ences for their plays; indeed, the mimetic approach to dramatic theory stresses
ordinary “backstage” reality of the actors, their costumes, properties, etc. In
this adaptation as fundamental to all drama. The distinction between what is
painting, paint on the canvas is transformed into images, while in writing.
98 Varieties of the Metadramatic
words are transformed into concepts, but in the theatre, people are “trans­
formed” into people ah(f things into things. The process of aesthetic transmuta­
tion,called “semiosis” (“symbolic transformation,” in Susanne Langer’s
terminology; “semiotization,” in Keir Elam’s) thus does not necessarily imply
that the elements being transformed change their looks, as with painting. As
Keir Elam puts it, “A table employed in dramatic representation will not usually
differ in any material or structural fashion from the item of furniture that the
members of the audience eat at, and yet it is in some sense transformed: it
acquires, as it were, a set of quotation marks.”'*’ Similarly, a star actor may not
change his voice or appearance in any way in taking on a role. Nevertheless,
there is a change in our relationship to the table or to the actor on stage that
corresponds exactly to the change of paint into images or words into concepts;
their ordinary reality is swallowed up into the dramatic world, taking on a
different significance for us then they would in real life. On the other hand,
since the ordinary, real life selves of the table and the actor are still there,
unchanged in essence, the potential for easily shifting back to the real-life mode
is always there as well. It is not necessary to insert real life, as Braque or Picasso
did with their painted objects, but only to drop the pretense of performance. In
Richard Schechner’s famous avant-garde performance piece, Dionysus in '69,
based on Euripides’ The Bacchae, when the actor playing Pentheus said the line “I
am Pentheus, the son of Echion and Agave,”" the actor playing Dionysus
replied, “No, you’re not, you’re Bill Shephard,” which was that actor’s real
name. Eor a moment, the entire imaginary framework of role and play were
stripped away. This is not real-life insertion, but real life acknowledgment.
Such stripping away or suspension of the dramatic world had not been
unknown in the past. Eor example, the practice of applauding a star actor on his
first entrance was a real-life acknowledgment, referring to his star personality,
which had nothing to do with the action of the play itself More often, the
suspension of illusion occurred in weak productions, whenever something went
wrong, or when the performances were so inept that illusion could not be
sustained. We can all recall moments in the theatre when something happened
that made us wonder whether or not it was supposed to be part of the perform­
ance. The technique of avant-garde directors like Schechner was to exploit this
uneasy feeling, to make things intentionally “go wrong.”
Eor this technique to work well in a metadramatic sense, however, it is
important that both the modes of reality, that of the dramatic illusion and that of
everyday life, be vividly expressed. Only if the audience is strongly caught up in
the dramatic illusion does breaking it have much significance. If a performance
already contains weak acting, loose control of detail, or meaningless pauses, then
having an actor suddenly identify his partner as “Bill Shephard” will merely
verify what has been painfully apparent all along.
Suddenly stripping away the fiction of performance, dropping the mask,
draws up>on the very essence of live theatre, which is why avant-garde directors
Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play 99
are so drawn to it. Many critics have discussed this essence as “live presence,”
stressing the actuality of the living, breathing, sweating actors in contrast to the
cold, dead actuality of the printed page. In fact, the essential thing about live
performance is not so much a presence, as an absence. The special, magical
feeling that we experience in the theatre is the result of our awareness that there
is so much that can go wrong, that a performance always teeters on the brink of
disaster, yet at the same time seems so solid, so tangible, so all in all. Printed
literature has been rewritten, edited, proofread, and film has been edited, but
live theatre allows no revisions or retakes. It has, of course, been rehearsed, but
still, if something goes wrong at a particular performance, it cannot be erased.
The live nature of theatre is not a foreground element but a background one; it |
is, in structuralist terms, not parole, the specific utterance, but part of langue, the i
understood framework in which parole takes place. The framework of real life I
gives meaning and significance to the particular utterance, just as the framework j
of English grammar, syntax, and semantics gives meaning to these sentences you
are reading. Live theatre is not more “present” than any other art form; that is, it
is no naore inherently vKIcT or exciting. Unlike other forms, theatre is of course
literally present, but if literal presence were inherently stimulating, then a
Rotary Club speaker would automatically be more engaging than the finest novel
or film. What gives theatre its special excitement is that its live aspect is not
present but absent from our direct perception; living reality surrounds and
shapes our response to what we see rather than stimulating our response
directly.
In other words, we experience real life in theatrical performance as a poten­
tial; not as what is, but as what might be. It is this “might be” that creates the air
oEspecial intensity and magic surrounding living performance that is missing in
filrii and' television (although it was there in the days of live TV), even when a
live performance is filmed or taped and then shown unedited. There is no longer
any danger in the background when we see a performance via the medium of
film or taped television. Eurthermore, in the theatre, the better the production,
the closer it moves to the edge of chaos, to the anarchy that threatens all live
performance. This closeness to chaos is what is meant by “freshness” and
“spontaneity” in performance; if a performance is too smooth and under control,
it seems tame and “mechanical”—that is, resembling those media, like film or
television, that operate by machine, flawlessly. Good theatrical productions are
fresh, spontaneous, seemingly accidental, yet remain paradoxically controlled
and focused.
When an avant-garde performance like Dionysus in '69 toys with reality, it is
toying with this background of danger that is always existent in live theatrical
production, intentionally moving across the boundary that the good, traditional
production approaches but never quite touches. It is not that showing ordinary i
reality per se creates any special estrangement; we would feel nothing strange if
an actor merely came up to us on the street and said, “Hello. My name is Bill
 100 Varieties of the Metadramatic
1 Shephard.” Those who enthuse about the “realness” of avant-garde performance
1 are naive. What is odd and estranging about the intentional dropping of role in
avant-garde performance is that background and foreground suddenly are re-
/ versed. Langue turns into jOaro/c, and vice versa. It is like those optical illusions
where, upon being turned upside down or seen in another, different way, the
picture becomes the background and the background becomes a new picture.
What had looked like a pair of faces now looks like a vase; it is then interesting to
see the picture as a pair of faces again, and then try to go back and forth between
the two alternatives. We become concerned not so much with either aspect of the
picture, as with the relationship between the picture’s two aspects. Similarly, in
avant-garde theatre performances that toy with reality, it is the relationship
between theatre and reality that is explored, rather than either theatre or reality
by itself.
iv
Literary and real-life reference seem less important as a type of metadrama
than the other types. Such usages are rarely metadramatic, and even when they
are, the metadramatic impact varies with time, and even from audience member
to audience member.
I Nevertheless, the significance of literary and real-life reference should not be
] overlooked. Such reference is probably most important not so much in the
\ literary playtext, but in performance. In fact, if we consider performance as an
: art form in its own right, rather than just as a means of putting across a text,
! then literTfy feTetenCe an' even more important, real-life reference, have often
\ been major dramatic elements. There is a story that Socrates, sitting in the
audience and seeing himself lapooned in Aristophanes’ The Clouds, stood up so
that the audience could compare his real self with the actor playing him on stage,
either to rebut Aristophanes’ ludicrous depiction as slander, or, as I prefer to
think, in a good-natured spirit of fun. The whole story may be apocryphal, since
another story has it that Socrates never went to the theatre except when the
plays of Euripides were being shown. Nevertheless, if the event really hap­
pened, it must have been a moment of special intensity, both hilarious and
poignant, as the world of the stage and the world outside it suddenly collided.
For an instant, foreground and background became one. In this example of real-
life reference (and literary reference as well, since the play was not just attacking
Socrates’ personality, but also his philosophy), we see the importance of meta­
drama generally; it produces a special, heightened, acute perception. Taken out
of ourselves, we see our world, our culture, for a moment as whole. The fact that
the incident occurred only once (if at all) made it no less significant in the lives of
those who experienced it.
Literary and real-life references are signs of a healthy theatre. Where there is
Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play 101
poor acting, weak playwriting, or flabby direction, the references do not work at
all well; there must be a solid dramatic illusion to break. Furthermore, with
literary reference, tha audience must have a fair degree of literary and theatrical
sophistication; it is impressive, for example, that Aristophanes could count on
his audience of thousands of Athenians to be familiar with the ideas that
Socrates and the sophists had been propounding in the marketplace.
Similarly, with real-life reference, the playwright or director must have con­
fidence that the audience will be strongly engaged with the dramatic illusion
before he can start toying with it. The real-life insertions and acknowledgments
of avant-garde American theatre practitioners have rarely worked well outside
New York, our theatre center. As professional actors know very well. New York
audiences, because of their long tradition of theatregoing, are more alert and
responsive than most regional audiences. Watching a theatrical performance is i A
not a naive experience but one requiring skill, based on having seen many
performances in the past, and having thought, discussed, and read about them. ^
One has to learn how to experience the dramatic illusion with full intensity.
Toying with the dramatic illusion can work with New Yorkers because they are
more likely to have learned to give themselves up to the dramatic illusion, to
commit themselves totally to what is happening on stage. When such experi­
ments are tried in regional theatres, or, more frequently, in university theatres,
the audience is more likely to be merely bewildered than to experience a special
insight. They do not know the theatre well enough to comprehend an attack on
it. --------------- ------ ------
T'hus, while avant-garde directors usually think of themselves as assaulting
theatrical tradition, they are also simultaneously acknowledging the vitality of
both its plays and its audiences. In Mukarovsky’s model of the moving norm, the
artist is always attacking yet being absorbed by the standards and traditions of
his art form, in a dialectical synthesis. In America, however, our theatrical
traditions are often too weak, too limited, to enable this dialectical process to
proceed with vigor. Even in New York, there is much less mass-audience theatre
today than there used to be, much less than in European capitals. As a result,
our avant-garde theatre seems to remain avant-garde forever, neither becoming
absorbed into the theatrical norm nor really destroying it—because there is so
little to destroy. The problem is that avant-garde practitioners in America
assume a much more solid, established theatre than actually exists; in a strange
way, they are as stagestruck as the most naive young actor, assuming that there is
a wonderful, powerful theatre establishment against which to test themselves. In
fact, American commercial theatre has become a loose, disorganized collection
of individuals, nervously concerned for their careers no matter how well estab­
lished they may seem, and having very little confidence in what they produce
even when it is a smash hit. Most audiences outside New York have little
experience with live theatre, and no solidly established way of responding to it;
in New York, declining numbers of productions and absurdly high ticket prices
102 Varieties of the Metadramatic

are destroying theatregoing as a practice and a skill. Against this “tradition,” our
avant-garde is like an athlete who plays only weak opponents, and thus never
develops his real potential.

Notes 6
1. Strindberg, 36. Self-Reference
2. (.hristopher .Marlowe, The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Irt ing Ribner (New
York: Odyssey, 1963), 195.
3. Donald Rayfield, Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art (New York: I larper & Row, 1975), 224.
4. Ibid.
5. Anton Chekbov, Chekhov: The Major Plays, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York- New American
Library, 1964), 164.
6. Bernard Dukore, Bernard Shaw, Playwright: Aspects of Shavian Drama (Columbia: University of
i
Missouri Press, 1973), 60.
7. Sbaw, 1:248. Unlike literary or real-life reference, self-reference is always strongly meta-
8. I have dealt extensively with the metadramatic elements of the play in the article, “Beyond the dramatic. With self-reference, the play directly calls attention to itself as a play,
Verbal in Pygmalion," in Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, ed. Daniel Leary (University an imaginative fiction. Acknowledging this fiction of course destroys it, at least
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), 121-27.
temporarily. During the first act of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, Prince Hal
9. Charles Marowitz, The Marowitz Hamlet and The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin Books, 1970), 13.
suddenly steps out of the world of the play, and directly addresses the audience:'
10. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (D)ndon: Methuen, 1980), 8.
11. Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith, in Euripides V, ed. David Grene and I know you all, and will awhile uphold
Richard Lattimore (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), 183. The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun.
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
Po smother up his beauty from the world.
That, when he please again to be himself.
Being wanted, he may Be more wond’red at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holicmys.
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, thev wished-for come.
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised.
By how much better than my word I am.
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground.
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault.
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill.
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
(1.2.183-205)
The play stops. The audience is made to examine the play as a play, an artificial
construction with events that, Hal advises his listeners, are not to be taken too
seriously, because he is due to reform later on. The lines about “playing

103
104 Varieties of the Metadramatk
holidays” carry an additional irony, however; playing is supposed to be a respite
from work (specifically, Hal’s roistering is a respite from his “work” as prince),
yet the speech itself is a respite from the “playing” of the drama. While the
dramatic action was moving forward, it seemed to be serious and important, but
here the audience is reminded that it is not. It is only a “playing holiday.” It is
interesting that we call a dramatic composition both a “play” and a “work,” and
here Shakespeare juxtaposes these two apparently antithetical concepts, examin­
ing the paradoxical phenomenon that a play can simultaneously be “sport” and
“work,” trivial and serious, meaningless and meaningful.
One can see relationships here with other forms of metadrama. The play
within the play has this same ultimate effect of reminding the audience that what
they have been watching is actually a play, but such reminders are indirect,
while self-reference is direct and immediate, a splash of cold water thrown into
the face of a dreaming, imagining audience. Self-reference is also literally an
example of literary reference, since the play itself is a piece of literature. In the
last chapter, I noted that the metadramatic intensity of such reference is propor­
tional to, among other things, how recent, individualized, and well-known is the
literary work that is being referred to. Obviously, there can be nothing more
recent than the play one is currently watching! The play under observation is
also obviously well-known, as an individualized work, to the audience while
they are watching it. Finally, self-reference is also an example of real-life refer­
ence, or, more specifically, real-life acknowledgment, since the “backstage”
reality of the play as an artificial construct is acknowledged whenever the play
refers to itself The difference is that real-life acknowledgment relates to the
individual performer rather than to the play as a whole. In the example given
above, the actor playing Prince Hal does not reveal his real-life identity but,
continuing to speak as Hal, refers to the dramatic action of which he, as Prince
Hal, has been and will continue to be a part. The mask is stripped off the play
rather than off the individual character.
Real-life acknowledgment tends to be fulfilled only in performance, while
self-reference often has its metadramatic impact even when a play is only read to
oneself Near the end of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Peer is apparently drowning after a
shipwreck, when another passenger floats by and tells him not to worry, since
“no one dies halfway through the last act.”^ This bizarre remark (again made in
character, rather than by an actor as himself) is just as hilarious and disruptive to
the individual reader, caught up in Peer’s moment of crisis, as it is to an audience
in the theatre.
We should distinguish between true self-reference and mere acknowledgment
of the audience, as occurs with choruses and narrators, or with characters
themselves in monologues or asides. Such devices are merely conventions of a
presentational style; they do not destroy the world of the play, but instead
enlarge it to include the audience. It is as if we are momentarily the characters’
Self-Reference 105
confidants. Choruses and narrators, moreover, do not stop the dramatic action,
but instead exist to help to move it along. Prologues and epilogues are closer to
dramatic self-reference than choruses, narrators, monologues, or asides, because
they do literally refer to the play as a play, but on the other hand they are not
really part of the play to which they refer. Prologues and epilogues refer to the
play, but not usually to themselves. Nor do they stop the action, which has
either not yet begun or already concluded. They provide a gentle transition
between the surrounding, real world and the inner world of dramatic illusion,
rather than disrupting the dramatic world with a sudden reminder of its fic­
titiousness. If Puck’s epilogue to A Midsummer Night's Dream, “If we shadows
have offended,” etc. (5.1.412-27), occurred during the action of the play, like
Prince Hal’s speech, it would certainly be self-reference in tbe metadramatic
sense, but since it occurs when the play has already drawn to a close, the
epilogue instead serves only as a mild and pleasant farewell.
ii
To understand the functioning of self-reference, we should first consider the
nature of the dramatic illusion that is being affected, and the related matter of the
nature of audience identification with that illusion and the characters who people
it. If self-reference (like metadramatic devices generally) operates by interrupt­
ing the dramatic illusion so as to alter our relationship with it, just what is this
illusion that is being disrupted?
Susanne K. Langer, drawing on a long tradition of writers on asthetics
including Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer, Adolf Hildebrand, Clive
Bell, Roger Fry, and Charles Morgan, has dealt extensively with the nature of
both artistic illusion in general, and the dramatic illusion in particular, in her
superb book. Feeling and Form. The gist of her argument is that the illusion that
art provides us is not based on its being a copy of anything in the real world.
Some art forms, like photography, may employ direct copying of life a great
deal, while others, like theatre, may do so occasionally (as when David Belasco
reproduced New York’s Child’s Restaurant on stage), but some forms, like music
or architecture, hardly do so at all. (Music sometimes uses sounds like bird calls
or street noises, and architecture sometimes uses decorative elements like pic­
tures of natural objects or bas reliefs of people, but such things are only minor
aspects of these art forms.) The presence or absence of direct mimesis, for
Langer, is simply not an important issue. PTfective works of art generate a “vital
feeling” in the observer, which has nothing to do with real life per se. All art
forms provide us with a kind of virtual reality, subject to its own inner laws, and
achieving vitality as the result of its inner rhythms. Such illusion is not de\w-
sion—the observer certainly knows that what he is seeing or hearing is not real
life—but rather an affecting presence.
 Varieties of the Metadramatic
106
Thus, for Langer, the essence of pictorial art is that it creates (rather than
recreates) a virtual space. Citing Hildebrand, she writes;
The factors which the artist presents are those which make us aware of related
forms in the continuum of a total perceptual space. All accents and selections,
as well as radical distortions or utter departures from any “actual form” of
objects, have the purpose of making space visible and its continuity sensible. The
space itself is a projected image, and everything pictured serves to define and
organize it. Even representation of familiar objects, if it occurs, is a means to
this end.^
Langer extends this notion of a “virtual space” to all the arts. She maintains that
lyric poetry provides us with a “virtual experience,” narrative literature with a
“virtual past” or a “virtual memory,” and drama, because of its copstgnt orienta­
tion toward what will happen next, a “virtual future.”'* Even music provides us
with a “virtual time,” creating “an image of time measured by the motion of
forms that seem to give it substance, yet a substance that consists entirely of
sound, so it is transitoriness itself”^ In each case, we imaginatively shift our­
selves from the real world in whieh we are eurrently living, into a hypothetical
state of existence, which we can drop at any time (it is not a state of insanity), but
which nonetheless is strangely eompelling.
What is the reason for this compulsive nature of the artistic experience? What
makes listening to a symphony or seeing a painting or watching a play pleasur­
able, in contrast to watching or listening to something—even the same thing—in
real life? As Aristotle long ago noted, “there are some things that distress us
when we see them in reality, but the most aecurate representations of these same
things we view with pleasure—as, for example, the forms of the most despised
animals and of corpses’^ even things that we &like in life are pleasurable in a
work of art.
The traditional Freudian explanation for this phenomenon is that works of art
provide us with the vicarious release of unconscious drives. Because of psycho­
logical repression, we cannot often release such drives in life, but when the
objects of the drives are disguised in artistic form, our repressive inner “censor”
allows them a brief, partial liberation. Literary works, more specifically, em­
body psychosexual patterns that we unknowingly are responding to and enjoy­
ing. Eric Bentley, for example, describes the experience of watching theatrical
farce in the following, traditionally Freudian terms:
Farce in general enables us, seated in dark security, to enjoy the delights of
complete passivity while watching on stage the most violently active creatures
ever imagined by man. In that particular application of the general formula
which is bedroom farce, we enjoy the acTventure of adultery, ingeniously
exaggerated to the »th degree, without incurring the responsibilities or suffer­
ing the guilt, without even the hint of an affront to the wife at our side.^
Self-Reference 107
Even the fact that unpleasant things are also entertaining on stage (such as death
in tragedy) can alsa be explained in Freudian terms, since for Freud, all
emotions are ambivalent. Conscious loathing is accompanied by unconscious
desire, which means that when we view a loathsome object or event in the safe
framework of a work of art, we enjoy it beeause it fulfills a secret, unconseious
wish to experience that object or event.
Freud’s view of the artistie experience, based in his book. Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious, and expanded by theorists like Ernst Kris and Ernest
Jones, is profound in its insight. Nevertheless, it is far too limiting. It tends not
to acknowledge the extraordinary variety in works of art; everything comes
down to a few psychosexual patterns, such as the Oedipus complex or, in hostile
works like satires, anal sadism. (With death in tragedy, we enjoy the vicarious
release of an unconscious “death wish.”) The problem is that Freud conceived of
“primary process thought,” the form of thinking that is found in dreams and
jokes and slips of the tongue as well as in works of art, as something atavistic or
merely infantile, rather than a full-fledged, but merely different, mode of
eoneeption from secondary process, logical thought. The contemporary psycho­
analyst Charles Ryeroft has noted that Freud, writing before the days of
Einstein and Picasso, of Pound and Joyce, assumed “that of the two types of
mental funetioning he was describing, one, the verbal mode, was characteristic
ofthe ego, of conseiousness, of health, of rational adaptation to the environment,
and the other, the non-verbal, iconic mode, was irrational and eharacteristic of
dreamers, neurotics, lunatics, infants, and primitive peoples.” Primary process
thought, which Freud reified as the Unconscious or the Id, was “a chaos, a
caldron,”* a source of energy to be sure (thus aecounting for the vitality of a
work of art, and the compulsive nature of our response to it), but still something
wild and irrational that the healthy adult was supposed to repress, not use.
Indeed, despite Freud’s own respect for and love of literature and art, Freudian
aesthetic theories tend to reduce the artistic experience to a neurotic symptom,
and the artist himself to a neurotic person.*^
We should instead conceive of primary process thought not as being illogical
but rather as being Kowlogical; it employs association, analogy, symbol, and
metaphor rather than ratiocination, but the conceptions that it formulates are
usually perfectly sane ones. In a word, primary process thought is intuition.
Instead of being repressed forever in the healthily developing person by his
secondary process thought, intuition eontinues to operate alongside seeondary
proeess thought throughout our lives. (Some researchers have even gone so far as
to maintain that the two sorts of thinking are located in the two different sides of
our brains; if so, then the two processes are literally “alongside.”) Indeed,
intuition is necessary for us to function effectively; how could anyone even walk
across the room if he had to analyze each step logically? As we walk, we are not
using “reason”—we are perhaps not even thinking eonsciously about walking at
108 Varieties of the Metadramatic
all—but are instead intuitively adapting to the placement of walls and furniture,
choosing a path and where to place each step in a perfectly sensible but
unanalyzed manner.
Clearly, both the process of creating a work of art, and of responding to it, are
examples of intuitive thinking. Secondary process thought, or rational thinking,
may be involved as well, since we should not think of the two processes as being
inevitably locked in bitter opposition but rather as ordinarily operating in
tandem. Thus, we may sense a lyrical intensity in a painting by lurner, and also
analyze this effect as being caused by his expressive use of color at the expense of
line. Nevertheless, intuitive or primary process thinking is the essential part of
the creation or the response to any artistic work. Now, P'reud, again, maintained
that primary process thought was governed by what he called “the pleasure
principle”; it is always oriented, at least ultimately, toward the achieving of
pleasure or the avoiding of pain. What he does not seem to have considered was
that such thought might itself he an instinctual drive, that intuition is not merely
pleasure seeking but pleasure giving. Susanne Langer writes of man’s need for
symbolization that “the symbol-making function is one of man’s primary ac­
tivities, like eating, looking, or moving about.” “Symbol-making function” is yet
another name for primary process thought; the basic need for it accounts for
man’s “love of magic, the high development of ritual, the seriousness of art, and
the characteristic activity of dreams. To arrive at an intuitive understanding of
something, via magic or ritual or art or dreaming, is, for human beings, an end
in itself rather than just a means to some other “practical” end.
Human beings actually yearn for such understanding. When something
seems orderly and comprehensible, whether it is the organization of society, the
workings of a piece of machinery, or the behavior of a person we meet, it makes
us feel comforted and pleased. Incomprehensibility in such circumstances can
be painful and threatening. This is the reason people often seem to go against
their own self-interest in political or economic matters. Why, for example, did so
many union members vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, despite his
conservative record of opposing nearly everything unions have worked for over
the past fifty years? The answer is that workers, like everybody else, are not
moved solely by their economic interests. Reagan stood for a world view that
was important to them, one that seemed threatened by numerous radical
changes in recent decades. The threat of unemployment seemed less threaten­
ing, at least at the time, than the threat of an alteration of a world view that
included American supremacy abroad and an orderly social structure at home,
with everything and everyone in his place. In sum, an intuitive sense of order
yields pleasure, while a sense of chaos yields pain.
Of course, secondary process thought can also be pleasure giving. Certainly,
solving a difficult mathematical problem can be an exquisite delight. Such a
sensation, however, is a deferred pleasure; we put up with the pain of ratiocination
because of our hope of finding the answer, proving the theorem, unraveling the
Self-Reference 109
problem’s complexities. The pleasure felt at that point is, again, primary pro­
cess, as we grasp the solution, at last, intuitively. Secondary process thought is
not pleasurable in itself; it is “work” rather than “play.” Having evolved later in
human beings than primary process thought, it is less natural to us, and thus
less enjoyable. Indeed, it functions best when operating in tandem with intui­
tion; a mathematical text with no practical examples relating to everyday experi­
ence can be agony for a student, and, despite what proponents of the so-called
new math might believe, it is pedagogically unsound. The joy of solving a
mathematical problem does not lie in the logical procedures per se, but in the
intuitive insights that they lead to. Good mathematical education involves both
work and play, calling upon both the student’s reason and his intuition, and
making the former serve the latter.
A characteristic of intuitive thought is that it is wholistic. Logical thought
isolates, analyzes, separates; intuitive thought integrates, synthesizes, unifies.
As the Gestalt psychologists maintained, we perceive in integrated wholes, at
least initially. Thus, we see a face as a face, not as a piecemeal collection of eyes,
nose, mouth, eyebrows, etc., nor as a collection of light waves which in turn
form our images of these parts. Similarly, when we think about a face in primary
process terms, intuiting its emotional state, we do so as a whole—the face looks
angry or happy or sad. This total, overall impression is our first impression,
which we can then secondarily analyze by isolating individual elements like the
width of the opening of the eyes, the set of the jaw, the tension in the forehead.
As we intuitively think about something like a face, we are automatically
dividing our total set of sense impressions into two parts, isolating the face from
its background. We are actually receiving an enormous mosaic of light sensa­
tions, but we formulate a boundary separating the sensations that make up the
object we are thinking about from those that make up everything else. This
automatic, unconscious, foreground-background bifurcation is an essential
characteristic of primary process thinking. What we are thinking about is a
whole, a phenomenological “presence”; this presence is a totality, but it is
surrounded by another, larger totality. (Note the analogue to Saussure’s langue
and parole-, just as a specific utterance, parole, is shaped and made meaningful by
language as a whole, or langue, so too a specific percept is conceived of mean­
ingfully by its relationship to its perceptual background.)
Thus, foreground and background essentially define each other. It is impor­
tant to understand that a background is never “everything there is,” but is itself
delimited. As we look at a portrait, the background elements like the subject’s
clothing, the room he is in, etc., affect our impression of the subject’s face, but
they are themselves circumscribed by the picture’s frame. I'he frame defines our
field of thought at the given moment; this field is bifurcated into a foreground (the
face, in this instance) and a background, but still has an additional “beyond,”
which we are not thinking about at all while we are absorbed by the portrait. As
we go through our day, we are constantly shifting our fields of thought—looking
no Varieties of the Metadramatic
at different portraits, if you will. It is also possible to redefine a field’s fore­
ground and background, as would happen if, for example, we focused on the
subject’s hands. In that case, the face would become part of the delimited
background, as the hands came to the fore. Finally, suppose someone came
along and said something like, “this picture would look better if there were more
light,” or, more abstractly, “this picture is influenced by nineteenth-century
genre painting.” By introducing an appropriate background, the entire portrait
would become foregrounded. In sum, there are three kinds of shifts in thinking
possible: shifts within a field, as when we focus on different areas of it; shifting
to a different field, as when we go from one portrait to another, or from the
portrait to thinking of our mother or the state of the national economy; and
finally, redefining the field itself, either by incorporating it into a larger field or
by narrowing it down into a subfield.
As examples of bifurcated fields of thought, consider our intuitive ways of
thinking about time and space. We have, as usual, two different ways of thinking
and talking about time. The first, using secondary process thought, is reflected
in our language in mathematical terms: 4:05 a.m. , ten minutes to three, two minutes
before midnight; or, for larger periods, the fourteenth of May, the Year of Our Lord
1914, the eighteenth century, the first millennium b.c. These terms are exact; it is
either ten minutes to three or it is not. Even the larger units are precisely
defined; Alexander the Great lived either in the first millennium b.c., or he did
not. The other way of thinking about time is intuitive and is reflected in our
language by a completely different set of terms: now, then, the past, thefuture, long
ago, once upon a time. These terms are flexible, referring to periods of time of
widely varying lengths. The sentence “Come with me now" can refer to the next
few seconds, while the sentence “We now drive automobiles” can refer to the
entire twentieth century. In both cases, the meaning of the word now is defined
by a bifurcated field. Now is defined by then, “when it will be too late” in the
former example, or “when we drove carriages” in the latter. Furthermore, now
has an intuitive sense of wholeness about it. Technically speaking, the seconds,
minutes, or years may be slipping away, but it does not feel that way. Now refers
to a piece of time that may vary extremely in size, according to the background
then that sets it off, but which seems fixed and still, an unmoving phe­
nomenological “presence.”
Our intuitive perception of space is similar to that of time. Again, we can
define space mathematically, in inches or feet or acres or cubic meters. Such
secondary process terminology, however, is not what we use in ordinary con­
versation. Corresponding to the intuitive terms like now, then, and long ago that
we use with time are spatial terms like here, there, long, wide, narrow, etc. These
terms are again flexible; here can refer to this room, this city, this country, this
world, or even this galaxy. (“Here in the Milky Way, we are a million light years
from the nearest other galaxy.”) There is also the same bifurcation, with here
defined by what is “not here”—i.e., there. Finally, despite the flexibility of the
Self-Reference 111
term, here always has a unified wholeness about it. The room in which you are
now sitting seems for the moment to be all in all; you are aware of a there that is
beyond it, defining here, but this awareness is in the background of your
consciousness. The foreground experience is of a unified presence surrounding
you.
As with the example of the portrait, shifts in our perception of space and time
are possible, and are indeed happening all the time. Our fields of thinking about
space and time obviously change as we move through space, or with the passage
of time. Our fields of thought can also be redefined, by being either expanded or
contracted. Thus, the here of this room expands to the here of this country when
someone starts talking about international politics. But imaginative shifts are
possible as well; in our imaginations, we can place ourselves in some past or
future time or place. While sitting in your living room, you can imagine yourself
in the bedroom or at your office or crossing the Alps with Hannibal. Shifts of
the previous type, where our fields of thinking about space or time are redefined,
I shall refer to as expansions or contractions; shifts of the latter type 1 shall refer to
as displacements.
The dramatic illusion, then, is a form of primary process thinking. It is
pleasure giving, as primary process thought is in general, because it presents us
with a unified, coherent vision. We enjoy it because it is comprehensible. Fwen
when the theatre depicts events that in real life are painful to consider, such as
tyranny or murder or physical suffering, they are pleasurable because we
experience them within an intelligible unity.
Much has been written about the nature of dramatic unity, a concept that has
become more and more difficult since the Romantic era. For purposes of
considering the dramatic illusion, however, we can simply say that a play is
unified by the very nature of its relationship to us. Because we can see it whole,
it is whole. In real life, our perception of things and events is always fragmen­
tary; whatever we are perceiving always has further aspects of itself that at a
given time are unavailable, backgrounds, causes, ramifications, and effects that
we do not know about. This does not mean that we are not perceiving things
wholistically; on the contrary, we are constantly forming integrated wholes out of
what we perceive, but these wholes are in turn constantly being broken up,
expanded, contracted, or displaced. Meaning continually competes with con­
fusion. In the theatre, on the other hand, the world of dramatic illusion stays
put. The stage itself provides it with a frame of coherence. We know that
everything we see on the stage is there to contribute to our understanding, and
that, conversely, nothing that we need to know is left out. Even in a play in
which enigma plays a part, as in a murder mystery, it is a controlled enigma, a
well-defined problem in contrast with the ill-defined ones that life presents us
with. A play may lack rational coherence, but, if it engages us, it always has an
intuitive coherence.
In phenomenological terms, the stage brackets a play, excluding external
 Varieties of the Metadramatic
112
considerations like cause or effect. Of course, the dramatic action usually
includes references to events and places that are unseen, but these are again part
of the “dramatic illusion” I have been talking about, since they are entirely a
function of what we see and hear on stage. The “bracketing” effect of the stage
should not be interpreted in crude terms, with the play providing only direct
sensual stimulation. Indeed, direct stimulation tends to destroy the dramatic
illusion; nudity on stage, for example, may make us forget the world of the play
by stimulating us with the sexual potentialities of the actor or actress. (For this
reason, nudity, which became popular in the theatre in the 1960s, is actually a
metadramatic device, a form of real-life reference.) The dramatic illusion pro­
vides us with an intuitively comprehensible imaginary presence rather than
direct stimulation. The dramatic experience is not like drinking a glass of beer or
receiving a kick in the pants, but is instead a form of knowing.
It is common to compare the dramatic experience to dreaming. The two are
indeed closely related, but there is an important difference. Dreaming is an
imaginative displacement of the self; we put ourselves into a world of our
imagination. The dreamer is always present in his dream, as the principal
character, experiencing all the events. Nor is he aware that he is dreaming; the
events seem to be actually happening. (Occasionally one does become aware that
one is dreaming, usually just prior to waking up, but this is an unusual
occurrence.) In the theatre, this is not the case. There, we are never the principal
character, and the events are known to be fictitious. (A play may be so vivid that
its essential artificiality retreats far into the background, but we never forget it
entirely, as we do in dreaming. It is always a part of our field of thinking.)
Psychoanalysts sometimes speak of “the dream screen,” analogous to a movie
screen “on to which the visual imagery of a dream can be imagined to be
projected.”" This is a misleading metaphor, however, for in a dream the
dreamer has the eyes of a character, while in a movie theatre the audience does
not. In films and on television, directors have occasionally tried the technique of
making the camera into a character but have met with little success. In live
theatre, it is simply impossible. With the exception of moments in a play where
the audience is addressed directly (and even then we are only passive partici­
pants), we are observers of a play, never characters in it, much less the central
character.
On the other hand, the theatre does provide us with a vivid imaginary world,
as does a dream, and we do, in some sense, identify with the characters of the
play. This identification, however, is not a displacement. It is instead an expansion
of the ego boundary that defines our concept of ourself We both remain who we
are and become the hero on stage. Bruce Wilshire, in his book. Role Playing and
Identity, maintains that the actor “stands in” for the audience. Fhis is well put.
We do not become the actor, but neither do we simply examine him like
scientists making a case study; instead, the actor becomes us. He is our proxy or
agent, acting for us as an extension of ourselves, but never becoming one’s entire
self
Self-Reference 113
The same is true for the actor in his relationship to his character. (Indeed,
there is a complete congruence among the playwright’s, actor’s, and audience’s
relationships with the characters, which I intend to explore in a future work.)
Acting theory, especially in the United States, has tended to be polarized
between those who posit a total identification of the actor with his role, and
those who posit a total detachment. Instead, the effective actor, like the au­
dience, has a flexible ego boundary that allows him both to identify and not to
identifjT with the character. The role extends his sense of self but does not
displace it.
UriTike the audience’s identification with a character, the audience’s response
to the overall dramatic illusion is an imaginary displacement rather than an
expansion. (Note that it is not necessary for identification to occur in a play; the
action can be completely engrossing, yet provide no one for us to emphathize
with, as in comedies where the characters evoke our disapproval.) Our attention
shifts from the real here and now of the auditorium, the other audience mem­
bers, etc., to an imaginary here and now that the play provides for us.
The here and now of the dramatic illusion, like the heres and nows in real life,
has a unified, all in all quality about it. We experience a series of dramatic
moments, each of which is a whole. Again as in real life, these wholes are in turn
defined by backgrounds within fields of thought. The physical stage is itself one
of these boundaries, with the real world of backstage and the auditorium
providing a background that is not fully present in our consciousness, yet is
never completely forgotten, either. The reality of the theatre defines the unre­
ality of the play, actually adding to the latter’s coherence by reminding us
subliminally that it is all contrived and controlled, however spontaneous it may
seem.
“Reality” is always the defining background of the dramatic illusion. The
concept should not be limited to the mere physical reality of the theatre
building, but extended to all the cultural realities that bring the play into
existence. In the first chapter, I argued that the background langue to the
foreground parole of the play itself was the “drama/culture complex,” an overlap­
ping set of implicit cultural codes that give the play meaning. The theatre
building is but one of these codes, telling us architecturally that there is a
specially defined space called “the stage” on which fictitious events are enacted
for our observation. All the cultural codes impinging on the staged events are
“realities” that create the defining background to the play, however.
I placed quotation marks around the word reality in the previous paragraph as
a reminder of what we have known at least since Kant: that there is no such thing
as observing reality directly. As Edward T. Hall insists, “You can’t shed
culture.”'^ We can view reality only through some cultural grid. This does not
mean that culture makes us hallucinate about reality, but only that culture
organizes our perception of it, reminding us what is significant and what is not.
Certain things will seem more “real” in a certain culture, more significant,
because the cultural codes that are in use bring those things to the fore, at the
114 Varieties of the Metadramatic
expense of other things. The length of a woman’s dress or the width of a man’s
lapels are important realities to us beeause our culture in a sense points to them;
they seem extremely “real” to us, although to someone from another culture
they could seem trivial bits of background.
In our culture, the “realest” of realities has become that which is identified by
science, or, in more general terms, by logical, secondary process thinking. We
remain confident that the realities revealed by science are always the ultimate
truth. We recognize that science can err, of course, but only because of faulty
application—poor logic, inept experimentation, inadequate data. Rightly ap­
plied, however, the scientific method always produces truth. Where science
conflicts with “common sense” (i.e., intuition), science is right. The earth is a
sphere, even though it seems flat; matter is made up of molecules, even though it
seems solid.
The “realities” that surround and define the dramatic illusion are such scien­
tific, secondary process realities, in contrast to the primary process realities of
the illusion itself When Northrop Frye points out that the story of Hermione
and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale is a reenactment of the Demeter and Proserpine
myth,'^ he is using secondary process means to demonstrate the mythical
background of Shakespeare’s play. This mythical background is, again, only one
of the play’s many background realities. In other words, Frye is creating a
mythical field of thought, in which the intuitiveforeground, the story of Hermione
and Perdita that the audience experiences, is set off by a background of a logical
system of myth.
In sum, we perceive a play as an intuitive foreground set against numerous
logical backgrounds. The foreground is pleasurable, easy, fun; the background is
onerous, hard, serious. Thus critics, whose job it is to explicate the play’s
backgrounds, are accused of being killjoys. Why must they always be talking
about a play’s philosophical meanings, or historical significances, or mythical
influences? Why can’t they just enjoy it, like the rest of us? But, in fact, these
serious backgrounds are subliminally present in our own experience of the play,
which could not exist without them, just as a game could not exist without rules
or a language without grammar. By setting off and defining the play’s area of
playfulness, the serious backgrounds of the drama/culture complex enable us to
enjoy the play freely. (“If all the year were playing holidays, to sp)ort would be as
tedious as to work.”) The dramatic illusion is enjoyable “play” in the foreground,
bounded by serious “work” in the background.
Ill
Self-reference is a rare form of metadrama. Its usage historically tends to
parallel that of the play within the play. Shakespeare uses it from time to time, as
in Prince Hal’s speech (1.2.183-205), for example, or in Cleopatra’s ironic lines in
Antony and Cleopatra:
Self-Reference 115
The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
r the’ posture of a whore.
(5.2.216-21)
'Fhis speech in the original production would of course have called attention to
the fact that the lines were actually being spoken by a boy in Shakespeare’s
theatre—only, given the greatness of the role, the youngster was probably a
superb actor who did not “squeak,” but was instead extremely impressive. A
similar piece of ironic self-reference occurs in Julius Caesar, when Cassius, after
murdering Caesar, says:
How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents vet unknown!
(3.1.111-13)
The joke, of course, is that the performance that the audience is watching is
itself one of the very reenactments that Cassius is referring to.
As with the play within the play, self-reference recurs in the modern era, with
playwrights like Brecht, Stoppard, and Handke, but is rare in other periods
except in parodies or burlesques. Self-reference is even more rare, in the periods
when it occurs, than the play within the play, however; only major, “serious”
playwrights tend to employ self-reference, while even hacks write plays within
their plays.
What is happening to the audience phenomenologically, when a play sud­
denly calls attention to itself? I said originally that the fictitious world of the
play is destroyed, but that is not precisely right, since the play does not go away.
Instead, the audience’s relationship with its changes radically. Previously, the
audience had been enjoying a unified foreground set against a background of
overlapping realities. The “field of thought” was this set of realities, the drama/
culture complex that enables a play to happen, both in the literal sense and in the
imaginative sense of establishing the conventions that make the play coherent to
the audience. They experienced the foreground as themselves, but their concept
of self expanded and contracted when they identified with a character, or ceased
to.
When a character in this experienced world suddenly says, “I know you all,”
or “no one dies halfway through the last act,” audience identification ceases.
There is a sudden collapse of the ego boundary back to one’s everyday self Such
a collapse of the self was the aim of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, usually
translated “alienation effect” but better rendered as “estrangement effect.” For
Brecht, audience empathy with the characters was anathema—as was actors’
identification with them. He seemed to believe that such empathy precluded
116 Varieties of the Metadramatic Self-Reference 117

any rational analysis of what one was seeing, that, swept away by the characters’ You will see nothing of what you have always seen here.
adventures, one simply accepted the dramatic world rather than questioning it. You will hear nothing of what you have always heard here.
There is an element of truth in this, although it is crudely reductive, another You will hear what you usually see. . . .
example of the “anti-theatrical prejudice” that views any change of ego bound­ The light that illuminates us signifies nothing. Neither do the clothes we wear
signify anything. They indicate nothing, they are not unusual in any way,
ary as a drastic threat to rational control. The oversimplifications in Brecht’s they signify nothing. They signify no otner time to you, no other climate, no
theories need not concern us here, however; what is interesting is the result in other season, no other degree of latitude, no other reason to wear them. Fh^
practice. have no function. Nor do our gestures have a function, that is, to signify
A good example is his “didactic play” (Lehrstueck), written in the early 1930s, something to you.''’
The Measures Taken (Die Massnahme). In it, four agitators in Moscow, just returned
The “play” goes on in this haranguing manner for some twenty-eight pages, or
from the Orient, reenact for a “control chorus” the events that led to their having
roughly an hour of performance. Note the nature of this “offending,” however:
to kill one of their comrades. There is thus a play within the play of the framed
It is entirely a negative reference to the background of dramatic conventions that
type, but also, during the inner play, the agitators from time to time comment
the audience had come to the theatre expecting to see and hear. Handke is
directly to the control chorus while they are performing. Furthermore, the
operating within the moralistic tradition of Brecht, using theatre to teach a
agitators take turns playing the young comrade. Fhese devices have the effect of
moral lesson, turning “play” into “work.” The bourgeois audience is to be taught
dramatic self-reference, destroying any empathy that the agitators, the control
that its frivolous concept of theatre is elitist and escapist. Where Brecht moves
chorus, or we in the audience might feel for the young comrade in his plight. In
from “play” to “work,” however, Handke never lets the audience get to “play” in
the climactic moment, when the young comrade is leaning on the agitators’
the first place.
arms, having agreed to be shot, the agitator playing the young comrade sud­
Playwrights who use self-reference are moralists, though perhaps not always
denly shifts from acting to narrating: “He then said: ‘In the interests of Commu­
so extreme as Handke. However playful a moment of self-reference may seem
nism. . . .’ ”'■* The three words, “He then said,” in the midst of such a moving
(“nobody dies halfway through the last act”), it always has the effect of dras­
scene, foreground the performance as performance, rather than as dramatic illu­
tically realigning the audience’s perception of the drama, forcing them to exam­
sion, and destroy the audience’s identification with a character who is, in many
ine consciously the assumptions that lie behind and control their response to the
ways, a traditional tragic hero.'*
world of the play. Since these assumptions, the drama/culture complex, are also
In the observer’s concept of self undergoes a contraction when self-reference
the means by which the audience views the world at large, self-reference has the
occurs in a play, the world of dramatic illusion undergoes a displacement. The
effect of challenging, in a sudden and drastic manner, the complacencies of the
field of thought remains the same, as does the boundary between foreground
audience’s world view.
(the dramatic illusion) and background (the “realities” that define the illusion).
In the first chapter, we saw that the serious playwright, unlike the hack,
What happens is that there is a shift in perception that turns the field of thought
attempts to alter the drama/culture complex rather than simply exploiting it
inside out. What had been background is foregrounded, and vice versa. Note
without changing it. In the second chapter, we also saw that, while all drama is
that in the examples given, the “self-reference” is really a reference to a back­
in a sense metadramatic (drama about drama), differing degrees of metadrama
ground rather than to the performance per se. In Prince Hal’s speech, Hal is
are possible, depending upon the intensity with which the dramatic world is
making reference to the audience’s historical knowledge of the actual Henry V, a
estranged. Self-reference is the most extreme, intense form of metadrama—a
background reality that had been subliminally affecting their response to the
frontal attack. It is for this reason that playwrights usually employ the device
performance—indeed, was the reason for their interest in the subject matter of
sparingly; Handke’s Offending the Audience runs the risk of estranging or “offend­
the play in the first place. When the mysterious passenger in Peer Gynt says, “no
ing” the audience to such a degree that they become bored and indifferent, and
one dies halfway through the last act,” he is referring to a theatrical convention
may simply walk out of the theatre.
that is also a background element for the audience.
Perhaps Brecht’s use of self-reference was the most effective among modern
Peter Handke’s (Jffending the Audience is an extreme contemporary example of
writers. (And even he did not use the device very often.) Brecht realized that the
dramatic self-reference. The entire play turns out to be self-referential:
audience must be entertained if they are to be moved at all, that we will not do
You are welcome. the work of secondary process thinking unless we are offered the play of primary
This piece is a prologue. process thinking in tandem with it. Work through play, teaching through
You will hear nothing you have heard here before. pleasure, is the basic technique of theatre, and is ultimately the reason for its
You will see nothing you have not seen here before. importance.
118 Varieties of the Metadramatic

Notes
1. lam assuming that I lal delivers this speech to the audience, although a case can be made that
he is speaking a soliloquy, i.e., entirely to himself. This would make the phrase, “I know vou all,”
rather strange, however; it would have to refer to Hal’s roisterous companions rather than to the
audience, which makes little sense, given the context. Furthermore, it seems to me that the ajjologia Part II
quality of the speech implies that it is delivered to someone sitting in judgment—like the audience.
2. Ibsen, 165.
3. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953), 77. Original italics. Drama and Perception
4. Ibid., 215, 307, 258-279, 307.
5. Ibid., 110.
6. Aristotle, 7.
7. Eric Bentley, “The Psychology of Farce,” in Let's Get a Divorce! and Other Plays, ed. Eric
Bentley (New York: Hill & Wang, 1958), xiv.
8. Charles Rycroft, The Innocence ofDreams (Oxfori: Oxford University Press, 1981), 156-57, 155.
9. This is related to the tendency of psychoanalysts wrongfully to consider actors as neurotics,
as discussed above in chapter four.
10. Langer, Philosophy, 45, 43.
11. Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary, 37.
12. Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubledav, 1969), 188.
13. Frye, 138.
14. Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken, trans. Eric Bentley, in The Modem Theatre, ed. Eric
Bentley, 6 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), 6:282.
15. For a complete discussion, see mv article, “Brecht Versus Aristotle,” Drama at Calgary 3,
2:64-68.
16. Peter I landke, Kaspar and Other Plays, trans. .Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux), 7-11.
118 Varieties of the Metadramatic

Notes
1. lam assuming that I lal delivers this speech to the audience, although a case can be made that
he is speaking a soliloquy, i.e., entirely to himself. This would make the phrase, “1 know you all,”
rather strange, however; it would have to refer to Hal’s roisterous companions rather than to the
audience, which makes little sense, given the context. Furthermore, it seems to me that the apologia Part II
quality of the speech implies that it is delivered to someone sitting in judgment—like the audience.
2. Ibsen, 165.
3. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953), 77. Original italics.
Drama and Perception
4. Ibid., 215, 307, 258-279, 307.
5. Ibid., 110.
6. Aristotle, 7.
7. Eric Bentley, “The Psychology of Farce,” in Let’s Get a Divorce! and Other Plays, ed. Eric
Bentley (New Ybrit: Hill &l U'ang, 1958), xiv.
8. Charles Rycroft, The Innocence ofDreams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 156-57, 155.
9. This is related to the tendency of psychoanalysts wrongfully to consider actors as neurotics,
as discussed above in chapter four.
10. Langer, Philosophy, 45, 43.
11. Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary, 37.
12. Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, N.Y'.: Doubledav, 1969), 188.
13. Frye, 138.
14. Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken, trans. Eric Bentlev, in The Modem Theatre, ed. Eric
Bentley, 6 vols. (Garden City, N.Y'.: Doubledav, 1960), 6:282.
15. F'or a complete diseussion, see mv artiele, “Brecht Versus Aristotle,” Drama at Calgary 3,
2:64-68.
16. Peter Handke, Kaspar and Other Plays, trans. .Michael Roloff (New York: Earrar, Straus and
Giroux), 7-11.
 7
Sophocles
Oedipus the King

“One man cannot be the same as many. ”

Although its importance has been little noted, perception is one of the great
themes of dramatic literature. Since drama is always addressing itself to the
ways in which society views reality, human perception is a latent theme of all
drama. Sensing this, the serious playwright in particular moves toward percep­
tion as an overt theme, making explicit what is always implicitly in the back­
ground. Drama, which is a means of perception, turns upon itself and becomes
about perception. This self-consciousness is, in broad terms, the sixth type of
metadrama, more generalized than the others, and less estranging upon the
audience, yet of equal importance, if only because of its prevalence in plays
recognized as classics.
In this chapter and those that remain, I shall examine six standard plays from
differing periods—Oedipus the King, Twelfth Night, Woyzeck, The Father, The Master
Builder, and Betrayal. In each of these, the playwright directly and explicitly
investigates the way in which his society views itself and its world. This list
could be extended, however, since a great many classic plays, modern and
ancient, have perception as a dominant theme.
These chapters are examples of “practical” criticism, interpreting individual
plays in detail, in contrast to the more general, “theoretical” criticism of the
previous chapters, in which plays are cited only as examples for developing a
systematic theory. Practical criticism is necessary here because of the greater
generality of this type of metadrama, which tends to operate through a play as a
whole, rather than through a separable part. Rather than a performance of some
kind within a play or within a role, the theme of perception unfolds from
beginning to end.

ii
Aristotle, in The Poetics, maintained that recognition (anagnorisis) is one of the
basic elements of the tragic plot. Recognition was “a change from ignorance to

121
122 Drama and Perception
knowledge,” and related primarily, in tragedy, to the recognition of persons.'
Nevertheless, subsequent critics have interpreted dramatic recognition in a more
profound sense, such as the insight a character might attain about the order of
the universe, or the self-knowledge that the tragic hero receives through suffer­
ing. As Francis Fergusson writes, “The characters suffer the piteous and terrible
sense of the mystery of the human situation. From this suffering or passion,
with its shifting visions, a new perception of the situation emerges.”^
Whether or not Aristotle would hav'e approved of such definitions of recogni­
tion, there can be no doubt that recognition, in many forms, is one of the most
basic plot elements in all kinds of drama, comic as well as tragic, popular as well
as serious. Recognitions can be as profound as Lear or Othello recognizing the
awesome and terrible errors they have made, or as trivial as Sherlock Flomes
recognizing (for no particular reason) a man’s occupation by the state of his
fingernails. They can be as tragic as Oedipus recognizing himself as the killer of
his own father, or as comical as the pairs of long lost brothers recognizing one
another at the end of The Comedy of Errors.
Fhe ubiquity of the recognition device naturally suggests the potential for
developing the theme of perception, since recognition is of course an act of
perception. Nonetheless, not all acts of recognition in drama truly concern
themselves with perception as a fully developed theme. To recognize someone
by his strawberry birthmark is not metadramatic in this final sense unless
attention somehow is called to the act of recognition itself If the focus is on the
person, thing, or concept being recognized, then the device is merely neutral or
transparent for the audience; if the focus is on the person doing to recognizing,
however, so that the act of recognition actually reveals something important
about him and the way he views things, then the audience is made to con­
template the nature of human perception itself When Electra in The Libation
Bearers recognizes from a lock of hair and some footprints that Orestes has come
home, it is conventional rather than metadramatic, since Aechylus does not
focus on the act of recognizing or on the recognizer (although he might well have
done so, since the evidence is feeble, later to be wittily parodied in Euripides’
Orestes). When Malvolio in Twelfth Night reads the faked letter and interprets it in
terms of himself however, we are not so much interested in the letter per se as in
how he reacts to it, which reveals what kind of character he is, and, more
generally, how fantasy and desire color people’s judgments. Such incidents do
not just involve the act of perception, but are about perception.
Ill
It is difficult to find something new to say about Sophocles’ Oedipus the King—
particularly something new about recognition. It is generally held to be the
quintessential play about self-knowledge, as the hero experiences a series of
Sophocles, Oedipus the King 123
recognitions about himself, his parentage, his crimes, his fate, and man’s fate
generally. In his superb book, 'The Identity of Oedipus the King. Alister Cameron
showed how there is a progressive altering of Oedipus’s objective in the play,
from trying to determine “Who is the murderer?” to asking “Am I the mur­
derer?” to asking, ultimately, “Who am I?”' Here recognition has gone far
beyond Aristotle’s mere identification of one person by another, to an ap­
prehending of the mysteries of human existence.
Many critics have discussed the play in similar terms; Francis Fergusson, for
example, extended the notion of existential recognition to the chorus:
If one thinks of the movement of the play, it appears that the tragic rhythm
analyzes human action temporally into successive modes, as a crystal analyzes
a white beam of light spatially into the colored bands of the spectrum. The
chorus, always present, represents one of these modes, and at the recurrent
moments when reasoned purpose is gone, it takes the stap with its faith-
informed passion, moving through an ordered succession of modes of suffer­
ing, to a new perception of the immediate situation.
But moving and sensitive as such critical interpretations have been, they have
usually treated the recognition in the non-metadramatic sense. That is, the
critics focus, or assume that Sophocles focuses, on the concept being recognized
rather than on the act of recognition itself They discuss what is being recog­
nized, but not how it is recognized. Oedipus’s final tragic vision, shared by the
other characters and ultimately by the audience, is so profound that his manner
of perceiving it has received little attention. Critics have assumed without
question that Oedipus is guilty of parricide and incest, and that his act of
discovering his own guilt is a horrifying but otherwise neutral series of recogni­
tions of the obvious—a classic example of dramatic “exposition,” in which facts
about events occurring before the play began are gracefully revealed, and,
conventionally, are never questioned thereafter. Indeed, the very obviousness of
Oedipus’s guilt is seen as an impressive piece of dramatic irony, with each new
revelation resounding like another stroke of doom.
But is Oedipus’s guilt truly so obvious? After all, he did not know that the
man he killed was his father, nor that the woman he married was his mother. His
ignorance, however, would probably not have made much difference to the
Greeks. Having a “shame” society rather than a “guilt” society like ours, they
saw morality in action rather than intention. Oedipus may not have intended to
commit parricide or incest—indeed, he did ev^erything he could to avoid doing
so—but to the Greeks, he would have seemed just as guilty as if he had. Sin was
like disease; if a person is ill, it is a pollution whether it is the result of his own
behavior or not. We may even feel sorry for him, but he is still a danger to us.
Nonetheless, there is still a sense in which Oedipus’s guilt is doubtful. There
are discrepancies in the factual evidence. If Oedipus were as good a defense
attorney as he is a prosecutor, he would have made more of them. If critics were
 124 Drama and Perception
more attuned to the play’s metadramatic aspects, they would make more of them
The play opens with Oedipus, typically, asking a question: “Children vouna
is si.ff • ^ answer IS not long in coming. A priest tells Oedipus that the city
suffering from a terrible plague, which he describes lengthily^and vividly: ^
A blight is on the fruitful plants of the earth
a b }ght IS on the cattle in the fields,
a blight IS on our women that no children
are born to them; a God that carries fire,
a deadly pestilence, is on our town,
strikes us and spares not, and the house of Cadmus
IS emptied of its people while black Death
grows rich in groaning and in lamentation.
(25-30)
This plague is the catalyst for the play’s action. Word comes from the oracle at
Delphi that the plague is the result of the murder of Laius, the pZZTkiZ
ore ^ *Pus, going unsolved, and the killers going unpunished The priest
“MaTph ^ Oedipus will succeed in driving the pollution from the knd-
( 50). rhe first choral ode is a lamentation describing the suffering of the
people m further detail. Afterward, Oedipus vows to fight the plaguX solv ng
the crime. He invokes a eurse on Laius’s murderer: ^ ^
Upon the murderer I invoke this curse—
whether he is one man and all unknown,
or one of many—may he wear out his life
m misery to miserable doom!
If with my knowledge he lives at my hearth
1 pray that I myself may feel my curse.
Un you I lay my charge to fulfill all this
for me, for the God, and for this land of ours
destroyed and blighted, by the God forsaken.
(246-54)
foe this is richly ironic, as many critics have noted
Yet there IS something strange about this opening scene. For one thing it
seems odd that Oedipus, ruler of the city, would have to ask why the suppliants
have come, since he certainly knows all about the terrible plague; in foct he
presently says that he has already sent Creon to the oracle at Delphi to finLut
does eTtabhsh Oed of justjfymg necessary exposition, but on the other hand Jt
does establish Oedipus at the outset as a very careful inquisitor.
He IS not always such a careful listener, however. When Creon is later
Sophocles, Oedipus the King 125
explaining to Oedipus about the murder, he emphasizes that, as the story was
told in Thebes, there were many robbers who did it:
This man said that the robbers they [Laius and his party] encountered
were many and the hands that did the murder
were many; it was no man’s single power.
(121-23)
Yet, as Karelisa Hartigan has noted,* Oedipus immediately speaks of the culprit
in the singular: “How could a robber dare a deed like this?” (124). Later, in the
passage already quoted, he qualifies this by saying, “whether he is one man and
all unknown / or one of many,” etc. (247^8), but even this qualification seems
strange, since he has heard of nothing but multiple murderers.
In the scene that follows with Teiresias, the old blind prophet, there is the
first accusation of Oedipus himself as the killer. Teiresias says, bluntly, “I say
you are the murderer of the king / whose murderer you seek” (362-63). This
only infuriates Oedipus, who curses the soothsayer. In the episode following the
next choral ode, he accuses Creon of the murder, and further, of now plotting
with Teiresias to remove him from the throne. The issue remains unresolved
when Jocasta, Creon’s sister and Oedipus’s wife, enters. With the sharp ques­
tions that are typical of his nature, Oedipus yet again draws out the story of the
murder. What was the place, how long ago was it, what did Laius look like? For
the first time, Oedipus begins to feel that Teiresias may have been right: “What
have you designed, O Zeus, to do with me?” (738). Oedipus then tells the story
of his encounter with an old man and his entourage:
When I was near the branching of the crossroads,
going on foot, I was encountered by
a herald and a carriage with a man in it,
just as you tell me. He that led the way
and the old man himself wanted to thrust me
out of the road by force. I became angry
and struck the coachman who was pushing me.
When the old man saw this he watched his moment,
and as I passed he struck me from his carriage,
full on the head with his two pointed goad.
But he was paid in full and presently
my stick had struck him bacKwards from the car
and he rolled out of it. And then I killed them
all.
(801-13)
It served them right. The Greeks had no notion of turning the other cheek, as
Christians do; these fellows struck first, and Oedipus, heroically, struck back in
double measure. Thus Oedipus never had any sense of the event being a crime—
until now, when he fears that the old man may ha\'e been his own father.
Yet there is a discrepancy between this story of the killing and the one that is
 126 Drama and Perception
now prevalent in Thebes. Oedipus was alone, and, as he says, he “killed them
all But when Lams was killed, one man escaped, who maintained that they
had been attacked by many men, a band of robbers. Oedipus considers the
point:
You said that he spoke of highway robbers who killed Laius. Now if he uses
not I who killed him. One man cannot be the same as
"'"'V the burden of
(842-47)
“One man cannot be the same as many” is a way of putting things that is
evidence of a logical, mathematical mind. This discrepancy will apparently be
resolved by rational means. Oedipus immediately sends for the man who
escaped and told the story, in order to cross-examine him closely.
In the meantime, after a short choral ode on man’s arrogance in ignoring
oracles and the gods, a mesenger arrives from Corinth, where Oedipus grew up
as prince, to announce that Oedipus’s father. Polybus, is dead, and that the
people there have declared Oedipus king. Since an oracle had once predicted
that Oedipus would one day kill his father and marry his mother, this is good
news. It appears that oracles can be wrong. But, in the critical reversal of the
u messenger tells Oedipus that he was not Polybus’s biological son He
had been adopted, after the messenger himself had found him on the slopes of
Mount Cithaeron. The messenger had gotten him from a Theban shepherd,
who worked for King Laius. Inquiring about the shepherd, Oedipus discovers
that he is actually the same person just sent for; the chorus tells him, “I think he
IS none other than the peasant / whom you have sought to see already” (1052-53)
the man who escaped to tell the story of the death of Laius.
No one makes much of this bizarre coincidence. Instead, the old shepherd
arrives, and tells how Laius had giyen him the child to do away with, again
because of oracles, who predicted that he vyould kill his father. Instead of
exposing the child on the hillside (the standard Theban form of birth control)
howeyer, the shepherd, pitying him, gave him to a man from another country.’
1 he chain of ev idence is overwhelming that Oedipus was that child.
Oedipus assumes automatically that he did indeed kill Laius, as all the oracles
predicted, and married his own mother, Jocasta. All leave except the chorus
who bemoan Oedipus’s fate. A second messenger announces that Jocasta has
committed suicide. Oedipus, having blinded himself, reenters, and after poig­
nant scenes with Creon, and with his daughters Antigone and Ismene, goes off
into bitter exile. ® within the play itself.
Yet the discrepancy still remains, never hav ing been resolved: Oedipus says he
was alone, and killed the entire entourage, but it appears that one man escaped
who then maintained that he and the others had been attacked not by a single
person but by a band of robbers. Although there can be no doubt that Oedipus
Sophocles, Oedipus the King 127
did marry his own mother, the play leaves some doubt, however small, whether
he did indeed kill his own father. It is possible that there were two separate
incidents, one in which Oedipus killed an unrelated old man and his traveling
companions, and another in which a band of robbers killed Laius and his.
Why would Sophocles have the stories differ on two major points? He could
just as easily have had the man who escaped say that the king’s party had been
attacked by a single person. He could also have had Oedipus say, “I think I killed
them all, but in the heat of fighting perhaps one or two got away.” Of course, it is
easy to imagine a reconciliation of the two stories. The shepherd in telling his
version may have felt embarrassed at the fact that a lone man had been able to
subdue a group of armed guards, and thus invented the business about a band of
robbers. (Shakespeare has Falstaff do this, in Henry IV, Part 1, when he falsely
maintains that he and his group were attacked and robbed by eleven men, when
there were actually only two.) Oedipus may simply not have noticed that one of
the group escaped. But the point is that w'c must infer these possibilities, the
play does not tell us. There is plenty of opportunity for it to do so—Oedipus
could simply continue to question the shepherd, instead of stopping after
hearing the story of his parentage. After all, he earlier had made much of the
discrepancy, and seemed intensely determined to clear it up.
A curious point is that we never hear again about the plague after the middle
of the play. At the end, do Oedipus’s self-mutilation and exile cure it? Not only
are there no signs or reports on the subject, no one is even interested in it any
more. Yet the plague had been so strongly emphasized at the beginning, when it
was causing terrible suffering and sorrow. To suggest at the end that there has
been a purification would resolve what had appeared to be a major issue in the
play—and would also provide evidence that Oedipus had indeed been guilty. Yet
here the play is oddly silent.
Critics have not made much of this, nor of the other coincidences and
paradoxes in the play.^ They have instead praised it for its supposed elegance of
construction. Aristotle in particular liked the neat way in which its plot worked,
with, for example, the messenger coming to cheer Oedipus and remove his fears
in regard to his mother, but actually achieving the opposite effect; this reversal
thus coincides with the main recognition in the play, which Aristotle felt to be
the best kind of plotting.** Aristotle disliked irrational elements in plot con­
struction, preferring “impossible probabilities” to “unpersuasive possibilities.”**
That is, it was all right to use gods, magic, and so in, in a logically consistent
way once these unrealistic elements have been established, but not to use things
just because they realistically could occur, without properly justifying them
Yet what could be more improbable than having the messenger from Corinth
show up just as Oedipus is about to question the shepherd; or to have the
messenger turn out to be the same man who had taken the infant Oedipus to the
Corinthian king; or to have the shepherd who had given the infant to the
 128 Drama and Perception
i
Corinthian messenger turn out to be the very man who later escaped when the
band of robbers (or the lone Oedipus) attacked Laius and his guards? Surely
these coincidences are perfect examples of “unpersuasive possibilities.” And
what about that plague that starts the play going—why do we never hear of it
after the opening scenes? Did Oedipus’s self-mutilation and exile cure it? Finally,
what about the discrepancies between the two stories of Laius’s death?
iv
Oedipus is characterized not only as having a logical mind, but as taking great
pride m It. The great coup in his life was figuring out the answer to the riddle of
the Sphinx, who had been terrorizing the city of Thebes: What creature goes
first on four legs, then on two legs, then on three legs? Oedipus realized that the
answer is man, who crawls on all fours as an infant, then walks on two legs as a
youth and adult, then finally walks on “three legs,” with the aid of a staff, in old
age. When Oedipus gave this correct reply, the Sphinx killed herself; Oedipus
was then made ruler of Thebes, in gratitude for his ridding the city of its
oppressor, and also in appreciation of his obvious shrewdness.
In a play abounding in recognitions, here was a pivotal recognition that
occurred before the play began. Oedipus proudly recalls the incident: “1 solved
the riddle by my wit alone” (398), he maintains, and furthermore, in contrast to
Teiresias, “Mine was no knowledge got from birds” (399). Teiresias, the blind
soothsayer, was useless when the Sphinx was around:
For, tell me, where have you seen clear, Teiresias,
with your prophetic eyes'? When the dark singer,
the Sphinx, was in your country, did you speak
word of deliverance to its citizens?
(390-94)
Oedipus solved the riddle with his intellect, his logic; blind Teiresias’s intuitive
form of perception, through oracles from birds, was worthless then, and,
Oedipus insists, is equally worthless now with regard to the plague.
A motif of eyesight and seeing pervades the play, and is the source of multiple
ironies. Oedipus can see, and Teiresias is blind; yet Teiresias “sees” the truth in
this case, while Oedipus is blind to it. When Oedipus taunts Teiresias for his
blindness, Teiresias taunts him back: “You have your eyes but see not where you
are / in sin, or where you live, nor whom you live with. / Do you know who your
parents are?’’ (413-15). Later in the play, Oedipus will be literally blind like
Teiresias, as Teiresias correctly predicts:
A deadly footed, double striking curse,
from father and mother both, shall driv'e you forth
% Sophocles, Oedipus the King 129
out of this land, with darkness on your eyes,
that now have such straight \ ision.
(416-19)
There are many other references to eves and seeing. The chorus calls Oedipus
“Greatest in all men’s eyes” (40), and later reminds Oedipus that CTeon has been
his friend “before all men’s eyes” (656). In reporting Jocasta’s suicide, the second
messenger tells the chorus, “You did not see the sight” (1238), and that “Oedipus
distracted us from seeing” (1252). When Oedipus appears for the final time, after
having put out his eyes, the chorus, aghast, cries, “This is a terrible sight for
men to see! ... I cannot / look at you, though there’s much I want to ask / and
much to learn and much to see. / I shudder at the sight of you” (1298-1306).
Throughout the final scene, there are of course numerous references to
Oedipus’s blindness; Oedipus stresses that to see would now be odious to him,
for “why should I see / whose vision showed me nothing sweet to see?” (1334-
35).
This motif of eyesight-seeing amplifies the theme of perception. (The verbs
for seeing and knowing are in fact related in Greek.) Oedipus sees himself as a
great logician, an inquisitor, an analyst, a solver of riddles and problems. His
knowledge does not come “from birds,” but from his own intellect. Yet, as
Teiresias points out, there are many important things that he does not know,
including the facts of his own parentage. And how does he actually come to
know things? We see him jump hastily to conclusions when he accuses Creon
and Teiresias of conspiring to depose him. We also see him forget to cross-
examine the shepherd about the killing of Laius. It is as if there were some
compulsive quality to his wanting to know things, a desire to find some pattern
for events, no matter how painful—and no matter how the minor details may
not fit the pattern.
The true significance of the contradictory stories about the death of Laius,
then, lies not in the discrepancy itself, for which we can easily imagine some
explanation, but in how Oedipus handles the matter. His failure to pursue it
does not leave us wondering who the killer actually was, as if the play were an
Agatha Christie murder mystery (and the marrying of his own mother is proven
beyond all question), but instead provides us with insight into Oedipus’s
character, and especially into how he perceives things. He may see himself as a
logician, but he actually intuits. Napoleon would warn his generals not to “form
a picture,” not to infer a pattern to events on the battlefield that might in fact be
disastrously incorrect. In deciding on his own guilt, Oedipus is indeed “forming
a picture,” intuiting a conclusion on the basis of evidence that is still incomplete.
This picture is probably correct, but has not been proven with the mathematical
certainty that Oedipus led everyone to expect. One man still cannot be the same
as many.
Oedipus, then, is not just the man who solves riddles, the man who knows.
 130 Drama and Perception
but the man who obsessively needs to know. He questions, analyzes, hypoth­
esizes, but then, as a grand pattern to events seems to emerge, he leaps to a
conclusion. Despite the fact that this conclusion leaves him the most odious of
men, it is preferable to have the pattern rather than to live with the chaos of
doubt.
The irony is tbat Oedipus liv'es in a world full of coincidences, paradoxes,
discrepancies, uncertainties. Oracles speak, sometimes accurately, sometimes
not. The gods seem to have some terrible design for man, but they do not
actually appear (as they do not in most of Sophocles’ plays, unlike those of
Aeschylus or p:uripides). Events can be explained in rational terms—almost.
There still remains the possibility that Oedipus is not guilty, that the killer
cannot be found, that life is ultimately a mystery. But Oedipus will not pursue
this terrible option. He will not risk cross-examining the shepherd, and will not
even concern himself about the effects of his decision upon the plague. He
figuratively blinds himself to these things, and then blinds himself literally, an
act of affirmation even in its self-destruction.
V contemplative. It is conservative, even passive, but it always includes man
Athens in the age of Sophocles was, among other things, the great age of
rational philosophy, which was to culminate in the thinking of Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle. All the philosophers, including the cynical sophists, prized
logical thinking above all else, believing that it was the surest and finest route to
truth. They laid the groundwork for the modern scientific method, with its
utterly rational, non-mythical approach to studying life.
The characterization of Oedipus in Sophocles’ play reflects this rationalistic
spirit. “Mine was no knowledge got from birds,” but from superior intellect. He
solved the riddle of the Sphinx by scientific reasoning alone. Yet, as Maurice
Merleau-Ponty has written, “Science manipulates things, but gives up living in
them.”'" Oedipus proudly solved the riddle of the Sphinx by answering
“Man”—but it was as if he himself were not a man. Now, at the end of the play,
he himself must walk on three legs,” with the aid of a staff, as he staggers about
blinded. Oedipus’s scientific method told him everything about the world, but
not about himself in the world. He did not know who his own parents truly
were, and deeper than that, did not recognize his own weaknesses, his own
obsessions, his own mortality.
Oedipus can be seen as a personification of Freud’s “secondary process think­
ing,” just as Teiresias is a personification of primary process, intuitive thinking.
Sophocles splits the two aspects of man’s mind, just as the philosophers were
doing. Aristophanes Ihe Clouds, written shortly after Oedipus the King, parodies
the same tendency. The hero, Strepsiades, “used to believ'e the rain was just
Zeus pissing through a sieve,”" but his antagonist, Socrates, teaches him that
Sophocles, Oedipus the King 131
there is no Zeus, and that rain is actually the result of mindless convection
forces. Like this fictions Socrates (probably based upon the real Socrates, but as
he was in his early days of association with the sophists, rather than as he was to
become by the time Plato was his student), Oedipus has renounced primary
process, mythological thinking in favor of reasoning. He rejects bird divination
and oracles, just as Plato was to reject theatre and most mythology, and just as
scientists today reject erroneously held popular opinions as “myth.” Teiresias’s
way of thinking is not for them, either.
Yet even a scientist would have to admit that the flight of a bird, or the
condition of its entrails, is the product of innumerable natural forces in its
environment. To intuit from birds, as Teiresias does, is to be exceptionally
sensitive to all these forces. Science, employing linear, secondary process think­
ing, can in a slow methodical manner perhaps arrive at the same conclusions.
But it can also miss things, essential side causes and effects, because of its very
linearity. It may tell us how to build a car, but not foresee air pollution; how to
split the atom, but not how to use its energy safely; how to manipulate man, but
not who man is. Primary process thinking, by contrast, is wholistic; it considers
all. Its view of the world is not piecemeal and manipulative, but totalizing and
himself in its view.
Of course, Teiresias can fail, as he did in trying to solve the riddle of the
Sphinx. Primary process thinking is no more infallible than is secondary pro­
cess. But the message of the play is that Teiresias cannot really be excluded.
Man’s intuition, for good or ill, must be satisfied. Ultimately, Oedipus intuits a
pattern in all the chaotic events from his past, and sacrifices logic to it. Intuitive,
primary process thinking allows for contradictions; one man can indeed be
many. The important thing is that there seem to be a coherent whole.
Notes
1. Aristotle, 19-20.
2. Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Garden (iitv, N.Y.: Doubledav, 1953), 31.
3. Alister t^ameron, The Identity of Oedipus the King (New \drk: New 'S'ork L'niversitv Press,
1968), 36-37.
4. Fergusson, 44.
5. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Da\ id Grene, in Sophocles I, ed. David Grene and Richard
Lattimore (Ghicago: University of (Chicago Press, 1954), lines 1-2. Subsequent quotations of Oedipus
the King, taken from this edition, are cited as line numbers in the text.
6. Karelisa I lartigan, “Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrranus 293,” Classical Journal 70 (.\pril -.\Iav 1975):
55-56.
7. It has not been overkxtked, however. In 1920, Gilbert Norw(x)d noted in his Greek Tragedy that
everyone has forgotten the issue of whether Laius was slain bv a lone man or a group hv the time the
shepherd arrives, but did not expand on the point (Greek Tragedy [New ^brk: I lill &. V\ang, I960],
149). In a crackpot article, “Who Killed Laius?” (Ttilane Drama Revieiv, 9 [Summer 1965]: 120-31),
Karl I larshbarger reached the conclusion that the discrepance between the tv^o stories means that
132 Drama and Perception

the chorus killed Laius! This was not only unsupported and foolish, it was once again an example of
a critic treating the perceived rather than perception in Oedipus the King. ^
.More recently Sandor Goodhart has given a deconstructive reading of the discrepancies, which
lead him to decide that the play “is a critique of mythogenesis, an examination of the process by
which one arbitrary fiction comes to assume the value of truth” (^Oedipus and Laius’s .Many
*S " h ^ This seems to fit Qicteau’s Machine Infemale better than
8
8. Aristotle, 19.
Shakespeare
9. Ibid., 45. As You Like It
10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James ,\1. Edie (Evanston, III.: North­
western University Press, 1964), 159.
1962) ^'‘'liam Arrowsmith (New York: New American Library,
"^There's no clock in the forest."

Perception is one of Shakespeare’s major concerns. His plays abound in dis­

guises, mistaken identities, ambiguous sights, confusing noises,
misapprehensions. Images of eyesight and seeing are among his most common.
King Lear alone has over a hundred of them. Characters often question their
sense impressions; “Were such things here as we do speak about it?” asks Banquo
concerning the witches, “Or have we eaten on the insane root / I hat takes the
reason prisoner?” (1.3.83—85). Antipholus of Syracuse in Comedy of Errors ex­
claims;

Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?

Sleeping or waking? mad or well advised?
Known unto these, and to myself disguised!
(2.2.211-13)

Gloucester in King Lear, like Oedipus, feels that he is better off not seeing, since
“I stumbled when I saw” (4.1.19). Ophelia in Hamlet cries, “O, woe is me /
T’have seen what I have seen, see what I seel” (3.1.160-61).
In fact, the major tragedies all turn on difficulties of perception; Hamlet must
determine whether the ghost is truly his father, or a devil or a fantasy, as
Horatio at first maintains. Lear disastrously misconstrues his daughters’ inten­
tions, as Gloucester does his sons’ in the parallel subplot. Duncan misjudges
Macbeth, as he had misjudged Cawdor, and even sees Macbeth’s castle, where
he is about to be murdered, as having “a pleasant seat. The air / Nimbly and
sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses’ (1.6.1—3). Othello fails to see
through lago’s smooth “honesty,” and as a result comes to misperceive the pure
Desdemona as a foul whore.
Shakespeare’s theme, which is derived from Platonic idealism as transmitted
via Christian theology, is always that sense impressions are not to be trusted.

133
 134 Drama and Perception
Validity comes not from scientific evidence, as for us, but from God. In
particular, the third person in the trinity, the Holy Ghost, which is the active
spiritual presence of God in human life, is the source of truth. Thus Lear, for
example, should not have concerned himself w ith the outward show of evidence
his daughters put forth in the love contest at the beginning of the play, but
should have looked into his own heart. Similarly, the “proof” that Othello
demanded should have been the pure love he felt for Desdemona, rather than
external things like the handkerchief
The theme of the unrealiability of the senses is not limited to the tragedies,
however. Misperception occurs over and over again in the comedies; sometimes
the very titles or subtitles—yfr You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, What You
Will—have phenomenological implications, suggesting that the characters’ per­
ceptions are in some way tainted. In the early comedies, the taint is likely to
come from an external source: blind coincidence reuniting tw o pairs of twins in
Comedy of Errors, Puck’s magic potion altering the lovers’ vision in A Midsummer
Night's Dream, Petruchio’s coercion forcing Kate to call the sun the moon in The
Taming of the Shrew.
In the later comedies, however, as in the tragedies, the taint in perception
often comes at least partly from within the characters themselves. The foolish
suitors, Morocco and Arragon, in The Merchant of Venice, wrongly choose the
outwardly attractive gold and silver caskets as a result of their own arrogance and
selfishness. Orsino in Twelfth Night dotes on Olivia not for what she is, but
because of his own obsessiveness about love. Malvolio mistaking the letter in the
same play is an example of perfectly balanced external and internal causation.
Maria, in forging the letter, uses no name but instead writes “M.O.A.I. doth
sway my life” (2.5.100). Had she instead written “.Malvolio,” or even
xM.A.I.O.”, the result would be simple, externally tainted perception, as in
Shakespeare’s early comedies; instead, this method allows Malvolio, filled with
fantssies of love and power, partly to fool himself He recognizes that “A should
follow, but O does” (120-21), but nevertheless, like a comic Oedipus, he com­
pletes the pattern that suits him despite the discrepancy: “.M, O, A, I. Phis
simulation is not as the former; and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to
me, for every one of these letters are in my name” (127-30).
Shakespeare s treatment of the problems of perception in the later comedies,
then, is metadramatic. When the taint of perception is externally caused, in the
early comedies, our focus is on what is perceived more than on the act of
perception. It is fun to watch Titania suddenly fall in love with Bottom, with his
ass’s head, but since this misperception was forced upon her, the event says
nothing about how human beings see in general. We could not possibly identify
with Titania, since objective reality—ass-headed Bottom—contrasts so
glaringly with Titania’s subjective response. Characters like .Morocco, .\rragon,
Orsino, and .Vlalvolio, however, are themselves part of their misperceptions.
The result is a more phenomenological \ iew of man, in w hich subjectivity is
Shakespeare, Ar You Like It 135
always part of sense impressions as actually perceived. Malvolio’s delusion is not
the result of coercion or magic; it is an all too human response with which we
can readily identify.
ii
As You Like It presents us with two overall contrasting settings, the civilized
world surrounding Duke Frederick’s court, and the world of nature in the Forest
of Arden. As many critics have noted, this contrast is typical of many of
Shakespeare’s comedies. The civilized world, presented at the beginning, is
characterized by rigidities and artificialities. Duke Frederick is a usurper and
petty tyrant. He took the throne from his brother, Duke Senior, who now lives
in the Forest of Arden with a band of followers. Similarly, Oliver, although he
did not actually usurp his brother Orlando’s place (Oliver is the elder), has
tyrannized him, and failed to raise him in a manner befitting his station of life.
Spites and hates are rampant in this artificial world. In a scene reminiscent of
the story of Cain and Abel, Oliver and Orlando quarrel bitterly, and Oliver then
plots his brother’s death. The scene takes place in Oliver’s orchard, also inhab­
ited by an old retainer, Adam. Everything echoes the myth of Adam and Eve
and the garden of Eden, after the fall. Man is fallen, the world is depraved, and
man has inherited a propensity to sin. Oliver does not even know w'hy he hates
his brother: “Eor my soul, yet 1 know not why, hates nothing more than he”
(1.1.151-53). There is no modern, deep psychological “motivation” for his hatred;
it is simply the result of the sinfulness of human nature.
Duke Erederick is similarly possessed with sinful hatred. The kind of enter­
tainment he enjoys is wrestling matches in which ribs are cracked and partici­
pants brought near to death. When Orlando introduces himself as the son of Sir
Rowland de Boys, the Duke is most displeased. It seems that although “ The
world esteemed thy father honorable” (1.2.206), Duke Frederick hated him
too—again, for no particular reason other than the Duke’s spiteful nature. His
fear and spite similarly lead him to ban his niece Rosalind from his court,
although she has done nothing disloyal to him.
Life in the Eorest of Arden, to which Rosalind, her cousin Celia, the Duke’s
court jester Touchstone, and (separately) Orlando and Adam, all flee, is very
different from life at court. Instead of hatred, there is brotherhood among Duke
Senior and his followers. Instead of scheming, there are philosophizing and
lovemaking and writing of poetry. Instead of brutal wrestling matches, there are
feasting and music. (There had been no music at court, significantly rare for
Shakespeare.)
This contrast between an artificial civilization and what critics call “the green
world” occurs in other Shakespearean cf)medies, such as A Midsummer Night's
Dream or The Winter's Tale. The green world is a source of fertility and love, the
 136 Drama and Perception
natural forces that sort out the problems of civilization. (Portia’s Belmont, in The
Merchant of Venice, is not a forest, but it functions similarly.) Thus, when Duke
Frederiek at the end of the play comes to the forest to root out all his enemies
who have taken refuge there, he is immediately converted by an old religious
man. The forest is working its natural magic; rigidity and conflict are dissolved
rather than being resolved.
rhe Forest of Arden in Ar You Like It, howev'er, has an additional charac­
teristic. It seems to be a different place according to whoever is perceiving it. lb
Duke Senior, it seems a wonderful place, full of meaning for man even where it
seems harsh and unpleasant:
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile.
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp.^ Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam;
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind.
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with eold, I smile and say
“ This is no flattery”; these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.
Sweet are the uses of adversity.
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous.
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt.
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks.
Sermons m stones, and good in everything.
(2.1.1-17)
This is medieval Christian idealism, in which ev'erything, no matter how ugly or
painful, has its place in the ov'erall scheme of things, the great chain of being
stretching downward from God. The chilling winter’s wind, like other human
adversity, may seem evil, but it is actually good, acting as a form of penance,
reminding man of what I am,” not a god or an angel, but a mortal. The quaint
story of the toad with the jewel in his head, drawn from the medieval bestiaries,
is yet another example of how evil has no real substance. “Every cloud has a
silver lining would be our eliche for the same sentiment.
And, indeed, this would seem to be true in Duke Senior’s own case. His
“toad”—being deposed from his dukedom—has turned out to have its “jewel,” a
life of good fellowship in the forest, living on nature’s bounty. He and his
followers seem to lack for nothing, spending their time hunting, feasting,
singing, and philosophizing. Only Jaques seems to have brought the eynicism of
civilization into the forest with him, but the other banished lords view him only
with an easy amusement. He is no threat, and even his cynicism seems to have
little rancor in it. He is philosophical and resigned rather than bitter or spiteful.
137
Shakespeare, As You Like It
In contrast, the refugees from Duke Frederick’s court view the forest in very
different terms from those of Duke Senior’s group. Rosalind, Celia, and Touch­
stone, exhausted and hungry, speak of it as “a deserted place” (2.4.67), a phrase
that is echoed s(X)n after bv Orlando. In what he calls “this uncouth forest
(2.6.6) Orlando says to Adam, who is starving, “Thou shalt not die for a lack of
dinner if there live anything in this desert” (15-16). The word “desert” (in
Shakespeare’s time meaning simply any wild, uninhabited place) recurs in his
speech in the next scene, when he tries to seize food from Duke Senior and his
lords by the threat of his sword;
I thought that all things had been savage here.
And therefore put I on the countenance
Of stern commandment. But whate’er you are
That in this desert inaecessible.
Under the shade of melancholy boughs.
Lose and neglect the creeping "hours of time;
If ever you have looked on better days.
If ever been where bells have knolled to chureh.
If ever sat in any good man’s feast.
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear
And know what ’tis to pity and be pitied.
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be;
In the which hope I blush, and hide mv sword.
^ ' (2.7.106-19)
In his distraught and starving condition, he sees the forest as “savage,” “inac­
cessible,” “melancholy.” By the end of the speech, however, Arden has begun to
work its magic upon him, and he is coming over to Duke Seniors view. The
images shift to “ehurch” and “feast,” as Orlando speaks of pity, gentleness, and
hope, finally putting down his sword. Later in the play, he becomes even more
idealistic than Duke Senior; the trees in the “uncouth” fi)rest, with their “melan­
choly boughs,” become instead charming natural surfaces for carving sonnets to
Rosalind.
In realistic terms, it seems strange that the Forest of Arden, so bountiful that
food seems to fall into the hands of Duke Senior and his banished lords, seems
so like a barren desert to the refugees. If food is so plentiful, why can they not
see it? (After all, the Duke and the banished lords were once refugees too, yet
they obviously got along with no difficulties.) But Shakespeare is not interested
in external realism. The forest simply means different things to different charac­
ters, and at different times. It is amusing that he can put contrasting views in the
very same scene. When Rosalind and her little group arrive in the “desert place,”
they encounter the pastoral shepherd, Silv'ius, who seems unconcerned about
food at all. Instead, he poeticizes endlessly about his shepherdess love object:
O, thou didst then never love so heartily!
If thou rememb’rest not the slightest folly
 138 Drama and Perception
That ever love did make thee run into,
Thou hast not loved.
Or if thou hast not sat as I do now,
Wearing thy hearer in thy mistress’ praise.
Thou hast not loved.
Or if thou hast not broke from company
Abruptly, as my passion now makes me.
Thou hast not loved. O Phebe, Phebe, Phebe!
(2.4.30-39)
The “desert place” not only turns out to have room for Duke Senior and his
lords, with their medieval world view, it also is inhabited by this character
straight out of pastoral poetry, a ridiculously artificial type, who nonetheless
seems perfectly at home in Arden as well.
In this same scene, there is another shepherd, Corin, whose approach to his
profession is as down to earth as Silvius’s is ethereal:
But I am shepherd to another man
And do not shear the fleeces that I graze.
My master is of churlish disposition
And little recks to find the way to heaven
By doing deeds of ho^itality.'
Besides, his cote, his flocks, and bounds of feed
Are now on sale, and at our sheepcote now.
By reason of his absence, there is nothing
I hat you will feed on.
(2.4.73-82)
Corin views the Forest of Arden in practical terms, of sheering and feeding,
buying and selling, in contrast to the young swain Silvius, “That little cares for
buying anything” (85). In a later scene with the clown Touchstone, Corin notes
how shepherds’ hands are hard, greasy from handling the fells of ewes, and
“often tarred over with the surgery of our sheep” (3.2.50-60), all of which again
seems remote from the world of his supposedly fellow shepherds, Silvius and
Phebe.
Corin, then, accepts his simple rustic life, viewing it neither romantically nor
cynically. He is a normative character, with a humble, natural philosophy of life:
I know the more one sickens the worse at ease he is; and that he that wants
money, means, and content is without three good friends; that the property of
rain is to wet and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep, and that a
great cause of the night is lack of the sun; that he that hath learned no wit by-
nature nor art may complain of good breeding, or comes of a \-erv dull
kindred. (3.2.22-29)
This solid, middle view is contrasted by the extreme romanticism of Silvius and
Phebe (and, later, of Orlando) on the one hand, and bv the extreme cynicism of
Shakespeare, As You Like It 139
Touchstone and Jaques on the other. Touchstone jokes about shepherding in
crude, sexual terms:
To bring the ewes and the rams together and to offer to get your living by
the copulation of cattle, to be bawd to a bellwether and to betray a she-lamb of
a twewemonth to a crooked-pated old cuckoldly ram, out of all reasonable
match. If thou beest not damned for this, the devil himself will have no
shepherds. (3.2.74—80)
For Silvius and Phebe, then, shepherding is heavenly; for Corin, it is earthly;
and for Touchstone here, it is hellish, and shepherds are “damned.”
Touchstone and Jaques are paired in the play in many ways; indeed, jaques
admires the clown so much that he even says he would like to dress up in motley
(2.7.34). Both have brought the attitudes of civilization into Arden, and see the
forest in terms of the court and city. In the scene just quoted, Fouchstone bases
his hellish theory of shepherding on its contrast with courtly life: “If thou never
wast at court, thou never saw’st good manners; if thou never sawst good
manners, then thy manners must be wicked; and wickedness is sin, and sin is
damnation” (3.2.37-40). Earlier in the play, Jaques gazed upon an injured stag,
and, we are told, moralized on his plight “into a thousand similes (2.1.45). I he
stag was like a “poor and broken bankrupt” (57), abandoned by his friends; a
herd passing by were like “fat and greasy citizens” (55), unconcerned with their
fellow creature’s plight.
Thus most invectively he pierceth through
The body of the country, city, court.
Yea, and of this our life^ swearing that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants, and what’s worse.
To fright the animals and to kill them up
In their assigned and native dwelling place.
(58—63)
For Jaques, the very animals of the forest are like civilized human beings, with
all their foibles and weaknesses. Later, in his famous speech, he compares all the
world to a stage—another image drawn from the city. Neither Duke Seniors
medieval idealism nor Corin’s naturalistic earthiness have any place in Jaques’s
world view. Like Touchstone, he sees the forest, and indeed all the world, in
ultra-civilized terms.
iii
In sum, the characters in As You Like It see life in the way that they want to see
it, or in the way that circumstances force them to see it. The title of the play
refers not just to the expected attitude of the audience, who presumably like this
 140 Drama and Perception
sort of entertainment, but also to the attitudes of the characters, who see life in
general as they like it. The idealists—Duke Senior, Silvius, Phebe, Orlando after
he is settled in Arden—view the world in romantic terms, as a virtual paradise.
“Here feel we not the penalty of Adam” (2.1.5), the Duke maintains. The
cynics Touchstone, Jaques, Oliver, Duke Frederick—view the world in pessi­
mistic, citified terms, in which the penalty of Adam is a life without meaning, a
war of all against all, with a dreary succession of empty roles ending “sans teeth,
sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (2.7.166). Finally, the moderates—Corin
and (as I shall argue) Rosalind—see the world in balanced terms, in which the
fall of Adam has indeed brought suffering and disorder, but in which God
nevertheless still operates behind the scenes.
The movement of the play is toward the moderate, central position. Orlando
comes to have a more realistic view of love in his relation to the flesh and blood
Rosalind, in contrast to the girl of his dreams and sonnets; similarly, under
Rosalinds influence, Silvius and Phebe come to accept each other in realistic
terms, in contrast to their ridiculously affected pastoral love. Duke Senior will
have to contend with the penalty of Adam” when he returns to the throne.
Duke Frederick and Oliver are converted from their irreligious cynicism
through the magic of the Forest of Arden. Even Touchstone, the cynical clown
who ridiculed love and despised rustic life, ends up in a marriage with the
country wench, Audrey. At the end of the play, only Jaques remains with an
extreme viewpoint, cynieally remarking that Touchstone’s “loving voyage / Is
but for two months victualled” (5.4.186), but even Jaques plans to go off to visit
the newly converted Duke Frederick, for “Out of these convertites / There is
much matter to be heard and learned” (178—79). Perhaps his melancholy pessi­
mism will be moderated after all.
Throughout the play, the extreme characters, both idealists and cynics, not
only see what they wish to see, but have a vision that is distorted. Here is
Touchstone, deseribing the days when he, like Silvius now, was an ardent lover;
I remember, when I was in love I broke my sword upon a stone and bid him
take that for coming a-night to Jane Smile; and I remember the kissing of her
battler, and the cow’s dugs that her pretty chopt hands had milked and I
remember the wooing of a peascod instead of her, from whom I took two cods,
and giving her them again, said with weeping tears, “Wear these for my sake.”
(2.4.42^9)
Touchstone, it seems, is a character of more than one extreme—idealist then,
cynic now. But his description here of the time he took a stone for his rival, and a
peascod for his love, aptly describes the kind of blindness that love instills in the
characters whom we see.
Phebe, for example, is so blinded by the notion of love that she falls in love
with a woman, Rosalind. It is true that Rosalind is disguised as a man, and it is
Shakespeare, As You Like It 141
also true that it is a convention in Shakespeare’s plays that no one ever sees
through a disguise, even when, as here, it consists merely of the clothing of the
opposite sex. Yet surely here the convention is being metadramatically mocked.
This is clear enough in act 4, scene 1, in which Rosalind, dressed as Ganymede
(her male disguise), plays the role of “Rosalind” to the love-sick Orlando. I his is
not only multiple-layered role playing within the role, it carries the added,
exquisite irony that the innermost role coincides with the outermost reality.
Orlando is so idealistically blind that he cannot see the very woman he loves,
even through she is standing in front of him, “disguised” only with male
garments, and playing herself. Similarly, Phebe, intoxicated with the idea, but
not the reality of love, becomes enamored of “Ganymede,” failing to see through
the thin disguise, even though her swain Silv'ius is obviously the man to whom
she should be paying attention. None of the lovers notices the blatant irony in
the little scene in the last act in which Silvius describes “What ’tis to love”:
SILVIUS.It is to be all made of sighs and tears;
And so am I for Phebe.
PHEBE. And I for Ganymede.
ORLANDO. And I for Rosalind.
ROSALIND. And I for no woman.
(5.2.78-83)
Although the incantation is repeated, hilariously, three times, each time ending
with Rosalind’s “And I for no woman,” no one notices her double entendre—
except the audience.
Duke Senior is another idealistic character who fails to recognize Rosalind—
his own daughter—in her male disguise. In the last scene, he at long last has
some faint stirrings of memory:
I do remember in this shepherd’s boy
Some lively touches of my daughter s favor.
^ (5.4.26-27)
And it is about time, too. Here Shakespeare is toying with the convention of
non-recognition again. Duke Senior almost eomes to the obvious conclusion that
Ganymede is really Rosalind, but puts the notion aside. Rosalind must put off
her male garments, and put on female ones, to show the benighted characters
what should have been apparent all along.
Always Rosalind is the catalyst for bringing the extreme characters back to
reality. She is not only a normative character, but a raisonneur, arguing against
the extremists for her moderate viewpoint. “You are a fool, she chides Silvius,
“and turned into the extremity of love” (4.3.23—24), just as the other fool in the
play. Touchstone, is turned into the extremity of anti-love, as he mocks the
 142 Drama and Perception
lovers endlessly and ruthlessly. “Men have died from time to time, and worms
have eaten them, but not for love” (4.1.96-98), Rosalind reminds Orlando. He
would love her “forever and a day,” but she replies.
Say “a day,” without the “ever.” No, no, Orlando; men are April when they
woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the
sky changes when they are wives.
(133-36)
Rosalind is realistic, knowing that romantic love cannot be a permanent state,
but that it must be transmuted into something more down to earth for there to
be a happy, lasting marriage. Romantic lovers are blind, seeing only an idealized
image of their beloved; husbands and wives must accept each other as real,
flawed human beings.
“Say a day without the ever” might seem a cynical statement, but Rosalind
has plenty of advice for the cynics of the play too. After all, unlike cynical
Touchstone, she at least allows romantic love “a day.” In act 3, scene 2, she
chides Touchstone for mocking Orlando’s verses; bad though they may be, she is
moved by them, and rejects Touchstone’s cheap sarcasm. Later, in the “say a day
without the ever” scene with Orlando just quoted (4.1), she has a parallel scene
with Jaques:
JAQUES. I prithee, pretty youth, let me be better acquainted with thee.
ROSALIND. They say you are a melancholy fellow.
JAQUES. I am so; I do love it better than laughing.
ROSAUND. Those that are in extremity of either are abominable fellows, and
betray themselves to every modern censure worse than drunkards.
JAQUES. Why, ’tis good to be sad and say nothing.
ROSALIND. Why then, ’tis good to be a post.
(1-9)
Earlier, Rosalind had insisted that Orlando’s romantic love was “merely a mad­
ness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do”
(3.2.376—77); here she insists that Jaques’s melancholy, which he loves as exces­
sively as Orlando does Rosalind, makes him worse than a drunkard. Rosalind,
both moderate and moderator, chides all extremism, whether of the lover, the
madman, the drunkard, or the melancholic. There is an echo here of the
medieval theory of humors (of which Jaques’s melancholer was one); the healthy
individual had his humors in balance, while the mentally or physically sick
person had one or more in excess. Balance, moderation, “the golden mean” were
good; imbalance, overindulgence, excess of any kind were bad, making one
literally or figuratively a drunkard, and warping one’s vision. Thus Rosalind in
the same scene rejects both Orlando’s and Jaques’s views of life as excessive and
distorted.
Shakespeare, Ar You Like It 143
iv
As already mentioned, Jaques and Touchstone are parallel characters in their
cynicism, despite the fact that the former is lugubrious, while the latter is
mercurially witty. Both bring city attitudes with them into the forest; both view
love contemptuously; both chide others, ostensibly with the purpose of improv­
ing them. “Invest me in motley,” says Jaques, “and I will through and through /
Cleanse the foul body of th’ infected world” (2.7.58-60). He was much taken
with Touchstone from their very first meeting, and repeatedly insists that he
would like to join the clown in wearing motley, as he says in this speech.
When the two did meet for the first time, in the forest. Touchstone was
carrying a small gadget from the city, a sundial. Jaques reports:
And then he drew a dial from his poke.
And looking on it with lack-lustre eye.
Says very wisely, “It is ten o’clock.
Thus we may see,” quoth he, “how the world wags.
’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine.
And after one hour more ’twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe.
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tail.”
^ (2.7.20-28)
Pocket sundials were nearly as common in the Elizabethan era as watches are
today. Indeed, watches themselves had been around for about a century but
would have been too expensive for someone like Touchstone; the small, portable
“dial” was the watch of the common man. (The recent raising of a shipwreck
from the time of Henry VIII uncovered many of them among the effects of the
drowned sailors.) Touchstone seems to have the same kind of obsession with
time as Jaques in the subsequent “All the world’s a stage” speech (2.7.139-66).
Both see time as clicking mechanically forward, hour after hour, scene after
scene, mindlessly taking us to a meaningless death.
Time is in fact a major theme of the play, but there are other views of it than
that of Jaques and Touchstone. Orlando, in a passage already quoted, says he
would love Rosalind “forever and a day” (4.1.132); ever the romantic, he sees love
as timeless, in the idealist, Platonic sense. Love for him is eternal and unchang­
ing. Rosalind, however, in the “say ‘a day’ without the ‘ever’ ” passage (4.1.133-
36), reminds him that time marches on, and brings in its transformations.
Orlando seems to get her message, for he shortly announces that he is off to
dinner with the Duke, but that he will return “by two o’clock” (164); he has
come to acknowledge the passing of time, and the existence of the clock.
Rosalind, however, was not speaking of time in this mechanical sense; how will
Orlando even know what time it is, out there in the Forest of Arden? She
therefore doubts that Orlando will be able to keep his promise, saying. Time is
 144 Drama and Perception
the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try” (183-84). In
the event, he does not return on time, because, as it turns out, he is injured
fighting a lioness that had been stalking his sleeping brother. As result of the
incident, the wicked brother, Oliver, has converted (as Duke Frederick will) into
a decent person. Time has brought unpredictable changes.
Earlier, Rosalind had more things to say about time:
ROSAUND. I pray you, what is’t o’clock?
ORLANDO. You should ask me, what time o’day. There’s no clock in the forest.
(3.2.285-87)
And indeed there is not, although some people, like Touchstone, may have
brought them there. The clock is a human invention, which has no counterpart
in nature. On the other hand, time does of course pass in nature, as processes
like the movement of the sun across the sky, the changing phases of the moon,
and the growth and decay of living organisms, take place. But nature itself
provides no abstract measure of these things. Man had to invent the sundial, the
clock, the watch, the chronometer, to do that.
Rosalind goes on to make an interesting point, that psychological time, which
is time as we actually experience it, is not really determined by the clock. In
fact, she says, “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons” (293-94). She
goes on to prove this by citing “who Time ambles withal, who Time trots
withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal” (294-96). It
trots with a young maid awaiting her wedding day, it ambles with “a priest that
lacks Latin and a rich man that hath not the gout” (304-5), it gallops with a thief
condemned to the gallows, and it stands still “with lawyers in the vacation; for
they sleep between term and term, and then they perceive not how time moves”
(314-16).
Just as the Forest of Arden is a different place according to whoever is
perceiving it, then, so too is time different according to whoever is experiencing
it. Rosalind, the normative character in the play, has little use for those who tell
time by the clock:
He that will divide a minute into a thousand parts and break but a part of
me thousand part of a minute in the affairs of love, it may be said of him that
Cupid hath clapped him o’ th’ shoulder, but I’ll warrant him heart-whole
(4.1.40-44)
Mathematicizing time, turning it into numbers that can be indefinitely sub­
divided, as we have come to do, is for Rosalind artificial and unnatural. A lover
who thinks of time in the mathematical way, the way of the clock, is no true lover
at all, she insists. The true reality (as always in Shakespeare) is the inner reality,
the psychological sense of time, which “travels in divers paces with divers
persons.”
Shakespeare, Ar You Like It 145
V
Clocks had been around for many centuries by Shakespeare’s day, and he
frequently mentions them in his plays. They were not particularly accurate or
reliable; Richard III calls for one on the eve of the battle of Bosworth, and bids
Ratcliffe, “About the mid of night come to my tent / And help to arm me”
(5.3.77-78). Ratcliffe, however, comes late, saying:
The early village cock
Hath twice done salutation to the morn:
Your friends are up and buckle on their armor.
(210-12)
Perhaps the clock had stopped. Indeed, in Richard’s day a clock would not even
have had a minute hand, since it would not have been accurate enough to
warrant one. By Shakespeare’s time, however, clocks were a little better, and
soon, with the invention of the pendulum, their accuracy improved dramat­
ically. Minute hands became standard, and, by the end of the seventeenth
century, the second hand had been introduced. With the invention of the marine
chronometer in the eighteenth century, it indeed became possible to “divide a
minute into a thousand parts,” and in the twentieth century it has become
possible to divide it into a billion.'
“By its essential nature,” wrote Lewis Mumford, the clock “dissociated time
from human events.It was probably the single most important invention for
the creation of modern industrial society. Pre-industrial societies define time by
the task itself, which takes as long as it takes to do, and is externally regulated
only by the natural rhythms of the day and of the seasons. Spring is planting
time, and fall harvest time; one plows until the fields are finished, sows seed
until they are covered, and gathers the grain until one has stored all that has
grown. In a factory, however, one continuously performs the same task of work,
which, having no real beginning or end, must be externally regulated by a
machine, the clock. Modern industry divides time up by the clock, sells it, and
buys our labor by it. Far from being an expression of our own inner lives,
controlled by our own subjectivity, time has become something objective,
controlling us. Like Touchstone, we now all carry watches, or “dials,” around
with us. “From hour to hour we ripe and ripe, / And then, from hour to hour,
we rot and rot” has become the way we look at ourselves.
Touchstone and Jaques are modernists. Prefiguring modern man, they see life
in objective, scientific, mathematical terms. Jaques’s “Seven Ages” speech de­
scribes human beings in the neutral, detached style of a scientist studying ants.
Audiences today respond strongly to the existential bleakness of the passage,
which is echoed in countless works of twentieth-century literature. But the
meaninglessness of life, which seems simultaneously so fascinating and horrify-
 146 Drama and Perception Shakespeare, Ar You Like It 147

ing to us, is very much a product of the modern way of looking at things existing outside our experience, but experience itself There is no clock in the
objectively rather than emotionally. forest, and none in life as we fundamentally live it.
Rosalind, the normative character in As You Like It, provides the corrective for
Touchstone’s and Jaques’s modernism. Her view is the traditional, medieval
Christian one, which measures man not with mathematical gadgets like a clock, Notes
but by the state of his timeless, immortal soul. In the traditional Christian view,
1. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clock and the Making of the Modem World (Cambridge;
God existed outside of time: “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and
a thousand years as one day,” as Saint Peter put it. Jesus advised his followers to Harvard University Press, 1983), 116-18, etpassim.
2. Ibid., 16.
“take no thought for the morrow,” but instead to live for the moment, the 3. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses ofEnchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York:
existential “present” that surrounds us, which is always invested with eternity. It Vintage, 1977), 94.
is in this spirit that Rosalind advises Orlando to “say a day without the ever”;
unlike God, we cannot experience eternity directly, but we can sense it in the
moment if we truly give ourselves up to it.
A similar attitude toward time is embodied in the Christian view of the day of
judgment, when we shall be transformed not according to some measurable,
mathematical process, but in “the twinkling of an eye.” The sudden transforma­
tions of Duke Frederick and Oliver at the end of the play reflect this kind of
thinking. To us, their conversions seem awkward and “unrealistic,” not because
we do not believe that people change, but rather because we believe that they
only do so gradually, responding in stages to a complex of internal and external
forces, like the man Jaques describes passing from infancy to adulthood to
senility in “seven ages.” In other words, what is bothersome here is that the
clock does not seem to be ticking, as it always is in a modern, realistic play. But
then, “there’s no clock in the forest.”
The forest, as Bruno Bettelheim has noted, is an important archetype in
literature:

Since ancient times the near-impenetrable forest in which we get lost has
symbolized the dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious. If
we have lost the framework which gave structure to our past life and must now
find our own way to become ourselves, and have entered this wilderness with
an as yet undeveloped personality, when we succeed in finding our way out we
shall emerge with a much more highly developed humanity. °

If we can no longer identity with Rosalind’s traditional Christian view of life, we

can at least respond to Bettelheim’s. The unconscious mind, symbolized in As
You Like It hy the Forest of Arden, recognizes no mathematical categories of
space and time. Nor does it recognize the possibility of its own destruction.
With its primary process thinking, it totalizes rather than divides “a minute into
a thousand parts.” It offers us a kind of eternity, not in a mathematical sense, nor
in any mystically religious sense, but in the way it connects us with all existence
rather than breaking it into parts. Fo enter the Forest of Arden, to explore our
unconscious, is to confront what we truly are, not some mindless process

9 then, again, we are not dealing with a completed playscript; perhaps the
Buchner
Woyzeck
“/ don't see it! I don’t see it! My God, why can’t / see it?”
In 1978, I had the opportunity to direct Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck at the Univer­
sity of Calgary in Canada, as part of the production season of the Drama
Department there. Since this German late Romantic play is deeply concerned
with problems of perception, I was naturally delighted to have the opportunity
to deal with it in performance. What follows here, in this chapter, is an account
of how literary criticism and theatrical production can interact in a mutually
productive way, something I have described in another book.' Far from yielding
a sterile, pedantic approach to performing a classical work, the literary and
historical skills that we brought to bear yielded a production that was strikingly
avant-garde. At the same time, the process of rehearsing and performing taught
us important things about the play itself.
One of my deepest convictions is that, in theatrical production, one must
respect the integrity of the playscript, making no changes except out of direst
necessity. Furthermore, while one must certainly interpret a playscript in order
to produce it, a production interpretation should not be something added to a
script, but rather something found in it. Buchner’s Woyzeck, however, is a script
that drastically challenges such assumptions. As is well known, the work is
incomplete, but that is only the beginning of the problem. Four separate drafts
have been identified. The drafts themselves were not discovered until long after
the author’s death; they were in poor condition, and chemicals added to bring
out the writing made them worse instead of better. Parts of the drafts are thus
illegible; in addition, they contain much crossing out and revising within them.
It is not even clear whether Woyzeck is supposed to die at the end of the play—
surely an important matter, whichever way one chooses! How do you remain
true to a script, if you are not even sure what the script is?
Textual problems can sometimes be solved by studying the play’s original
production, or at least by studying the stage conditions at the time of the play’s
composition. But Woyzeck was never produced in Buchner’s lifetime, and it is
difficult to see how it even could have been produced then. Depending on how
one puts the text together, there are anywhere from twenty to thirty scenes, the
148
Buchner, Woyzeck 149
longest of which runs about five minutes. Some contain only two or three
sentences. Given the illusionistic scenery and proscenium stage that were uni­
versally employed in 1837, the year of the playscript’s composition, it is hard to
imagine a production that would not have bogged down in scene shifts. Indeed,
many of the shifts would have lasted longer than the scenes themselves. But
staccato, episodic quality of what we have is merely accidental. Instead of
envisioning some radical new form of theatre for his time, Buchner may simply
have intended to flesh out the scenes later. What we have may be only an
extended outline.
The usual approach to producing Woyzeck is to construct—one cannot even
say reconstruct—what the playscript might have been if Buchner had
finished it. A logical place to start such a construction would be the German
version that has become standard, that of Werner Lehmann, which is available in
English translation by Henry J. Schmidt. Nevertheless, we started with the
other readily available version in English, which is translated and edited by Carl
Mueller. I made this choice for two expedient reasons; First, I had already
performed as an actor in a production using the Mueller version, and thus I
knew that, while preserving the fragmented quality of the lines in the original,
its English was speakable. Second, unlike anybody else, Mueller starts the play
with the scene of Woyzeck shaving the Captain, which seemed, for purely
intuitive reasons at first, to be a better beginning than that of most other
versions, which start with the scene with Woyzeck and Andres in the open field.
The latter scene has Woyzeck imagining strange, apocalyptic sights and sounds;
showing this at the beginning could make the audience decide, far too soon, that
Woyzeck is simply insane, thus closing them off from later scenes m which he is
shown to be by far the sanest character in the play.
The production was to use environmental staging, with scenes taking place
around, among, and even suspended above the audience, in a large storage room
near the main theatre at the university. The choice of staging was again intuitive.
I had seen some of Richard Schechner’s environmental productions and been
excited by the possibilities of this form of staging; the Brechtian “alienation
effect” it provided seemed vaguely right for this particular play, which was, in
fact, a strong influence on Brecht. Furthermore, I hated the two standard theatre
spaces available to the University of Calgary drama department: a cramped, low-
ceilinged studio theatre that was difficult to light, and a large regular theatre
with a thrust stage modeled on the wonderful one at Stratford, Ontario, but
debilitated by several bad compromises, such as the attempt to be a proscenium
stage at the same time. Both the university theatres were also very bad ac-
coustically. The storage room, on the other hand, had a high ceiling, and, being
a kind of leftover space in the building, was full of odd shapes and angles that not
only provided a multitude of playing variations, but also broke up sound better
than either of the two theatres ostensibly designed as performance areas.
 150 Drama and Perception
I would not have hesitated to use a contemporary style of staging, if I felt it
were appropriate, even if it had been possible to reconstruct an original produc­
tion of Woyzeck. Being faithful to the text does not imply an archaeological
reconstruction of an historical production. It means, rather, that one recognizes
that a play is an interrelated process, a delicate web of performance patterns,
which must be uncovered and projected into the staging conditions available!
The director does not explore theatre history, he or she explores a script.
Theatre history may be an important guide for that exploration, but it is not an
end in itself
The music composed for the production provides an example of what I mean.
Here we can see, quite clearly, what Buchner’s intentions were. He calls for a
number of standard German folk songs to be sung in the course of the play, with
altered lyrics. These folk songs would have been well known to the audiences of
his day; the juxtaposition of the simple, charming songs with their incongruous
lyrics in ghastly contexts would have had an exciting effect of disruption on the
audience. This is what, following Jacques Derrida, poststructuralist critics call
deconstruction, in which what is absent affects readers or audiences more than
what is present; a standard framework sets up expectations which are then not
met.
The difficulty with Buchner’s music today, however, is that none of our
audience would have been familiar with the original tunes, or even their overall
style. Thus, deconstruction had to be achieved differently. Our composer and
music director, Gregory Levin of the music department, therefore employed a
basic, modern cabaret style for the tunes, but with inversions, transpositions,
and strange instrumentation as a projecton of the disjointure and conflict in the
original.
In this preliminary work before rehearsal, I became convinced that this idea of
deconstruction provided a v'aluable clue not only to how the music might be
composed, but also to how the production as a whole should operate. The script
employs a number of deconstructive devices. The basic story, for example, if
looked at in outline, is a traditional one: a love triangle, jealousy, murder, and
(assuming that Woyzeck really does die) suicide. Unlike German folk songs,
these elements are perfectly familiar to any Western audience. They have been
used in thousands of stories and plays, most notably in Othello. Lhe source of
their potency is the underlying psychosexual material: the basic Oedipal pattern
of jealousy of the powerful father figure (the drum major who seduces Marie);
the castration fear expressed through Woyzeck’s sexual impotence; ambivalent
feelings of desire and resentment toward the mother figure, Marie; and finally,
the resultant and equally ambivalent feelings of rage and guilt. Buchner’s prin­
cipal deconstruction of the jealousy plot is in his inversion of the hero: instead of
making Woyzeck an upper- or at least middle-class figure, Buchner sets him at
the very bottom of society—poor, illiterate, and oppressed. Othello was a leader,
a general; Woyzeck is a private soldier. Othello was exploited by a lower-class
Buchner, Woyzeck 151
subordinate, lago; Woyzeck is exploited by upper-class, authority figures like
the Doctor and the Captain.
But the other major deconstructive device is the script’s very fragmentation
and crudeness. By these means, the hostile and sexual material, instead of being
disguised behind a facade of beautiful poetry and a smoothly linear plot, is laid
bare. Instead of blank verse, there is verbal awkwardness, parataxis, inar­
ticulateness. Instead of a linear plot, there is an episodic, fragmented, disor­
ganized jumble. The script is remarkably frank. Excrement and copulation are
called by their real names. We know, quite bluntly, what Marie and the Drum
Major are doing, and what Marie and Woyzeck are not doing. In this regard, it is
significant that the script contains innumerable references to animals; in fact, the
cast actually includes three animals—a cat, a monkey, and a horse—the last of
which urinates on stage. Man’s animal nature is exposed here; just as Buchner
inverts the social hierarchy of traditional drama by making Woyzeck lower class,
he also inverts the traditional natural ordering of man and beast, or, in psycho-
sexual terms again, of ego and id.
With fragmentation and inversion as operating principles, then, we were
ready to work on the set. The environmental setting, designed by Douglas
McCullough of the drama department, worked not just as a jazzy updating of
the play, but as a highly effective device for disorienting the audience in the
same way that the multiple scenes and inversions provide disorientation in the
script. MuCullough’s first design actually was strongly oriented toward one side
of the room, which shows how, even in a sophisticated stage designer, this
proscenium convention has a strong unconscious hold. But the final design had
no identifiable orientation. One never knew where to look next; an audience area
could suddenly become an acting area, and vice versa. In watching the pro­
gression of scenes, it was not only necessary to turn 360 degrees; one also had to
look up and down on various levels; there was even a bridge across the middle of
the room, and nets that were strung above the audience in which the actors
could play the scenes in the pond. One moment the audience would have to
imagine that the entire room was a large carnival tent; the next, that they were in
the street peeping into Marie’s room; the next, that they were actually under
water, looking up at Woyzeck swimming out after the knife that he had just
tossed into the pond. This disorientation of audience perception was to prove
the most effective and intrusive aspect of the production, for reasons that I shall
elaborate on below.
As we moved into rehearsal, we discovered, if we had not guessed already,
that Woyzeck is an extremely difficult play to perform. It is not just that the
characters are grotesque and the emotions raw; there are also enormous practical
problems involved in a play with twenty-eight scenes. It was hard for the actors
to tell where they were in the play; using the Brechtian device of announcing
scenes by slides was actually more necessary for them than for the audience.
The actors constantly had to dash from one position to another as the scenes
 152 Drama and Perception
rushed along phantasmagorically. Scenes are often supposed to begin at a fever
pitch, for which the actor would have no time to prepare, and then end perhaps
thirty seconds later. Nor is the episodic nature of the play limited to the scenic
structure. Individual scenes themselves are full of abrupt changes, and individ­
ual speeches are characterized by fragmentation, parataxis, and non sequitur.
Just memorizing a speech like the following could be a maddening process:
I’m going. Anything’s possible. The bitch! Anything’s possible.—The
weathers nice. Captain sir. Look, a beautiful, hara, gray sky. You’d almost
like to pound a nail in up there and hang yourself on it. And only because of
that little dash between Yes and Yes again . . . and No. Captain, sir: Yes and
No: did No make Yes or Yes make No? I must think about that.^
Finally, the text seemed to present major problems that demanded decisions:
does Woyzeck die, or not? Is he mad, or not? Is the murder the result of his
being oppressed, or is it because of something within Woyzeck?
And, of course, there was still the underlying problem of what text to use,
with which scenes, and in which order. Fhe Mueller text that we were using
incorporates several scenes from earlier drafts of the play, and has been severely
criticized for doing so. One such scene in particular has a character identified
only as the Barber talking to an army Sergeant at the Inn. Because Woyzeck is
employed by the Captain as his personal barber, and because the Barber
character speaks of scientific experiments being performed on him, Mueller
gives the speeches to Woyzeck. Other versions universally delete the scene, on
the grounds that it seems to be among those that Buchner discarded, but also, I
think, because the speeches sound too educated for the Woyzeck character as he
is popularly coneeived. Woyzeck is supposed to be stupid and inarticulate—one
major critic has even celebrated his inarticulateness as a great dramatic break­
through^—yet the Barber talks like this:
My name is science. Every week for my scientific career I get half a guilder.
You rnu^n t cut me in two or I’ll go hungry. I’m a Spinosa pericyclia; I have a
Latin behind. I am a living skeleton. All Xiankind studies me. (129)
But, on hearing such wonderful speeches in rehearsal, I was reluctant to make
cuts. There was something about Mueller’s liberal approach to the material that
seemed better than the pedantic approach of the others, especially that of the
restrictive Lehmann version. Mueller seemed to have a better sense of what the
play is than Lehmann did, although it was difficult at that time for me to say
why this was so.
For the time being, then, I left the textual problems alone. As a practical
matter, I knew it would be much easier to start with a liberal version of the play,
and to cut back later, than to have to add material if we finally decided it was
necessary. And in the meantime, there was plenty to worry about besides the
Buchner, Woyzeck 153
ultimate form of the text, as the actors tried to learn the difficult music and to
work their way through the complicated speeches.
It often happens in rehearsal that one becomes aware, through repetition, of
important motifs in the script that went unnoticed in private reading, and that
have not been commented upon by the critics. As I worked with the actors on
their roles, I became impressed by how much looking and listening there is in the
play. Woyzeck imagines that he sees visions, that he sees the knife, that he sees
Marie and the Drum Major copulating, that he hears the music of their dancing.
The Doctor is constantly examining Woyzeck, even when they pass by accident
in the street. The carnival barker asks the audience to look at the monkey, and
later at the horse. Woyzeck looks at Marie and tries literally to see her sinfulness:
“I don’t see it! I don’t see it! My God, why can’t I see it! (122), he shouts.
Checking the original text, I noticed the German verbs sehen and horen—”to see”
and “to hear”—recurring constantly, both alone and in compound forms like
ansehen, “to look at.” Often the references are casual and apparently unrelated to
the story, as when the Doctor says to his medical students, “Gentlemen, I find
myself on the roof like David when he beheld Bathsheba. But all I see are the
Parisian panties of the girls’ boarding school drying in the garden” (127). There
are numerous references to eyes, and to blindness: “Take your eyes to the Jew’s,”
says Marie to her next-door neighbor, “and let him clean them for you” (112).
“Why did the street-lamp cleaner forget to wipe my eyes—everything’s dark”
(126), complains Woyzeck. Marie tells her little boy to close his eyes and go to
sleep, or else the Sandman will look into them and make him blind (116). There
are also gratuitous references to ears, as when the Doctor orders Woyzeck to
wiggle his.
This fascination with perception is not unusual in late romantic literature,
influenced as it was by the theories of Kant. Kant distinguished between
phenomena, the sense impressions that we receive, and noumena, the source of
these impressions that remains forever beyond our direct knowledge. This
theory provides a key as to how Woyzeck operates as a text, and how it should
operate in a performance. The play has mystery at its very core. Woyzeck wants
to see noumena, but sees only phenomena, as he expresses in the anguished cry,
“My God, why can’t I see it?” The play embodies a philosophy of life as
something essentially ambiguous and unknowable. In this regard, the un­
finished nature of the playscript, with its multiple drafts, must be the result of
something more than just Buchner’s early death. Buchner himself, one might
say, was in the same position as Woyzeck, trying to resolve problems that are
inherently unresolvable. Woyzeck cannot define his world; Buchner could not
define Woyzeck: Is Woyzeck’s crime caused, by his oppression, his diet of peas,
his insane jealousy? Or is it free-willed, an existential act of moral righteousness,
a revolt against an immoral and chaotic world? The play gives us plenty of
evidence for both views; it is a problem inherent in the real-life crime upon
which the play is based. Claude Levi-Strauss, the structuralist anthropologist.
154 Drama and Perception
has noted that myths tend to multiply themselves in an endless number of
versions; he points out that “since the purpose of myth is to provide a logical
model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it
happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number of [versions]
will be generated.”'* In writing Woyzeck, Buchner found himself in the same
position as mythmakers, trying to resolve a contradiction that is unresolvable,
and hence generating multiple drafts and revisions, as well as a dramatic style
that is jarring and deconstructive.
As rehearsals continued, there, I came to the conclusion that a production of
Woyzeck should not take the route of constructing or reconstructing an ideal text
“as Buchner would have completed it.” I strongly suspected that, even if
Buchner had lived another fifty years, the script would have remained in rough
and incomplete form, with perhaps many more versions. Indeed, is it not the
very roughness of the script that is a source of its fascination for us? If there were
an easy answer as to why Woyzeck stabs Marie, the play would be greatly
reduced in significance; instead of mystery, we would have the kind of simplistic
explanation for crime that television drama provides us with every week.
Everywhere one looks in the script, there is paradox. The carnival Barker tells
us that the horse, which can count by stomping its hoof, is both a man and a
beast. Woyzeck tells the Captain that the earth is “hot as coals in hell,” but that
he, Woyzeck, is “cold as ice” (121). In the disputed scene between Woyzeck and
the Sergeant, Woyzeck maintains that “a man with courage is a dirty dog”
(129)—i.e., a coward. Woyzeck accuses Marie of “a sin so swollen and big it
stinks to smoke the angels out of heaven” (122), yet is astounded to find her still
so beautiful. The Doctor upbraids Woyzeck for having urinated on the street:
“The musculus constrictor vesicae is controlled by your will,” he insists, “In
Mankind alone we see glorified the individual’s will to freedom” (117). This last is
an excellent example of an unresolvable contradiction. Urination, like other
bodily functions, is both free and determined. One can, more or less, choose
when and where to urinate, but one cannot choose not to urinate at all. This
homely example reverberates with larger questions of human freedom, includ­
ing the question of Woyzeck’s guilt in killing Marie—and, for that matter,
Marie’s guilt in having the affair with the Drum Major. The affair was a sin; on
the other hand, she was driven to it by Woyzeck’s neglect and impotence. Yet
that very neglect and impotence are caused by his overwork and diet of peas,
both of which he took on in order to provide for her and their son. As one
explores the circumstances surrounding the characters’ actions, one alternates
saying “guilty,” “innocent,” “guilty,” until the very concepts of guilt and inno­
cence come to seem ridiculous abstractions.
As we reached the final stage of rehearsal, the performance patterns in the
script became clearer. The balancing of guilt and innocence, like that of
Woyzeck’s sanity and madness, is central to the play’s dynamic; in fact, the script
Buchner, Woyzeck 155
embodies a series of related, balanced ambiguities, which can be listed as
follows:
Guilt Innocence
Madness Sanity
Hot Cold
Black White
Evil Good
Alive Dead
Human Beast
Woyzeck tries to make sense of these ambiguities, but they defy his understand­
ing. Man is both human and beast. Marie is both innocent and guilty, both good
and evil. The murder itself is both a sane deed of retributive justice, and an
insane act driven by inner voices and visions.
In performance, then, the play should not be presented as a puzzle that has
been solved, but rather as a puzzle to be experienced. Any production of Woyzeck
should maintain rather than resolve the ambiguities, and thus maintain some of
the very roughness and incompleteness of the script. Needless to say, in our
production we kept in the scene between Woyzeck and the Sergeant. As I
started earlier, I believe that an underlying reason that so many editors and
translators are repelled by this scene is that it presents us with a Woyzeck who
seems too intelligent and articulate. One of the critical cliches that has come to
be attached to the play is that it is “the first tragedy of the common man,” and it
does not seem proper for a common man to spout Latin phrases like Spinosa
pericyclia,” or to have such a well-developed sense of irony on the matter of
physical courage. But, as a matter of fact, Woyzeck is not a very common
individual. He is poor, and uneducated in the formal sense, but he is constantly
searching for meaning in a callous and indifferent world, and his speech echoes
the learned phrases of his educated superiors. Even before he learns about
Marie’s unfaithfulness, he is theorizing—about the Freemasons, about
toadstools and the arcane patterns he believes them to make, about heaven and
hell, about the nature of sin. For a truly common man, Buchner gives us
Andres, Woyzeck’s army buddy, who never questions anything and has no
moral sense at all, being content throughout the play to sing and drink and sleep.
The scene with the Sergeant works in performance as an important counter­
point to a view of Woyzeck as too common; lest the audience merely dismiss the
character as too low and beastlike to be more than a psychopathological curi­
osity, this strangely calm scene lets Woyzeck express his moral and humanitarian
views, showing him to be more sensitive and intelligent than anyone else in the
play. In other words, the scene shows the audience the human side of the
human/beast paradox.
 156 Drama and Perception Buchner, Woyzeck 157

But in addition to including this controversial scene, I tried to show the disorientation. The performance left the audience with no simple answers, but
multiple and paradoxical nature of the play through a number of deviees in rather with big questions.
staging. For example, as the audience entered the performance area, numerous
scenes were already taking place, simultaneously. Indeed, even before they
entered, the audience were confronted with soldiers from the play marching in Notes
and around the building. Once inside the performanee area, they saw Woyzeck
already shaving the Captain, Marie telling stories to her child, the Doctor 1. Richard Hornby, Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production (Austin: Univer­
performing experiments, Andres asleep in his bunk, all at once. The experienee sity of Texas Press, 1977).
2. Buchner, 121. Subsequent quotations of Woyzeck, taken from this edition, will be cited as page
for the audience was thus much like that of the reader confronting multiple
numbers in the text.
versions of the script; oddly enough, I was being true to my belief in not 3. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: I lill Wang, 1961).
changing scripts by accepting the fragmented, multiple form of this script as 4. Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of .Myth,” in The Structuralists from Marx to Levi-
being complete. It is complete in its incompleteness. Strauss, ed. Richard and Fernande DeGeorge, (Garden fiity, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 193.
In sum, the unifying principle for this play can be deseribed by the phrase,
“the ambiguity of perception.” The incompleteness of the seript arises from this
ambiguity, as do the multiple paradoxes within the script. And just as Woyzeck
tries to make sense of the paradoxes of his world, so too did the audience try to
make sense of the paradoxes of performance. It seemed to take place in a
specified room, yet it was also going on outside. Did it start when one entered
that room, or fifteen minutes later.^ On entering, the audience were shown to
their seats by actors. At the end of various seenes, the actors did not go
anywhere, but simply stayed in the room, sometimes continuing to behave in
character, and sometimes watching the next seene. Fo the paradoxes on the list,
then, could be added those of performanee/life, theatre/outside world, and
character/performer. Which was which.^ Did No make Yes, or Yes make No?
The principle of the ambiguity of perception provided the key to the question
of whether or not Woyzeck dies at the end of the play. Here I differ strongly
with Mueller, who for once beeomes alarmingly specifie: His Woyzeck is not
only alive at the end of the play, but is present at the scene in the morgue,
looking at Marie’s body. According to Mueller’s stage direetion, which is not
found in any of the original versions, Woyzeck stands among the spectators,
“dumbly looking at the body of Marie; he is bound, the dogmatic atheist, tall,’
haggard, timid, good-natured, seientific” (138). I rejected this, and left Woyzeck
m the pond. As before, all scenes were visible simultaneously; the pond was
achieved by having a large cargo net stretehed above the audience. Woyzeck
tossed in the knife from above, whieh of course fell through the net to the floor,
and then crawled out over the audience, on the net, searching for it. We then
went immediately into the next scene, leaving Woyzeck hanging there. Was he
alive or dead? It was impossible to say. At the end of the morgue scene, the final
one of the play, the room lights were turned on for the first time, and the actors
walked briskly out of the room, leaving the audience alone for the first time.
Woyzeck was still in the net. Was it time to get up and go home? Was the actor in
character, or being himself? The final state remained one of confusion and

10
Strindberg
The Father
“Now there are only shadows, lurking in the undergrowth. ”
The excessive use of biographical criticism with regard to Strindberg’s plays has
tended to obscure the playwright’s deeper meanings. While Strindberg’s The
Father may have had its genesis in Strindberg’s domestic problems and anti­
feminist mania, the playscript in its final form is not really an attack on
Strindberg’s wife in particular, nor on liberated women in general.
The outline of the play is well known: A man and his wife argue over whether
their daughter should receive a religious education. The husband is a free­
thinker, the wife conventionally religious. In explaining their respective rights
over the child, the husband happens to mention that one can never be certain
about a child’s paternity. This interesting fact surprises the wife, who questions
her husband about it; her very questions raise doubts in the husband about his
wife’s fidelity. The uncertainty over the paternity of his daughter gradually
drives him mad, and he dies. This plot is simple to the point of austerity, which
underlines the essentially allegorical nature of the play. The Father is more like a
fable than a realistic expose. The husband and wife, called simply “Adolf” (or,
even more emblematically, “The Captain”) and “Laura,” are not depicted as
rounded, complex, real-life people. Strindberg provides very little background
on them, or realistic detail; we do not even discover their last name.
Instead, the Captain and Laura stand for masculine and feminine principles.
With the Captain are associated all the attributes traditionally assigned to males
in our culture: he is both a military man and a scientist, and is above all a man of
reason, of logic. Laura, despite having some vaguely feminist views (the Captain
says, for example, that she and the daughter “do nothing but talk about men
being made to see that women can do this and that,”' is depicted as traditionally
feminine, relying on religion, superstition, and intuition. The fact that Strind­
berg chose to make religion the catalyst in the plot shows how much this is not
ultimately an antifeminist play. Feminism, then as now, was generally seen as an
attack on tradition, on religion, on family. Yet note that in 'The Father it is the
Captain who is modernist and antireligious, and who proposes to split up his
158
Strindberg, The Father 159
family. Torvald Helmer, in Ibsen’s A Doll House, cited religion and family in
trying to persuade his wife Nora not to leave home; here the Captain wants his
daughter to leave home, to study with a freethinker in town, to become an
atheist, and to be independent. If Laura were truly a feminist, she would want
these very things for her daughter, to prove that “women can do this and that”;
instead, her feminism, which is never much articulated in the play, seems to be
merely a pawn in her game with her husband.
The nature of this game is made clear from their very first scene together.
Masculine and feminine principles, reason and intuition (Freud’s secondary and
primary process thinking), confront each other. The Captain is shown going over
the family accounts, an appropriately rational activity, with which she, typ­
ically, does not wish to concern herself. In the argument over the raising of their
child! he cites the law, again a rational strategy; she knows nothing of law. He
then makes a joke out of their disagreement:
I want her to live in town; you want her to live at home. The mathematical
mean would be for her to stop at the railway station, midway between home
and town. You see? It’s a deadlock. (16—17)
The witticism is excessively logical and sophisticated, and is of course lost on his
wife, who merely replies, “Then the lock must be forced” (17). Throughout this
scene, Laura is continually asking questions: Does she have to keep accounts
now? Does a mother have no say in the religious upbringing of her child? Can’t
one tell who a child’s father is? The Captain, by contrast, is the man who knows,
apparently an expert on finances, law, and child-rearing, in addition to science
and the military—until he confronts the one thing that he does not and cannot
know, which is the paternity of their child.
Significantly, the thing that drives him mad is the uncertainty of the matter. A
less discerning playwright would have had Laura simply taunt the Captain with
the fact of infidelity; adultery is of course a traditional theme in drama, par­
ticularly French drama, with which Strindberg would have been familiar as
result of his stays in Paris. The silly husband driven frantic by his fear of being
cuckolded is a favorite theme of French farceurs; Strindberg gives it a twist by
making the Captain afraid that he has not been cuckolded, for only if he actually
has can he know for certain. Laura always presents the matter hypothetically:
“Supposing I am telling the truth now when I say: Bertha is my child but not
yours. Supposing . . .” (28). The Captain begs her to verify these suppositions:
“Free me from uncertainty. Fell me straight out that it [her infidelity] is so, and 1
will forgive you in advance” (39). But she refuses to end his doubt; m fact, when
asked point blank who the father is, she tells him “you are” (40), which only
serves to generate more agonizing uncertainty. Doubt, not jealousy, destroys
him.
Such careful patterning on Strindberg’s part reveals, again, that the Captain
and Laura are something different from realistic portraits of Strindberg and his
160 Drama and Perception
wife. Nor are they merely late nineteenth-century “Everyman” vs. “Every-
women” struggling on a feminist battleground, for they are not really typical
individuals of their period, nor of any other period. They are too abstract, and
should not be considered people at all in the historical sense. Again, they
personify abstractions, which can be described various ways, but perhaps best
through the terminology of one of Strindberg’s major interests, oriental religion:
the Captain and Laura stand for the yang and the yin, the male and female,
p)ositive and negative principles that underlie all existence and keep it in dynamic
balance. Of these, Alan Watts has written:
The insight which lies at the root of Far Eastern culture is that opposites are
relational and so fundamentally harmonious. Conflict is always comparatively
superficial, for there can be no ultimate conflict when the pairs of opposites
are mutually interdependent.^
It is this mutual interdependence that characterizes the relationship between the
Captain and Laura. Although critics have written of Laura’s supposed “cunning
savagery,”’ and described her as “a demon, a nightmare, ... a fanatic,”"’ she is
actually characterized as neither clever nor consciously sadistic. Her behavior is
intuitive, not cerebral. We are told that she has long had a tendency toward
mindless obstinacy:
As a child she used to lie down and sham dead until they gave in to her. Then
she would calmly hand back whatever she’d set her mind on, explaining it
wasn’t the thing she wanted, but simply to get her own way. (13)
Her willfulness is instinctive and obsessive; although actresses have often played
her erroneously as a clever schemer, consciously manipulating the Captain’s
downfall, she actually behaves unconsciously and automatically, always in reac­
tion to initiatives taken by the Captain himself. A significant passage shows this,
in her little argument with the Captain over the household accounts:
LAURA. Am I disturbing you?
CAPTAIN. Not in the least. Housekeeping money, I suppose?
LAURA. Yes, housekeeping money.
CAPTAIN. If you put the accounts down there, I will go through them.
LAURA. Accounts?
CAPTAIN. Yes.
LAURA. Do you expect me to keep accounts now?
CAPTAIN. Of course you must keep accounts. Our position’s most precarious,
and if we go bankrupt, we must have accounts to show. Otherwise we could
be accused of negligence.
LAURA. It’s not my fault if we’re in debt.
CAPTAIN. That’s what the accounts will show.
LAURA. It’s not my fault the tenant farmer doesn’t pay.
Strindberg, The Father 161
CAPTAIN. Who was it recommended him so strongly? You. Why did you
recommend such a—shall we call him a scatterbrain?
LAURA. Why did you take on such a scatterbrain?
He initiates the topic of their financial precariousness, and she reacts, drawing
him out and making him more and more angry. When he calls the tenant farmer
a scatterbrain, she does not oppose him directly, and insist that the fellow is
actually hardworking and intelligent; instead, she accepts the Captains premise,
but asks a question about it that exposes his part of the blame m hiring the man
in the first place. Like a ju jitsu wrestler, she blithely turns her attackers own
force against him. , , i mi..
This active/passive, yang/yin interdependence informs the whole play. Males
initiate; females draw out the initiative to its own self-destruction. The whole
issue of the doubtfulness of paternity is initiated by a man—Nojd, the trooper
who got a servant girl pregnant. He first points out how the girl led him on: It
the girl’s not game, nothing don’t happen” (10). The pattern of male-female
interdependence being established, he goes on to point out the crucial fact that
paternity, from the man’s point of view, is always uncertain: “You cant tell it
you’ve always been the only one” (10). Shortly after, it is the Captain who passes
on this information to Laura. If Strindberg had wanted to make Laura into a
cunning demon, he could have had her raise the point herself, but instead she is
utterly unaware of it, and is even surprised when her husband brings it up:
CAPTAIN. Xhe law doesn’t say who the child s father is.
LAURA. Well, people know that for themselves.
CAPTAIN. Discerning poeple say that’s what one can never know.
LAURA. How extraordinary! Can’t one tell who a childs father is?
The issue of the essential doubtfulness of paternity, which the Captain himself
raises here as part of an argument to gain control of his child, ironically becomes
the means by which he loses not only the child, but also his reason, and finally
his very life. Far from being destroyed by Laura, he instead destroys hiinself; m
his drive toward self-destruction, she is not his antagonist, but rather his
^^Like^ all self-destructive tragic heroes, however, in destroying himself the
Captain at the same time defines himself. His drive toward catastrophe is
supremely rational, forever masculine and assertive. Even when he discusses his
own impending mental breakdown, he does so in detached, logical terms:
My emotions are still pretty well under control, but only
power remains intact. And you have so gnawed and gnawed at my will that at
162 Drama and Perception Strindberg, The Father 163

any moment it may slip its cogs, and then the whole bag of tricks will go to
pieces. ... By behaving in this way you have made me so full of suspicion
that my judgment is fogged and my mind is beginning to stray. This means
that the insanity you have been waiting for is on its way and may come at any
moment. The question you now have to decide is whether it is more to your
advantage for me to be well or ill. (38).
faces, mocking his pretension. Oedipus blind could “see” more than he had
before, recognizing his own weakness and shame; the Captain, strait-jacketed,
now recognizes that all his strength and reasoning were as nothing against the
blank indifference of the universe, but he is the more heroic for recognizing his
limitations. Now he knows who he truly is.

There is an unwitting acknowledgment here of his own limitations; his scien­

tific, rational approach to life will not survive against its ultimate ambiguity. Notes
Eventually, the yin principle that Laura personifies stands for the entire natural 1. Strindberg, 14. Subsequent quotations of The Father, taken from this edition, will be cited as
order, mysterious and indifferent to man’s attempt to understand and control it. page numbers in the text.
Strindberg places the Captain in an entire household of females: his wife, their 2. Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: New American Library, 1959), 170.
daughter, the nurse, and the unseen mother-in-law. All are pietistic and naive to 3. V. J. McGill, August Strindberg: The Bedeviled Viking (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965),
the point of stupidity. Strindberg’s point is not that real women are actually like 270.
4. Gunnar Ollen, August Strindberg (Sew York: Ungar, 1972), 43.
this, but rather that nature is. Written in 1887, the play is a sendup of the
prevalent nineteenth-century scientific and technological optimism, which saw
man as capable of achieving one discovery or invention after another, without
limit, until he would become godlike. Now, in the late twentieth century, we can
see what Strindberg saw—that nature, which seems so yielding, can destroy us
with our own force. The atomic bomb, the energy crisis, and the environmental
crisis are all examples of this rebound effect; nature is responding to us as the
females in Strindberg’s play respond to the Captain.
In the final scene, the Captain draws his revolver on these maddening females;
it is a phallic symbol, a symbol of technology, and a symbol of assertiveness, all
in one. But, like the gasoline that disappeared from our cars, the cartridges have
been removed from the gun, turning this symbol of assertiveness into one of
impotence.
The symbolism is extended, as the nurse eases the Captain into a strait-jacket,
all the while talking to him so soothingly that he does not understand what is
going on. But before his final, apoplectic stroke, he has a moment of recognition:

That’s the horror of it. If they had some foundation, there would at least be
something to catch hold of, to cling to. Now there are only shadows, lurking
in the undergrowth, peering out with grinning faces. It’s like fighting with air,
a mock battle with blank cartridges. Reality, however deadly, puts one on
one’s mettle, nerves body and soul for action, but as it is . . . my thoughts
dissolve in fog, my brain grinds a void till it catches fire. (55)

At the time he was writing The Father, Strindberg had been reading Greek
tragedy, whose influence can be seen here. The Captain is like Oedipus in
Sophocles’ play, the man who thought he knew everything, who had solved the
riddle of the Sphinx, who was confident that he could similarly find the killer of
Laius and cure Thebes, but who was instead to confront fundamental things
about himself. The Captain, so assertive, rational, and confident, pursues his
logic to its limit, where he perceives shadows in the undergrowth with grinning

11
Ibsen
The Master Builder
“/ must have willed it. Wished it. Desired it.
It has long been known that Ibsen’s late plays—7’^e Master Builder, Little Eyolf,
John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken—represent a departure from the
famous realistic plays of his middle period. Even Bernard Shaw, who had been
obsessively concerned with Ibsen the moralist, described Ibsen as now having
“completed the task of warning the world against its idols and anti-idols,” and
instead having now written “tragedies of the dead.”' But more than this, the late
plays demonstrate Ibsen’s greatness, both as a significant (though independent)
figure in the symbolist movement of the 1890s, and as a significant precursor of
twentieth-century literary movements. In his late plays Ibsen anticipates such
twentieth-century concerns as the function of the artist, the use of personal
experience in literature, and the importance of the inner life of both the
conscious and the unconscious mind.
The Master Builder, published in 1892, shows all these concerns. Its hero is an
artist, Halvard Solness, a successful architect (or “master builder,” as he prefers).
Perfection of the work seems to have blocked perfection of the life; his artistic
success has coincided with contempt for his clients, ruthlessness toward his
associates, the loss of his children, the mental breakdown of his wife. He is
restless, alienated, and afraid of being superseded by younger architects. Into
his life comes a strange, alluring, naive young woman, who seems to know his
deepest secrets, and who claims to have had a near-sexual affair with him ten
years before, when she had been little more than a child. In contrast to the drab,
realistic world in which he works, she talks of trolls and magic kingdoms and
harps in the air, fascinating him and ultimately leading him to destruction.
Solnesss psychological problems—a fear of growing artistic and sexual impo­
tence, and a fascination with a young girl—reflect those of Ibsen at the time he
wrote the play. The Master Builder is Ibsen’s most personal play. Indeed, it has
become common for critics to compare the details of the play with the pattern of
Ibsens career as a playwright: Solness began by designing churches, then
shifted to houses, and finally designs houses with steeples; Ibsen, at the time the
play was written, had gone through three similar phases, first writing Romantic
164
Ibsen, 'The Master Builder 165
plays, then realistic plays, and finally realistic plays with Romantic overtones
like The Master Builder itself The shift in style in 'The Master Builder is not truly a
reversion to romanticism, however; the play instead looks forward to the work of
the surrealists and expressionists of our century, in its exploration of inner
psychological states.
The realistic plays of Ibsen’s middle period were far more than simplistic
problem plays taking moralistic stands on social issues.^ Nevertheless, they did
follow standard realistic conventions, which, as I shall attempt to show in this
chapter, provide a point of departure for the pivotal late play, 'The Master Builder.
In A Doll House (1879), for example, we find ordinary, middle-class characters
inhabiting a mundane, realistic world. The setting is an ordinary bourgeois
living room. The characters’ concerns are work, family, love, money. The action
arises from conflicts between characters rather than within individual ones;
Nora has forged a note to get money to treat her sick husband, Torvald Helmer,
but this caused her no inner anguish—if anything, she is proud of it. Her
problems arise when the loan shark, Krogstad, discovers the forgery and uses it
to blackmail her. She fears being exposed (because she thinks that her husband
will take the blame himself and go to prison), but she still feels no guilt.
All the information needed to drive the plot forward in A Doll House, as in
Ibsen’s other realistic plays, is provided by an extraordinary amount of exposi­
tion, necessitated by the late point of attack of the plot—in A Doll House, long
after the forgery, after the husband’s recovery, and just as the note is at last about
to be paid off A convention of this kind of realistic exposition is that it is always
presented to the audience as factual; even though Nora has always cheerfully lied
whenever it was necessary to cover up her scheme, when she explains it all to her
confidant, Mrs. Linde, we take her every word for truth. This truth about the
past never comes into question and is always perfectly clear. The play moves
toward a climax in which Nora’s husband is exposed as a hypocrite (instead of
taking the blame himself, as Nora had always expected he would, he plots a
coverup), and in which Nora herself bitterly disappointed in Helmer and seeing
her whole life in a new light, leaves him to cast out on her own. It is a powerfully
dramatic conclusion, but it is not in any sense a psychological one.
Although Ibsen’s later realistic plays, such as Rosmersholm or Hedda Gahler, are
decidedly psychological, the psychology still exists within the same framework
of realistic convention. The exposition, again, is presented as clear, uncontradic­
tory truth. Thus when Rebecca West, in her famous speech, describes how she
drove Rosmer’s wife mad, it comes out in a blunt, straightforward manner:
I wanted Beata out of here, one way or another. But even so, I never dreamed
it could happen. With every step ahead that I gambled on, it was as if
something inside me cried out: “No further! Not one step further!” And yet I
couldn't stop. I had to try for a tiny bit more. Just the least little bit. And then
again—and always again—until it happened. That’s the way these things do
happen.’
166 Drama and Perception
Rebecca is describing her own psychological turmoil, but her tone is clinical, as
detached as a doctor describing a patient. Her conclusion—’’That’s the way
these things do happen”—is a profound insight, but again, is meant to be taken
as straight truth by the audience, as is her whole speech. The audience may well
be shocked by Rebecca’s compulsion, but they experience no disorientation
themselves. The psychology here is vivid, pitiable, even terrifying, but defi­
nitely understood. It is still realistic, in the sense of being clear and comprehensi­
ble.
The Master however, is in fact a deconstruction of Ibsen’s own realism.
Using conventions that would have been familiar to late nineteenth-century
audiences (and which he himself had used extensively before), Ibsen first creates
apparently realistic characters in a realistic situation. Gradually, however, he
moves into his hero’s mind, to an inner world of unconscious desires and exotic
symbolism. Written at the time of Freud’s early work, the play anticipates much
of Freud’s theory, exposing the existence of the unconscious mind, the signifi­
cance of dreams and mistakes, the ambivalence of emotion, and the unconscious
belief in the omnipotence of thought. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century tech­
niques are thus combined in the play, which represents a major turning point in
the history of dramatic literature.
The play opens in Solness’s “plainly furnished workroom” (785), immediately
establishing a realistic, mundane atmosphere for the audience. Solness’s two
assistants, old Knut Brovik and his son Ragnar, are seated, busy with blueprints
and calculations, while a young bookkeeper, Kaja Fosli, stands at her ledger. We
are in the everyday world of work. Solness enters, and in a brief aside with the
girl, Kaja, reveals to the audience that the two are intimate. There follows a
scene between Solness and Knut Brovik. Brovik is ill, and probably dying; he is
concerned that his son be given a commission to establish his career as an
independent architect. Unaware of Solness’s relationship with Kaja, Brovik
speaks of his son wanting to marry her. Solness is callous toward Brovik, and
frightened of giving up a commission to a younger man.
Thus, all the materials for a realistic problem play are here: the realistic
setting with a workaday atmosphere, the sexual hypocrisy, the problems of
aging and loss of power. The audience would expect that young Ragnar would
ultimately triumph, winning a commission and the girl, while Solness would
either die or somehow become reconciled to his loss. The audience would also
expect to draw moral conclusions about the nature and abuses of power, the
importance of kindness and fidelity, the limits of individualism. Instead, the trio
of Brovik, Ragnar, and Kaja turn out to be relatively unimportant in the play.
After a few brief scenes, Ibsen introduces a raisonneur, in the character of Dr.
Herdal; in his scene with Solness, a major incident warns us that we are in for a
very different experience from the realistic power struggle that we were led to
expect.
Dr. Herdal tries to get Solness to see that he is really very well established,
with nothing to fear from young Ragnar, but Solness is vehement. “The change
Ibsen, The Master Builder 167
is coming, “ he insists. “Someday youth will come here, knocking at the door—”
(800), when lo and behold, there actually is a knock at the door, and youth does
enter, in the person of Hilda Wangel, a girl whom Solness had met ten years
earlier. The moment is one of the great coups de theatre in the history of drama,
grotesque, funny, shocking—perhaps even awkward. (It has often been ridiculed
or parodied.) What critics have not recognized is that the literal representation of
a metaphor, such as this one, is something that Freud was noticing about the
time the play was written, as a common element in dreams. In The Interpretation
of Dreams, published in 1900, Freud was to give many examples, such as the
dream of a horse frolicking in a field of the finest oats being an obvious
manifestation of the expression, “feeling one’s oats.”“^ Expressionist playwrights,
in the early decades of the twentieth century, were often to use the concrete
manifestation of aphorisms as a device for inducing shock and laughter; Ibsen
uses it for the same purpose here, starting his deconstruction of the realistic
atmosphere and action that he had so carefully established.
The scene with Hilda, despite its bizarre opening, at first seems realistic. She
is no imaginary construct of Solness’s, but a real flesh-and-blood girl, the
daughter of a public health officer (a position of social responsibility, perhaps
echoing Ibsen’s own An Enemy of the People). Even Dr. Herdal has met her before,
and recognizes her now. She has real bodily needs, too: she mentions that her
underwear need to be washed, that “they’re real grimy” (802). The grimy
underwear represents Ibsen’s sly evocation of naturalism, the extreme form of
realism that depicted man in purely physical, animal terms. The audience seems
to find itself on familiar ground once again.
The familiarity is an illusion, however. Dr. Herdal soon exits, leaving Solness
and Hilda alone. Gradually, without a seam showing, the tenor of the scene
changes. Grimy reality melts away, to be replaced by something like a dream.
Hilda describes the occasion of their first meeting, when she was a girl of twelve
or thirteen. Solness had built a church tower in her town, and dedicated it by
climbing to the top and hanging a wreath on the weather vane. In the late
twentieth century, we hardly need to be told of the sexual symbolism of
climbing a tower, or of the vane and the wreath, but to the audience of the time it
would have seemed evocative and disturbing. More important, however, is what
follows: Hilda says that she and Solness met afterward, alone, and that he first
promised that he would come back in ten years, carry her off “like a troll” (806),
and buy her a kingdom. Then, she says, he held her in his arms, bent her back,
and kissed her—’’many times” (807). Solness is shocked and dazed, first denying
the incident and then saying,
I must have willed it. Wished it. Desired it. And so—Doesn t that make
sense? Oh all right, for God’s sake—so I did the thing too! (807)
We have again left the external world of realism, for the inner, dream world of
expressionism.
This passage is extraordinary in its anticipation of Freud’s theory of “the
 168 Drama and Perception Ibsen, The Master Builder 169
omnipotence of thought.” The infant cannot distinguish between dreams and
Don’t you believe with me, Hilda, that there are certain special, chosen
reality between wishing a thing and doing it. As adults, we continue to equate people who have a gift and power and capacity to wish something, desire
thought and reality m our unconscious minds, which is why we can feel guilty something, will something—so insistently and so—so inevitably—that at last
for something that we never did, but only wished. Here Solness cannot re­ it has to be theirs? Don’t you believe that? (830)
member whether he actually kissed Hilda or not, but he realizes that he wanted
to, which in his unconscious mind is equivalent to having done it. As for Hilda
This is omnipotence of thought once again, which Solness is coming to think of
she no longer seems the real live girl with the dirty underwear she was earlier
as an actual reality. Such omnipotence is found elsewhere in the play. For
She has shifted to a mythic plane, describing herself as a princess and Solness as
example, Solness says that he got Kaja to come to work in his office simply by
a troll, and demanding that he come up with the promised kingdom. Troll,
wishing it one day; then, “in the late evening, . . . she came by to see me again,
princess, and the enchanted kingdom show an obvious connection with the
acting as if we’d already struck a bargain” (797). But Ibsen in the long run is not
symbolist movement, ^ but we never leave the real world entirely. Ibsen’s purpose
so crude as to suggest that thought is literally omnipotent; all the things Solness
is not so much to evoke a magical, poetic vision as it is to explore, very precisely,
wished for could have occurred by accident, or in this case, by Kaja’s sensitivity
his hero’s unconscious mind. Hilda now appears to be a fantasy, a projection of
to nuances of expression and attitude in Solness. Ibsen’s focus is instead on
Solness’s desires and fears.
Solness’s confusion and fear with regard to his inner life, on his awareness that it
The second act begins the following morning; Hilda has spent the night at
might have powers far beyond his conscious understanding, and on his guilt for
Solnesss house. She says that she dreamed the night before of falling over “a
the immoral desires that seem to come true. Freud maintained that unfilfilled
terribly high, steep cliff” (819). Like the dreams that Freud analyzed, her dream
desired actually make us feel more guilty than fulfilled ones; the undischarged
seems charged with sexual significance; it also foreshadows Solness’s own fall at
psychic energy of the desire turns inward, against the self This is the case with
the end of the play. In addition, however, it signals another deconstruction of
Solness. He is not at all guilt-ridden about his sexual affair with Kaja, but feels
realism to expressionism. As in the first act, there is another long scene between
extremely guilty about his desires for Hilda, even though they were never
her and Solness. He tells of a disastrous fire that consumed the house in which
actually consummated. In the same vein, Solness’s wife. Aline, feels more upset
he and his wife lived early in their marriage. The fire helped make Solness’s
about the loss of her collection of dolls in the fire than about the loss of her two
reputation; he was then able to subdivide the land and build houses on it which
sons; her imaginary love for the dolls is more real to her than her ostensibly real
established him as an architect. As a result of the fire, however, Solness’s two
love for her flesh-and-blood children. The pattern in the play is always that a
children died. Here again we have the basis for a realistic struggle of career vs.
character’s inner life is paramount; the outer, realistic world, while genuine
family (an echo of the great neoclassical theme of honor vs. love), but the details
enough (Ibsen is no solipsist), is not the world in which one actually lives.
are odd: the children did not die in the fire itself, but rather because of Mrs.
Ibsen continues his exploration of the inner life in his depiction of Solness’s
Solness having taken sick from the strain, which affected her milk. Instead of the
death. Solness, afraid of heights, no longer climbs towers to plant celebratory
md of simple, surface causality that we would expect in a realistic play, the
wreaths on them. Nonetheless, Hilda demands that he climb the tower on his
causality here is strangely oblique, as if some inner, unseen mechanism were
latest building. Solness’s acrophobia is distinctly ambivalent, in keeping with
operating. The information that follows is even stranger: it turns out that
Freud’s theory of the ambivalence of emotions; strong conscious feelings of
Solness had noticed a crack in the chimney of the house, long before the fire,
revulsion against something are always accompanied by equally strong uncon­
and neglected to fix it. He sensed, even then, that if the house were to burn
scious feelings of desire for it. Solness unconsciously seems to yearn to climb
down, he would be given a wonderful opportunity to advance his career. Here,
and fall, just as he unconsciously wanted sex with the forbidden Hilda. In the
we might think, is the kernel of the play, the original sin, like Rebecca West’s
end, it is the power of thought that again seems the catalyst: Hilda wishes his
always going “a tiny bit more.” Solness’s neglect—a “Freudian slip,” fulfilling his
climb, twice saying, “I will see it!” (850, 851). At the ultimate moment, she
wish to get rid of the house—brought him fame and fortune, but cost him his
excitedly snatches a white shawl and waves it at Solness, shouting from below to
children. What price glory?” But then, in another bizarre and cunning stroke,
him high on the tower, “Hurray for master builder Solness!” (859), causing
Ibsen destroys our standard reaction: Solness says that “It’s been proved without
Solness to plunge to his death.
a shadow of a doubt that the fire broke out in a clothes closet, in quite another
Again, however, the exact nature of causality is ambiguous: Did Solness fall
part of the house” (830). It seems that Solness had nothing to do with the fire at
because Hilda distracted him by shouting and waving, or because she willed him
all!
to fall? Is Hilda a real girl with an obsessive neurosis, who destroys Solness by
Yet once again, Solness believes that his inner state at the time represented the
palpable methods, or a witch, a troll, a projection of Solness’s own fantasies,
true reality. In a key speech, he reflects on the power of wishes:
who destroys him by the power of the unconscious mind? The greatness of the
170 Drama and Perception
play is that it explores the boundary between outer and inner reality, de­
constructing the former to bring us to the latter. At the final curtain, the
audience is as confused and upset as Solness, confronted with the power of the
unconscious mind, and unable to determine its extent or its meaning. They have
entered the twentieth century.
Notes
1. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1913), in Selected Non-Dramatic Writings of Bernard
Shaw, ed. Dan H. Laurence (Boston: Houghton .Mifflin, 1965), 267.
2. I have discussed this in my book. Patterns in Ibsen's Middle Plays (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell
University Press, 1981).
3. Henrik Ibsen, Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays, trans. Rolf Fjelde (New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1978), 567. All subsequent quotations of Ibsen’s plays, taken from this edition, will be cited
as page numbers in the text.
4. Sigmund F'reud, The Interpretation ofDreams (\9Wi), in The Basic Writings ofSigmund Freud, trans.
and ed. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1938), 399.
5. Maurice Valency deals with the relation of The Master Builder to the symbolist movement in The
Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to Modern Drama (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 204 et passim.
Errol Durbach discusses the symbolism in the play from a similar viewpoint in 'Tbsen the Romantic”:
Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 127-36.
12
Pinter
Betrayal
“This is the only thing that has ever happened. ”
In 1980, two “new” plays by Harold Pinter played in London, The Hothouse and
Betrayal; the former was actually written twenty years earlier. Pinter had pro­
fessed over the years not to like the piece, but nevertheless did not discard it, and
finally had it produced, even directing it himself The two plays thus allowed
audiences almost simultaneously to see Pinter afresh from two very different
perspectives, early and late.
The Hothouse takes place in a weird mental hospital, whose inmates are known
only by numbers, and whom we never see—although we do hear their sighs,
whispers, laughs, and half-screams from time to time. The staff are all grotesque
individuals with monosyllabic names like Roote, Gibbs, and Lush. They seem
cruel, incompetent, and power hungry. In the final scene, we learn that the
inmates have revolted and killed all but one of the staff members. Written about
the same time as The Caretaker, 'The Hothouse is typical of early Pinter, although
perhaps even more absurd than usual. It employs standard Pinteresque tech­
niques of terse, oblique dialogue, a menacing atmosphere, and an underlying
power struggle. Gibbs, the assistant director of the asylum, is trying to take over
both his boss’s job and mistress; the struggle finally surfaces in a fist fight and
knife assault near the end of the play. It is another example of Pinter’s use of the
Golden Bough ritual explicated by the Cambridge anthropologists: the Year
King, Roote, is involved in an agon with Gibbs, his challenger. The time of year
is Chrismas, “in the year that is about to die,”' as Roote says. We learn that one
of the inmates has just died, and that another has just given birth, reinforcing
the death/rebirth motif Cutts, the mistress, can be seen as a fertility goddess.
There is even a scapegoat figure, ironically named Lamb, who is subjected to
some kind of electronic brainwashing. Gibbs blames the final massacre on
Lamb, for not having tested the locks, although we suspect that Gibbs himself
unleashed the crazed patients. Katherine Burkman, in her book, 'The Dramatic
World of Harold Pinter: Its Basis in Ritual, demonstrated the extensive use of the
Golden Bough ritual in Pinter’s other plays, and The Hothouse turns out to be no
exception.
171
 172 Drama and Perception
At first glance, Betrayal seems very different from The Hothouse. The at­
mosphere of the more recent play is not menacing; the characters are not
grotesque. The subject is a traditional one, concerning adultery and betrayal of
frienship. Jerry, a writers’ agent, has a long affair with the wife of his best friend,
Robert, a publisher. First the affair and then the marriage dwindle to an end,'
and finally the wife, Emma, appears to be having a new affair with a writer
named Casey. The characters are middle class, the settings realistic, the events
plausible. The only oddity about the play is that its scenes run backward
beginning two years after the affair is over and ending nine years previously at
the moment the affair bepn. Adultery is no new theme to Pinter, of course, but
Jerry’s and Emma’s affair seems, in contrast to the crude, ugly sexual rela­
tionships in previous Pinter plays, quite civilized and sometimes even idyllic.
Eurthermore, while the changing sexual relationships can once again be seen as a
ritual pattern of the type explicated by Burkman, with Emma as the fertility
goddess being won in turn by Robert, Jerry, and the unseen Casey, the rela­
tionships among the three men could hardly be described as life-or-death agons
m the manner of The Hothouse. Robert gives up Emma quite easily, having had
affairs of his own for many years, and Emma moves on to Casey only after her
affair with Jerry has long since burned out.
The reverse timetable of the play is a radical deconstruction for Pinter. As is
well known, the past in his plays is usually mysterious; conflicting accounts of
what previously happened are never resolved. But in Betrayal, such conflicts do
get resolved: for example, in the opening scene, Emma tells Jerry that she has
just told Robert the previous night about the affair, but Robert later says that she
told him four years earlier. If this were a typical Pinter play, that would be the
end of It. Both Emma and Robert have reasons for lying, Emma because she
would not want Jerry to know that she had told Robert years ago without telling
Jerry at the time that she had done so, and Robert to save face and seem not truly
deceived. The focus would be on the essential ambiguity of the situation, and on
the struggle of Emma and Robert each to influence Jerry. But as a matter of fact,
we actually do find out the truth, being shown the very scene in which Emma
told Robert—four years earlier. An interesting mystery is resolved in the
bluntest fashion possible. By reversing historical sequence, Pinter has made the
past tangible and knowable, in contrast to his earlier plays where it is forever
beyond our perception; the ambiguity that characterizes his usual work becomes
conspicuous by its absence.
On the other hand. Betrayal is not a complete departure for Pinter. We can
understand it, and its relationship to The Hothouse and the intervening plays, by
interpreting Pinter’s epistemology as found in both his plays and in his the­
oretical writing. Pinter’s theory of perception is basically phenomenological, in
the manner of Edmund Husserl. I do not mean to imply that Pinter is in any
way a disciple of Husserl, or even that he has ever read him. Rather, Pinter’s
Pinter, Betrayal 173
ideas about how we know the world and one another are very similar to some
ideas in Husserl, and can be articulated in terms of them.
Phenomenology has been called “the triumph of subjectivism.” This does not
mean that it advocates withdrawing into solipsism, or even into introspection. It
is very much concerned with the outer world, but with that world as it is
perceived; scientific objectivity for Husserl, if not exactly fraudulent, is always
hypothetical, since no one can ever know anything except through his percep­
tions. Husserl did not insist that we reject all hypothetical constructs of the
world, but rather that, in examining anything, we are least temporarily ignore
all such constructs, and instead intuitively scrutinize the actual phenomena we
perceive. This process he called “bracketing” (epoche). He wanted, for example,
to apply the process to psychology, rejecting genetic psychology, or “psychol­
ogism,” in favor of a descriptive psychology that would inspect mental processes
while holding in abeyance all assumptions about motivation, consequences, or
any other wider significance.
Pinter, in a speech made in 1962 about his work, said much the same thing:
The context has always been, for me, concrete and particular, and the
characters concrete also. I’ve never started a play from any kind of abstract
idea or theory. . . . When a character cannot be comfortably defined or
understood in terms of the familiar, the tendency is to perch him on a
symbolic shelf, out of harm’s way. Once there, he can be talked about but
need not be lived with.^
It is an immediate, intuitive experience of “living with” his characters that Pinter
wants for his audiences, rather than a smoke screen of theories, philosophies,
motivations, histories. This does not mean that watching a Pinter play should be
merely a passive, unintellectual process. Commenting on the ambiguities of his
characters, he went on to say, “Between my lack of biographical data about them
and the ambiguity of what they say lies a territory which is not only worthy of
exploration but which it is compulsory to explore.”^ Like Husserl, Pinter
believes that a descriptive psychology is not only possible but necessary.
In addition to being concerned with the relationship between audience and
play, Pinter’s phenomenology is also concerned with attitudes of characters
within the plays. The Hothouse, for example, satirizes the very kind of objective
psychology that Husserl attacked. As already mentioned, the patients are
known only by numbers. The staff have no human interaction with them,
except to abuse them regularly, since one patient is dead and another becomes
pregnant, apparently by one of the staff, who regularly have sex with their
charges. Two themes emerge: clouded perception and detachment. Lush says
that Roote, the director, is a fine scientist, with knowledge of “philology,
photography, anthropology, cosmology, theology, phytology, phytonomy, phy-
totomy” (87). Roote himself insists that he has second sight, and can see through
 174 Drama and Perception
walls. Yet despite his scientific knowledge and second sight, Roote does not have
first sight: he cannot remember what his patients and even some of his staff look
like, confuses a 7 for a 5> in his own diary, forgets that it is Christmas day, cannot
determine who impregnated the patient, does not know what the weather is like
outside. His only contact with the patients before they murder him is via a
clogged intercom. Roote wants the reactions of his patients to be “tabulated,
compared with others, filed, stamped and if possible verified” (42), but he does
not want any direct experience of them.
Lamb, the new staff member, says “I wish I could deal with the patients—
directly. I ve thought out a number of schemes,” (34), but his schemes get
nowhere, and he ends up electronically brainwashed by Gibbs and Cutts. This
brainwashing is the epitome of objectivity: Gibbs and Cutts ask Lamb questions
from outside the room, stunning him from time to time with a powerful noise
that makes him fall to the floor. The questions seem designed purely to initimi-
date, since Gibbs and Cutts do not even wait for answers.
CUTTS. Are you often puzzled by women?
LAMB. Women?
GIBBS. Men.
LAMB. Men? Well, I was just going to answer the question about women—
GIBBS. Do you often feel puzzled?
LAMB. Puzzled?
GIBBS. By women.
LAMB. Women?
CUTTS. Men.
(69-70)
In the Pinter lexicon of sins, detachment is the deadliest. Detachment is the
problem of Edward in A Slight Ache, Teddy in Phe Homecoming, and Spooner in
No Man’s Land, characters who related to their fellow human beings as if they
were butterlies pinned to a board. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phe-
nomenologist, wrote:
Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own
limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect
whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to
face with the real world only at rare intervals."^
This kind of science is the credo of Pinter’s detached characters, including the
top staff in The Hothouse, and it leads them to be brutal, miserable, and lacking in
genuine perception.
By contrast, the trio of characters in Betrayal are not detached. Their rela­
tionships are spontaneous and human rather than objective and manipulative.
Functioning in the world of publishing rather than psychology, they approach
Pinter, Betrayal 175
life via the arts rather than science. They are sensitive to poetry, to literature, to
natural beauty, entities rarely found in Pinter’s earlier plays. The only detached
character in Betrayal is the unseen Spinks, who lives alone in furnished rooms,
wearing dark glasses day and night, and who has written a novel about betrayal.
The three principal characters, however, are genuinely engaged with things.
Like Roote and Gibbs in The Hothouse, Emma and Robert and Jerry have
difficulty remembering facts, but, by contrast, they do have an intuitive under­
standing of the past that for Pinter is true knowledge. Robert cannot remember
when he introduced Jerry to Emma, cannot remember that Jerry was best man
at their wedding. Jerry cannot remember that he and Emma bought a bed for
their otherwise already furnished flat, cannot remember what he did with a
letter from Emma. He says that Emma wore white at their wedding; she insists
that she did not. Three times during the play he remembers throwing Emma’s
daughter up in the air and catching her; he says that it happened in Emma’s
kitchen, she insists that it was in his. The point is that Jerry’s emotional recall is
perfectly correct; the event symbolizes for him the exuberance and pre­
cariousness of his relationship with Emma, while his placing it in her kitchen
reflects his obvious desire to be living there, with her. This emotional truth is
more important than the objective fact. It is like the incident of the madeleine in
Proust’s Remembrance of 'Things Past, a novel for which Pinter once wrote a
screenplay. The taste of the cake and tea enables Proust, the narrator, to relive
the past emotionally rather than to record it detachedly. Relived, rather than
tabulated and verified, the past becomes truly real.
Betrayal, then, is The Hothouse turned inside out. In The Hothouse, the patients
were offstage, and the staff, their detached observers, dealt with them via
intermediaries and intercoms and electronic torturing devices. In Betrayal,
Spinks is the observer, offstage writing about betrayal—which is what is hap­
pening onstage. But we, the audience, are also observers. As the play moves
backward in time, the characters’ stories are more and more revealed, as if the
characters were being psychoanalyzed. All those questions like the ones asked of
Lamb—’’Are you often puzzled? By women? By men?”—are ostensibly being
answered for us.
Rising to the bait, American critics and actors have already begun to psychol­
ogize the play. Critics have explained away the behavior of the characters in
terms of their selfishness, or banality, or homosexuality.® Actors have made the
same choices; of the two American productions of the play that I have seen, one
made much of Jerry’s supposed selfishness, while the other made the homosex­
ual theme overwhelming. (Jerry and Robert were definitely “puzzled by
women.”)
Actually, the psychological pattern of Betrayal is a joke that is being played on
us. As we move back into the characters’ pasts, we do uncover answers to some
of the questions raised in the opening scenes, but we also find new questions.
We may learn that Emma actually told Robert about her affair four years before
 176 Drama and Perception
she said she did—but why did Robert become so complaisant about it? In the
scene m Venice in which he learns of the affair, he at first seems extremely upset
then suddenly passes it off His flippant line, “Maybe I should have had an affair
with Jerry myself certainly suggests repressed homosexuality, but then why
did he seem so upset about Emma? And why does he have affairs with other
women? Of course, he could be lying about those affairs, or could have been
having them to try to cover up his homosexuality, but we do not really know.
Many modern plays of psychological realism, like Tea and Sympathy of The
Childrens Hour or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, use homosexuality as a deux ex machina
to resolve all the mystery of the characters’ behavior, but here the suggested
homosexuality is simply a component in Robert’s makeup, not a full explanation
or anything.
In fact, there are a number of important things that we do not know about in
the play, and are not supposed to know. We do not really know that Emma has
gone on to an affair with Casey; it is only suggested that she has. We do not
really know whether Judith, Jerry’s unseen wife, is having an affair with a
doctor; we only know that Jerry suspects it. Most important, we do not really
know why Jerry’s and Emma’s affair came to such a measly end. It is true that
Jerry’s line when he first tries to seduce her, “You’re so beautiful. Look at the
way you look at me” (136) exposes an underlying selfishness, but he also has lines
that express genuine passion;
I adore you. I’m madly in love with you. I can’t believe that what anyone is at
this moment saying Iws ever happened has ever happened. Nothing has ever
happened Nothin. This is the only thing that has ever happened, ^our eyes
kill me. I’m lost, ’fou’re wonderful. (136-37) ^
As for the characters’ supposed banality, it is true that Pinter shows them to be
like ordinary people, m contrast to the grotesques of The Hothouse, but they are
ordinary people who read Yeats and Eord Maddox Ford, seek out and publish
new novelists, visit the Lake District and Venice, are sensitive and intelligent
and sometimes passionate, and who are capable of carrying off an affair that lasts
seven years. ’Tis a banality devoutly to be wished.
Betrayal, then, demonstrates Pinter’s attitude toward his characters’ back­
grounds m all his plays. It is not that we are supposed to think of his characters
as having no real background, like Pirandello’s six characters (assuming that they
do not, which is actually problematic in that play); the very structure oi Betrayal
IS an assertion that their personal histories do exist. It is rather that Pinter’s
characters should be phenomenologically bracketed; we should experience them
here and now rather than speculate about their factual pasts. In this one play in
which he actually does expose his characters’ pasts, the focus is just on the
curving relationships. He is not giving us material from which to construct neat
solutions to the enigmas of their behavior.
Pinter, Betrayal 177
This also explains why so many American productions of Pinter fail. Amer­
ican acting, with its obsession with motivation and character biography, is
singularly unsuited to a phenomenological playwright, who wants his actors,
like his audiences, to concentrate on the shaping and structuring of the charac­
ters’ behavior, what is seen and what is heard, and what that means in terms of
the overall, virtual world of the play. For all their supposed Stanislavskian
influence, American actors are rarely trained to “live the part.” Instead, they
become lost in a hypothetical world of emotion memory, subtext, and character
psychology. In other words, they act like Spinks, alone and remote, rather than
like Jerry, who “brackets” that wonderful moment with Emma, insisting that
“this is the only thing that has ever happened.” And, for that moment for him, it
is.
In sum, Pinter’s Betrayal represents a profound challenge to realistic doctrine
in both playwriting and acting. In the first chapter, I noted that realistic doctrine
presents a bipolarity of “close to” vs. “far from” life, but that is not the whole of
it. Closeness to life is not meant to life as it is experienced, but rather as it is
observed, clinically and disinterestedly, as if from without. One presents a “slice
of life” in order to hypothesize about it, to psychologize it. Characters are shown
as having serious problems, which are gradually revealed to be the result of a
complex of “motivations,” which explain everything about the characters, but
also reduce them to objects, categories, diseases. Like patients in a case study,
characters are defined in terms of their afflictions—repressed homosexuality,
nymphomania, a mother fixation—glib, easy classifications that strip both the
characters and the audience of humanity. We no longer recognize the characters
as extensions of ourselves.
This is an approach to theatre that Artaud cogently attacked:
Psychology, which works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known, to
the quotidian and the ordinary, is the cause of the theater’s abasement and its
fearful loss of energy. . . . Stories about money, worry over money, social
careerism, the pangs of love unspoiled by altruism, sexuality sugar-coated
with an eroticism that has lost its mystery nave nothing to do with the theater,
even if they do belong to psychology. . . . This idea of a detached art, of
poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea
and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate. ^
Pinter’s plays are the dramatic equivalent to Artaud’s challenge. Pinter de­
constructs dramatic realism, setting up characters and situations that lead us to
psychologize, but the psychologizing yields only emptiness. The absence of a
coherent or significant psychological background forces us to return to the
present, confronting the immediacy of the world of the play in all its intensity
and mystery. It is a valuable lesson for both audience and actors.
178 Drama and Perception

Notes
1. I larold Pinter, The Hothouse (New York; Grove Press, 1980), 144. Subsequent quotations of The
Hothouse^ taken from this edition, will be cited as page numbers in the text.
2. Harold Pinter, “Writing for the Theatre,” in Complete Works: One (New York- Grove Press
1977), 10-11.
3. Ibid., 13.
13
4. Merleau-Ponty, 159. Afterword
5. See, for example, the various essays on Pinter in Modem Drama, September 1980.
6. Harold Vmter, Betrayal (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), 87. Subsequent quotations of Betrayal,
taken from this edition, will be cited as page numbers in the text.
7. Artaud, 77.

Throughout this book, I have used the term drama (and metadrama) to include
both playscript and performance. Script and performance are not the same
thing, nor is either one reducible to the other; nonetheless, they are intimately
connected, a fact that both literary scholars and theatre practitioners have often
ignored or even denied.
Literary scholars should remember that originally, all literature was per­
formed, and that even in a literate society such as ours, drama remains a literary
form carrying a performance potential. This is particularly important with
regard to metadrama, where the playwright often plans devices that are realized
only in performace. One should always at least imagine a performance in
reading a playscript, even when dealing with playwrights like Ibsen or Strind­
berg, whose scripts seem to require us only to visualize people living in their
homes, rather than actors performing on a stage.
Theatre practitioners should remember that the playscript came into being
not because literary writers forced it upon the performers, but rather because
performers required it. For all the talk these days about “performance art” and
“pure” performance (as if a literary script were a contamination), the playscript
is inevitable. As performance evolves in length and complexity, the need is
apparent to everyone, including the performers themselves, to have a basic,
controlling plan, which is what a script essentially is.
Some of my remarks in the book are applicable to literary forms other than
drama, and some are even applicable to all art forms. I have tried to avoid
making such generalizations, however—drama is difficult enough for me to
understand. Others may wish to pursue such connections, however. I take it as
axiomatic that drama is an art form, related to other literary forms, and ul­
timately to all the arts. It is not a trivial hybrid (a literary “message,” with
performance added to make it palatable); nor is it a form of exhibitionism, of the
actors’ faces or bodies or (more pretentiously) their personal emotions. It is
instead a full-fledged art form of its own, which embodies meanings, as do all
the arts, but meanings that are among the most urgent for our culture.
A theme running through the discussions of the plays in the final section of
the book is the conflict between logical and intuitive thinking, as originally

179
180 Afterword
personified by Oedipus and Teiresias, respectively. I did not plan this theme
overtly—some of the chapters were originally written before this book was even
conceived. But as I began to explore the theme of perception in Western drama,
I became impressed by how it recurs. Husserl saw this very conflict as a “crisis”
in Western society, as there seemed a widening gap between the objective
formulations of science and the subjective world in which we live. This gap goes
back to the ancient Greeks, however, who invented the scientific method.
Drama is a literary form particularly suited to exploring the gap. It is a cliche
that “drama is conflict.” The cliche is a true one, however, if we do not limit
“conflict” to simple oppositions of character vs. character, hero vs. villain, nor
assume that the conflict necessarily has to be resolved. Instead, drama can be a
means of exploring conflicts of ideas or principles, not necessarily to provide
solutions but instead to reveal that the conflicts exist. Often the most fundamen­
tal problems of a society are the ones that are ignored, because of the very fact
that they are so fundamental. Drama, and especially metadrama, grabs us by
the scruff of the neck and makes us look at them.
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Aristotle. Aristotle's Poetics. Translated by Leon Golden. Tallahassee: Florida State Uni­
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Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards.
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4 Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980.
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Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953.
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Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Garfield, David. The Actors' Studio: A Player's Place. New York: Macmillan, 1984.
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7 Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.
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Hardin, Richard F. “The ‘Ritual’ in Recent Criticism: The Elusive Sense of Com­
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Hartigan, Karelisa. “Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrranus 293.” Classical Journal 70: 55-56.
Homan, Sidney. When the Theater Turns to Itself: The Aesthetic Metaphor in Shakespeare.
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Ibsen, Henrik. Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays. I'ranslated by Rolf Fjelde. New
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--------- . Peer Gynt. Translated Rolf Fjelde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
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Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth:
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--------- . The Self and Others. New York: Random House, 1969. ^
Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modem World. Cam­
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception. Edited by James M. Edie. Evanston,
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--------- .The Hothouse. New York: Grove Press, 1980.
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/ Rycroft, Charles. A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Totowa, N.I.: Littlefield, Adams
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--------- . The Innocence of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Index
■ Sapir, Edward. Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and Personality. Edited by David G.
V Mandelbaum. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949.
Schlueter, June. Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia Univer­
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Shakespeare, William. The Complete Work. Alfred Harbage, general editor. Baltimore: Abel, Lionel, 31
Penguin Books, 1969. Absence vs. presence: in theatrical perform­
Shaw, Bernard. Complete Plays with Prefaces. 6 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963. ance, 99
Absurdist drama, 41-42, 47, 61-62, 83
--------- . The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1913). In Selected Non-Dramatic Writings of Bernard
Acknowledgment, real life, 98, 104
Shaw. Edited by Dan H. Laurence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
Adaptation, 90, 93-97
Shephard, William. Group Dynamics in the Evolution of Creative Choices in the Performance Aeschylus, 36, 91, 93, 130; Eumenides, 57; The
Group's Production of Dionysus in '69. Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1984. Libation Bearers, 58, 122; The Persians, 58
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans­ Aesop, 21
lated by Lee 1'. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1965. “Agit-prop,” 45
Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Translated by David Grene. In Sophocles I. Edited by David Albee, Edward, 61
Grene and Richard Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954. Alexander the Great, 110
/ ^Stanislavski, Constantin. Building a Character. New York: I'heatre Arts, 1949.
/ Steiner, George. The Death cf Tragedy. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961.
Alienation effect, 23, 32, 37, 44, 84, 88, 115. See
also Ostraneniye
Allegory, 90, 92-93, 95-96
Strindberg, August. Six Plays of Strindberg. Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge. Garden Alleyn, Eidward, 92
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955. Includes “Author’s Notes” to A Dream Play. All the President's Men (film), 18
Anderson, Robert: Tea and Sympathy, 176
Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. New York: Vintage, n.d.
“Anti-theatrical prejudice,” 69-71, 84-85, 116
^A^alency, Maurice. The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to Modern Drama. New York:
Antoine, Andre, 95, 97
Macmillan, 1963. Archetype, 21, 26-27, 28n.ll, 42, 52, 76-77, 89
Watts, Alan W. The Way of Zen. New York: New American Library, 1959. Aristophanes, 77, 95—96, 101; The Achamians,
^ Weissman, Philip. Creativity in the Theatre: A Psychoanalytic Study. New York: Basic 56; The Clouds, 100, 130-31; The Frogs, 36, 91-
93; Platus, 35; Tbesmophoriazusae, 56, 76
Books, 1965.
Aristotle, 14, 20, 47n.l, 53-54, 91, 106, 127,
I Wilshire, Bruce. Role Playing and Identity : The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: 130; on recognition, 121-23
Indiana University Press, 1982. Artaud, Antonin, 61-62, 177•, Jet cf Blood, 41
Augustine, Saint, 69
Barish, Jonas, 69, 84
Barrie, James: The Admirable Crichton, 93
Barthes, Roland, 17-19
Beaumont, Francis, 37
Beckett, Samuel, 15, 24, 41, 6\,Endgame, 82-83;
Krapp's Last Tape, 43
Belasco, David, 105
Bell, Clive, 105
Bentley, Eric, 106
Bermel, Albert, 24
185
Bettelheim, Bruno, 146
Binary opposition, 13-17, 51-52, 177; in acting,
85-86
Bisexuality, 70, 76
Bond, Edward, 61
Bracketing. See Phenomenology: bracketing
Brando, Marlon, 14
Braque, Georges, 97-98
Brecht, Bertolt, 14, 16, 23-24, 37, 44, 47, 84,
88, 97, 115—17, 151; The Good Person of Setzuan,
81; A Man's a Man, 33, 82—83; The Measures
Taken, 116; Mother Courage, 25; The Threepenny
Opera, 89-90, 96
Breton, Andre, 41
Brook, Peter, 62
Buchner, Georg, 65; Woyzeck, 59, 121, 148-57
Burhage, Richard, 92
Burkman, Katharine, 171
Butchers, The (play), 95
Caesar, Julius (Roman emperor), 95
Calderon, Pedro, 38, 41, 74
Calderwood, James L., 31
Calgary, University of, 148-49
Calvin, John, 42
Cameron, Alister, 123
Cassirer, Ernst, 105
Ceremony, 32, 36, 39, 49-57, 60-67, 85; anti-,
58—60; fulfilled, 55—57, 65; offstage, 58-60;
private, 63, 65; quasi-, 58, 61-62; unfulfilled,
55-60, 64, 66. See also Ritual
Character acting, 86
Charles 1 (king of England), 64
Chekhov, Anton, 24, 61, 65; The Anniversary, 60;
The Bear, 60; The Cherry Orchard, 60, 91; The
Marriage Proposal, 60; On the Harmfulness of
Tobacco, 60-61; The Sea Gull, 40-44, 92; Three
Sisters, 60, 91; Uncle Vanya, 90; The Wedding, 60
Christie, Agatha, 129
186 Index Index 187

Citation, 90-92, 95-96 Farce, 61; French, 159 167; Glmts, 60, 73, 88-90, 93; Hedda Gabler, Marowitz, Charles, 45, 94
Classical drama, 35-36, 47n.l, 55, 57-58, 61, Fergusson, Francis, 122-23 60, \6S\John Gabriel Borkman, \M\ Little Eyolf, Marston, John, 37
64, 76, 91 Fielding, Henry: Tom Thumb, 93 164; The Master Builder, 121, 164—70; fter G^»r, Medieval drama, 78
Cocteau, Jean, 41, 132n.7 Field of thought. See Thought; field of 59, 80-81, 104, 116; Rosmersbolm, 165-66, 168; Medwall, Henry, 36
Cole, David, 53, 73 Flynn Errol, 22 When We Dead Awaken, 164 Meisel, Martin, 24
Coleridge, Samuel, 68, 76 Ford, Ford Maddox, 176 Identity theory, 68-73, 82, 85 Menander, 47n.l
Comedy of Manners, 80-82, 84 Foreground-background bifurcation, 109, 110- Illud tempos, 53, 73 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 130, 174
Commedia dell’Arte, 44 11, 113-17 Information theory, 16 Metaceremony, 55
Connelly, Marc, 41 Foreman, Robert, 54 Insertion, real-life, 97-98 Metadrama, 31-32, 34—36, 39, 41^3, 47, 49-
Cooper, Gary, 22 Formalism, Russian, 24, 44 Ionesco, Eugfene, 41; The Bald Soprano, 61; The 50, 52, 55, 68, 74, 83, 88-98, 100, 104-5, 112,
Copernicus, 65 Frazer, James, 83 Chairs, 61; Jack; or the Submission, 61, 82; The 114, 117, 121-24, 134, 141, 179-180
Corneille, Pierre, 38 Freud, Sigmund, 65, 68-70, 73, 85, 108, 130, Lesson, 61 Metadramatic. Metadrama
Coursen, Herbert R., Jr., 58 159, 166-69; aesthetic theories of, 106-7 Middleton, Thomas, 37
Coward, Noel, 81 Fry, Roger, 105 Johnson, Lyndon B. (U.S. president), 96 Miller, Arthur, 95
Frye, Northrop, 17, 18-19, 49, 114 Jones, Ernest, 107 Modern drama, 64, 80-83, 85, 115
Darwin, Charles, 65 Jones, Inigo, 93 Molifere, 46, 80, 85; The Bourgeois Gentleman, 39,
Deconstruction, 16, 58, 150, 166-68, 170, 172 Galileo, 65 Jonson, Ben, 37; Every Man Out of His Humour, 67, 79, 89; The Doctor in Spite of Himself, 79,
Defamiliarization. See Ostraneniye Gay, John, 39 92; Poetaster, 92 80; L'lmpromptu de Versailles, 39-40; The Mis­
Derrida, Jacques, 58, 150 Genet, Jean: The Balcony, 43, 61, 83; The Blacks, Joyce, James, 84, 107 anthrope, 79, 80, 84; The Precious Ladies, 79;
Descartes, Rene, 85 43, 61, 83; The Maids, 61, 83 Tartuffe, 79-81
Deus ex machina, 89 “Genetic fallacy,” 50 Kafka, Franz, 82 Morality play, 21
DeWitt, Johannes, 37-38 Geometry; Euclidean, 22; Riemannian, 22 Kaiser, Georg, 41 Moral Majority, 23, 28n.ll
Dithyramb, 49 Gestalt psychology, 109 Kalidasa, 36 Morgan, Charles, 105
Drama/culture complex, 17, 20-27, 31-32, 42, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Egmont, 25; Kant, Immanuel, 65, 113, 153 Morgan, J. Pierpont, 96
44-45, 58, 63, 90-91, 113-14, 117 Faust, 40, 59 Kaufman, George S., 41 Mucedorus, 37
Drayton, Michael, 37 Goodhart, Sandor, 132n.7 Kepler, Johannes, 65 Mueller, Carl, 149, 152, 156
“Dream screen,” 112 Gougenot, 38 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 65 Mukafovsky, Jan, 19, 73, 101
Dukore, Bernard, 93 Gozzi, Carlo, 44 Kleist, Heinrich von, 65 Mumford, Ixwis, 145
Dumas pere, Alexandre, 40 Greene, Robert, 37 Kokoschka, Oscar, 41 Murray, Gilbert, 50
Durbach, Errol, 170n.5 Grotowsky, Jerzy, 44 Kommos, 49-50 Myth, 21-22
Kris, Ernst, 107
ligan, Robert, 31 Hall, Edward T., 113 Kyd, Thomas, 37-38, 43, 94 Napoleon (French emperor), 129
Ego psychology, 68 Handke, Peter, 115; Kaspar, 61, 82; Offending the Naturalism, 13, 167
Einstein, Albert, 22, 65, 107 Audience, 116-17 Laing, R. D., 68, 72, 78, 79 Nelson, Robert J., 31, 37, 39-40
Edam, Keir, 98 Langer, Susanne, 50-51, 98, 105-6, 108 Neoclassicism, 39—40, 59-60, 80, 93, 168; Ital­
Hannibal, 111
Eliot, T. S., 68, 84; The Cocktail Party, 83 Hardin, Richard E, 62 Lehmann, Werner, 149, 152 ian, 39
Edizabeth I (queen of England^ 37 Harshbarger, Karl, 131-32n.7 Levin, Gregory, 150 New Critics, 20
Elusion, 72, 78, 81 Hartigan, Karelisa, 125 L6vi-Strauss, Claude, 13-14, 51, 153-54 Newton, Isaac, 65
Environmental staging, 149, 151, 156 Hebbel, Friedrich, 65 Lichtenstein, Heinz, 68 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 65, 69
Epic theatre, 44—45, 47, 97 Heilman, Lillian: The Children’s Hour, 176 Linguistics, 26 Noh theatre, Japanese, 36, 45-46, 53-54
E>ikson, Erik, 68, 70 Hemingway, Ernest, 22, 23 Literary reference. See Reference: literary Norton, Thomas, 37
Essex, earl of, 64, 96 Henry VIII (king of Edtgland), 143 Littlewood, Joan, 44 Norwood, Gilbert, 131n.7
Estrangement. See Ostraneniye Hildebrand, Adolf, 105-6 Louis XIV (king of France), 46
Euclid. See Geometry; Euclidean Hitler, Adolf, 82 Lyly, John, 37 “Oceanic feeling,” 70, 72-73
Euripides, 36, 46, 56, 70, 91, 93, 100, 130; The Holberg, Ludvig, 24 Olivier, Laurence, 14
Baccbae, 35, 57, 62, 76, Heracles, Si\Hippo- Macbird, 96 O’Neill, Eugene; Beyond the Horizon, 82,
Holmes, Sherlock, 122
lytus, 58; Medea, 58; Orestes, 122; The Trojan Homan, Sidney, 31 McCullough, Douglas, 151 87 n.23; A Touch of the Poet, 82
Women, 57 McLaglen, Victor, 22 Ontological insecurity, 79, 81; and American
Hughes, Ted, 62
Expressionism, 13, 41, 167-68 Husserl, Edmund, 172-73, 180 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 14, 16 society, 86-87
Manchester, William, 22-23 Oriental drama, 36, 45
Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 22 Ibsen, Henrik, 14, 16-19, 65, 179; A Doll House, Marlowe, Christopher: Dr. Faustus, 37, 59; The Orwell, George, 82
Falwell, Jerry, 95 Jew of Malta, 88-89 Ostraneniye (defamiliarization or estrangement).
24, 60, 93, 159, 165; An Enemy of the People,
188
24, 32, 44-47, 62, 67, 73, 84, 88-89, 94, 99-
100, 117, 121, 157
Parody, 25, 39, 45-16, 89-90, 93-96, 115
Peele, George, 34, 37
Perception, 32, 42, 121-22, 128, 129-30, 133-34,
136-42, 144-48, 151, 153, 156, 173-74, 180;
externally tainted, 134-35; internally tainted,
134-35
Peregrini, 11
“Performance Art,” 54, 179
Peter, Saint, 146
Phenomenology, 32, 115, 134, 172-74, 176-77;
bracketing, 111-12, 173, 176-77; phe­
nomenological criticism, 16; “presence,” 109-
10
Picasso, Pablo, 97-98, 107
Pinter, Harold, 41, B2-, Betrayal, 121, 171-77; The
Birthday Party, 61; The Caretaker, 171; The
Homecoming, 61, 84, 174; The Hothouse, 171-76;
The Lover, 82; No Man's Land, 174; A Slight
Ache, 174; Tea Party, 61; his theory of
character, 173, 174
Pirandello, Luigi, 37, 44, 47, 52; Each in His
Own Way, 43; Henry IV, 43, 67, 74, 83; Six
Characters in Search of an Author, 43, 81, 176;
Tonight We Improvise, 43
Piscator, Erwin, 44, 47, 97
Plato, 46, 64, 69, 130-31; Platonism, 16, 85, 133
Plautus, 47n.l, 77
Play of Frau Jutten, 77-78
Play within the play, 32, 38-40, 43-47, 49, 63,
65, 67, 85, 93, 104, 115, 121; framed type, 33-
41, 43-45, 116; inset type, 33-39, 41-44, 88
Plot, 53-54
Pornography, 28n.ll
Poststructuralism, 14, 16-17, 19, 58, 150
Pound, Ezra, 107
“Presence,” phenomenological. See Phe­
nomenology: “presence”
Presence vs. absence: in theatrical performance,
99
Primary process thought. See Thought: primary
process
Problem play, 166
Proust, Marcel, 175
Racine, Jean: Britannicus, 59; Phaedra, 59
Raiders of the Lost Ark (film), 27
Rayfield, Donald, 91
Reader-response theory, 16
Reagan, Ronald (U.S. president), 19, 95, 108
Index Index 189
Realism: as doctrine, 13-16, 18, 25-26, 86, 96- great chain of being,” 136; and “the green Swan Theatre: drawing of, discussed, 37-38
97, 137, 146, 177; as drama, 14, 20, 40, 60, world,” 135, 136; and “humours” theory, 142. Symbolism (literary movement), 13, 92, 168,
158-59, 165-68, 176 Works: Antony and Cleopatra, 78, 114-15; As 170n.5
Real-life reference. See Reference: real-life You Like It, 15, 36, 67, 74-75, 79, 80, 133-47; “Sympathetic magic,” 51-52
Reference: literary, 32, 88-95, 100-101, 103-4; Comedy of Errors, 122, 133-34; Cymheline, 36; Synge, John Millington: Playboy of the Western
real-life, 32, 91, 95-101, 103-4, 112; self-, 92, Hamlet, 16, 33-34, 36, 38-39, 41, 44, 49, 55- World, 83
103-17, 118n.l 56, 58, 67-68, 75, 78-79, 83, 90, 92, 94, 96,
Remarque, Erich, 22-23 133; Henry IV, Part I, 21, 36, 78, 103^, 114, Terence, 47n.l, 77
Renaissance, 16, 35, 39, 59, 64-65, 77-79, 85; 116, 118n.l, 127; Henry IV, Part 2, 78; Henry Tesson6rie, 38
Continental, 38, 46; English, 34, 36-38, 46, VIII, S6, Julius Caesar, 78, 115; King Lear, 36, Theatricalism, 13
94 49, 56, 78, 94, 122, Love’s Labour's Lost, Thought: contraction. 111, 115; displacement,
Restoration, English, 39 S6-, Macbeth, 33, 36, 49, 55-59, 77-78, 87, 97, 111-13, 116; expansion, 111-12, 115; field of,
Retrou, Jean, 38 133; The Merchant of Venice, 56, 67, 73, 75, 89, 109-10, 116; primary process, 107-11, 114,
Return from Parnassus, The, 37 134, 136; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 36, 67, 130-31, 146, 159, 179-80; secondary process,
Riemann, Georg. See Geometry; Riemannian 105, 134-35; Othello, 49, 56-57, 61, 67-68, 73- 107-10, 114, 130-31, 159, 179-80
Ritual, 21-22, 49-51, 53-55, 58, 60-63, 65, 78, 83, 122, 133-34, 150-51; Pericles, 35, 36; Time, 143-47, 172, 175; ways of thinking about,
66n.5; “Year King,” 49-50, 84, 171 See also Richard II, 36, 57-58, 64, IK, Richard HI, 36, 110-11, 144-46
Ceremony 58, 84; Romeo andJuliet, 40, 88-89; The Taming Toller, Ernst, 41
Robin Hood, 77-78, 89 of the Shrew, 33, 34, 36, 38, 56, 74, 134; The Tolstoy, A. K., 91
Rockefeller, John D., 96 Tempest, 36; Timon of Athens, 58; Troilus and Tootsie (film), 70
Role playing, 32, 36, 39, 46, 52, 66n.5, 67-86 Cressida, 36; Twelfth Night, 33-34, 67, 74, 79, Turner, J. M. W., 108
121; allegorical, 73-74, 77, 83-84; involun­ 121-22, 134; The Winter’s Tale, 114, 135
tary, 73-74, 76, 82-83, 86; voluntary, 73-74, Shaw, George Bernard, 23, 68, 70, 164; Heart­ University Resident Theatre Association
76, 80-83, 84 (URTA), 86
break House, 81-82; Major Barbara, 84; Man
Romanticism, 25, 40, 59, 111, 148 and Superman, 56; Misalliance, 81-82; Pyg­
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 69 malion, 82-83, 92-93 Vakhtangov, Eugene, 44
Rowley, William, 37 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 59 Valency, Maurice, 170n.5
Rycroft, Charles, 63, 107 Shepard, Sam: Buried Child, 84 Vega, Lope de, 38
Shephard, William, 98-100 VictorIVictoria (film), 70
Sackville, Thomas, 37 Sheridan, Richard, 39; The Critic, 93 Villiers, George: The Rehearsal, 39, 93
Sapir, Eldward, 26 Shklovsky, Viktor, 24, 44, 62
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 40 “Show business” play, 42 Wannamaker, John, 96
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 15, 17, 50, 58 Socrates, 100-101, 130-31 Washington, George (U.S. president), 95
Schechner, Richard, 44, 62, 149; Dionysus in '69, Sophists, 64, 130-31 Washington Press Club, 96
98-99 Sophocles, 36, 91, 130; Oedipus at Colonus, 35; Watts, Alan, 160
Schiller, Friedrich von: Don Carlos, 25; Wilhelm Oedipus the King, 50, 57, 121-32, 136, 162-63 Wayne, John, 22
Tell, IS Space: ways of thinking about, 110-11, 146 Webster, John, 37, 77
Schlueter, June, 31 Stalin, Josef (marshal, U.S.S.R.), 82 Weissman, Philip, 87n.2
Schmidt, Henry J., 149 Stanislavski, Constantin, 14, 16, 84, 86, 177 Well-Made Play, 24
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 65 Star Wars (film), 27 Whitehead, Alfred North, 105
Scribe, Eugene, 24 Stein, Peter, 44 Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest,
Scuddry, Georges de, 38 Stoppard, Tom, 115; The Real Inspector Hound, 43, 81,93
Secondary process thought. See Thought: sec­ 43; The Real Thing, 43; Rosencrantz and Williams, Tennessee: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 176
ondary process Guildenstem Are Dead, 94; Travesties, 43 Wilshire, Bruce, 112
Second Shepherds' Play, 11 Wilson, Lanford, 15
Strasberg, Lee, 84
Self-reference. See reference: self- Stratford, Ontario, 149 Wilson, Richard, 54
Sellers, Peter, 86 Streisand, Barbra, 77 Wycherley, William: The Country Wife, 61, 73-
Semiosis, 98 Strindberg, August, 65, 179; A Dream Play, 40- 74, 76-77
Semiotics, 16, 27, 51, 63 41, 44, 81; The Father, 88-90, 121, 158-63; Miss
Serban, Andrei, 44 Yang/yin, 160-62
Julie, 82
Shakespeare, William, 15, 19, 22, 24, 31, 38-39, Yeats, William Butler, 16, 176
Structuralism, 13-17, 19, 50
45-46, 56, 58, 60, 68, 70, 77, 81, 85; and “the Surrealism, 41 Yentl (film), 70, 77