Download Functions (or politics) of Metatheatrical Techniques in King Lear and

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Hwang Ji Yeon
Ron Strickland
378: Shakespeare on Stage
08/08/03
Metadramatic Techniques and Their Effects on the Audience in King Lear
I
As Richard Fly points out, metadramatic approach in Shakespearean criticism is
concerned with interpreting Shakespeare’s plays in terms of the reflection of “the
artist’s ongoing struggle to understand and master the expressive potential of his
medium” (24). The medium here is drama itself as an art form. I think that the core of
metadramatic approach to the plays is this emphasis of the ‘medium’. It does not
exclude the aspect of meanings a play may create. But its main concern is to trace the
process in which a piece of drama is made. Usually, drama making process begins with
the consideration for the concrete theatre space the dramatic work is to be staged. So,
the understanding of dramatic medium is related with that of the theatre. Theatre itself is
not only the starting point but also the closing one for a dramatist. Putting emphasis on
the aspect of the theatre and the elements of the theatre, I want to examine in King Lear
the relationship between the theatre and the play written for staging in the theatre
condition. It will show that the metadramatic techniques used in King Lear resulted
from the consideration for the theatre and for the audience seeing the play performed.
First, I want to focus on the prevalent theatre going habit at Shakespeare’s time.
According to Andrew Gurr, with increasing population of London, theatres from 1574
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to 1642 found their regular audience to “help the players to stay prosperous” (213). He
says that “there was on average over that seventy years or so of London commercial
theatre as many as a million visits to the playhouse a year”(212). Though the admission
prices differed according to the seating places, “the basic penny at the Globe in 1600”
(215) was relatively cheap compared with other forms of entertainment at the time.
Once people were admitted to the public theatre, they could see all kinds of people of
different classes. As John Davies put it, “citizens and artisans joined with gentlemen
and prostitutes, porters and household servants” could attend the same play (Gurr 217).
This fact supports Jean Howard’s opinion that in the age of “heightened social mobility”
(10), theatre could be a place of “social change and contestation” (11). I think this is the
aspect of interaction between the theatre audiences. The theatre space and the presence
of “people from the whole social gamut” (Gurr 217) at the same place could make the
audiences think of their life in terms of theatre. So, Jaques’ speech beginning with “all
the world’s a stage” shows the theatre metaphor prevalent among people at the time.
Even Queen Elizabeth I used theatre metaphor to communicate with the people and to
display her power to the whole English subjects. When she said that “we princes are set
on stages in the sight and view of all the world” (Greenblatt 21), she seemed to have
thought that she was seen to the people like an actor seen to the audience and that
therefore, she must manipulate her image as a king.
Like this, theatre in Shakespeare’s time functioned as a cultural place to offer
people an opportunity to meet people of various class and profession as well as to give
an entertainment. Through this theater experience, they could share the common
consciousness that they were similar to the actors playing the designated roles.
According to Jean E. Howard, this kind of phenomenon shows that “the theater shared a
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discourse of theatricality with the larger culture” (10). That is, under the popular
theatre-related sayings, there were the greater social changes triggered by the “transition
from feudalism to capitalism” (10). Exposed to the changing social positions and
identities, people came to have “the sense that in some fundamental way men and
women were actors in a self-scripted theater and must forge the identities once taken for
granted”(Howard 10).
But, according to Anne Righter, Shakespeare’s use of the play metaphor stands
out among his contemporaries. She says that “the association of the world with the stage
fundamental to Elizabethan drama built itself deeply into his (Shakespeare’s)
imagination, and into the structure of his plays” (89). Her remark emphasizes that
Shakespeare’s plays are unique in the matadramatic frames. The frequent use of the play
image, “a meditation upon the nature of the theatre” (Righter 89) and the reflection of
“the relation of illusion and reality” (Righter 89) are important qualities of metadrama.
Righter points out the metadramatic aspect of Shakespeare’s plays as follows:
“Shakespeare’s genius perceived in the metaphor (play metaphor) a virtually
inexhaustible means of expression, reflecting the multiple possibilities inherent in the
dramatic situation itself” (89).
James L. Calderwood defines metadrama (or metatheatre) as “a dramatic genre
that does go beyond drama (at least drama of a traditional sort), becoming a kind of
anti-form in which the boundaries between the play as a work of self-contained art and
life are dissolved” (4). Anne Righter’s remark and that of James L. Calderwood show us
the way a drama becomes metadramatic; to use Michael Shapiro’s term, it’s through
“self-reference” (146). Here, self-reference means that a play reminds us (the reader or
the audience) of its being a play. Sidney Homan expresses this metadramatic situation
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as a moment “when the theater turns to itself” (10). According to Homan’s explanation,
the metadramatic moments, especially in Shakespeare’s plays, make us “conscious of
his art” by referring “not just to theatrical references in the text itself but to metaphors
based on all the components of the theater” (11). He enumerates the components of the
theater like this; “the act of creation on the playwright’s part, the resulting text, the
techniques of acting and the delivery of that text, and the presence and function of the
audience” (11). I think that the four things Homan lists are very important elements
when we discuss the metadramatic techniques. Especially, I think, the playwright’s
creating process and the function of the audience are more important than the other two
components. Considering the amphitheatres of Shakespeare’s time, we cannot put too
much importance on the audience part in the process of writing a play. So my main
concern in this paper is to emphasize the relation between the metadramatic techniques
and the audience in King Lear.
II
From the explanations above, we can find that King Lear also deals with a
society in which great social change accompanies the crisis of role playing of the
members living in that society. In the center of the play, we witness that the king’s role
comes to nothing. Lear’s statement to Cordelia that “Nothing will come of nothing” is
an echo throughout the play and can be applied, I think, to the metadramatic aspect of
this play. If someone’s role in the society he lives in is nothing, he comes to nothing.
That Lear and Edgar, after they are stripped of their fixed position, come to nothing
reminds us constantly that our presence in the world is only playing of the designated
role. The fool’s remark (1.4 187-88) after seeing Lear mistreated by Goneril that he is
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better than Lear because he is a fool makes sense in terms of role playing. In the fool’s
thought process, we can find an association of life with play metaphor. If we all are
actors on the stage, the role of a fool is better than nothing.
Thomas F. Van Lann, in his Role-Playing in Shakespeare, begins his reading of
King Lear by showing that Lear’s playlet in the opening scene goes wrong. According
to Van Lann, the first scene of King Lear seems to be a well-rehearsed play except
Cordelia’s response. Lear’s remark to Cordelia’s “nothing”, “How, how, Cordelia!.
Mend your speech a little,/ Lest you may mar your fortunes” supports Van Laan’s
opinion that Lear “treats Cordelia like an actress who has forgotten her lines”(198). To
his point, I want to add that Lear in this speech acts like a director of a performance.
Van Laan thinks it important that from the first, Lear does play-acting instead of roleplaying. According to him, Lear’s play-acting of his imaginary role, instead of roleplaying expected of him, begins all the following tragedies. Lear’s plan to “divest
himself partially of his role as king but to retain only its rights and privileges violates
the demands of his role” (199).I find that Van Laan’s notion of role-playing is too
complex, but that his opinion that Lear is acting according to his playlet is very helpful
to enlarge the perspective of metadrama in King Lear. His term ‘playlet’ is similar to
the script of the dramatist. Though he does not use the word ‘surrogate dramatist’, I
think that his notion of ‘play-acting according to the playlet’ is the same as that of
‘surrogate dramatist’ who does the playwright’s trade in the play. James L.Calderwood
calls surrogate dramatist ‘internal dramatist’ and lists “Aaron, Oberon, Iago, Prospero,
all the kings, whose successes and failures in governing men and events reflect
Shakespeare’s in governing them” (16). The reason Calderwood included all the kings
in the category of internal dramatist can be applied to Van Laan’s notion of play-acting
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of King Lear. Like most kings, Lear in the first scene of King Lear directs characters
according to his own scripts and in this sense, he acts as a surrogate dramatist.
Besides Lear, there are more surrogate dramatists in King Lear. Above all,
Edmund is a representative surrogate dramatist. Van Laan points out that “Lear’s
nullification of the roles upon which order depends creates an ideal setting for Edmund”
(200). Here, we can imagine Edmund’s position as a bastard son in the early modern
England. According to Lawrence Stone, from the thirteenth century, bastards were
“legally excluded from property inheritance” (30). So Edmund is as good as nothing in
the social hierarchy of that period. Jean E. Howard mentions that “Renaissance drama is
full of such displaced types (as Edmund)-Bosolas and Vindices and Bussy D’Amboiseswho for one reason or another find themselves without a socially defined identity and so
are forced to embrace the path of self-fashioning” (44). I think that Edmund’s playacting as a surrogate dramatist is a way of ‘self-fashioning’ to fulfill his ambition-from
‘nothing’ to something- in this society of disorder and mobility. His virtuoso-like acting
ability when he changes roles rapidly in act 2, scene 1 shows his desire for the roles
denied to him in the society.
According to Van Laan, Goneril also acts as a surrogate dramatist. But she
“begins not as actor but as playwright-director, working through her agent, Oswald”
(Van Laan 201). What Lear accepts from her house is her invention and is performed by
her servants including Oswald. If the audience can think about the relation between
Goneril and Oswald, that is, the relation between a puppeteer and a puppet, they can
enjoy a puppet show embedded in the main play, King Lear.
Kent and Edgar also play the surrogate dramatist role, though their purposes are
different from those of Edmund and Goneril. This shows that surrogate dramatist not
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always does the villainous part. I think that surrogate dramatist technique is a kind of
supplemental device to bridge the gap between the real dramatist and the manipulating
characters. In the case of manipulating characters, the intervention of the real dramatist
would lessen the dramatic suspense easier than the characters’ own plot- making. Kent’s
purpose of his own play-script is to serve Lear in the ignorance of his identity. In Act I,
Scene iv, he says in aside that “If thou canst serve where thou dost stand condemned, /
Thy master, whom thou lov’st, shall find thee full of labour” (5-6). Edgar writes his
own play to preserve himself in the bestial world in which he is betrayed by his own
brother (though half-brother). His play-script shows the detailed direction how to act the
Bedlam beggar. He says that “My face I’ll grime with filth, / Blanket my loins, elf all
my hair with knots” (2.2. 175-176). I find that this direction is for a make-up staff in the
modern theatre.
Like this, surrogate dramatist technique is used by many characters in King Lear.
Van Laan observes that “almost every character (of King Lear) engages in play-acting
of one kind or another” (201). I think that his remark is related with the deceptive roles
many characters in King Lear play beyond their original fixed roles. In my opinion, the
presence of multiple surrogate dramatists in the tragedy of King Lear shows the
disordered and unstable society in which the old value and the new one struggle for the
hegemony of power. The resolution of the struggle in this play does not end in harmony
as in the comedies. Unlike in the comedies, the surrogate dramatists in the tragedies, I
think, contribute to throwing the opposing forces into relief. Their manipulations of
their own plays are usually delivered in soliloquies or asides. The special speech acts
such as soliloquy and aside, conventionalized dramatic device, emphasize theatricality
different from every day lives. Theatre experience gives the audience an ‘artificial’
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entertainment. In many cases, the acting of surrogate dramatist, through the direct
address to the audience, tends to make another play within a play.
Apart from the surrogate dramatist technique, the play metaphor does a
metadramatic function. The play metaphor, according to Anne Righter, originated “from
an ancient group of resemblances between life and drama” (113). The play metaphor, I
think, carries always a pair of persons, that is, the original person and its ‘double’ or its
agent. Antonin Artaud expresses the essence of the theatre by the phrase ‘theatre and its
double’. As his term ‘double’ suggests, the use of theatre -related words in a play make
the drama ‘metadramatic’ by their self-referentiality.
Edmund’s second soliloquy in Act I, Scene ii is metadramatic in that his speech
reminds the audience of the fictive situation by the use of theatrical terms. On Edgar’s
appearance just at the right time when he lets out Edgar’s name, he says like this; “ and
on’s cue out he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy; mine is villainous
melancholy, with a sigh like them of Bedlam ”(1. 2. 129-131). The words like ‘stage’,
‘act’, ‘play’, ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’ are suggestive of the theatre and emphasize the
theatricality of the performance the audiences are experiencing.
Kent’s statement that Oswald takes “Vanity the puppet’s part against the royalty
of her father” (2. 1. 33-34) also reflects his consciousness of the theatrical situation he is
in. In act 4, scene 1, after seeing Gloucester with no eyes, Edgar cries in aside that “Bad
is the trade that must play fool to sorrow, / Ang’ring itself and others” (37-38). In act 4,
scene 5, Lear also uses the play metaphor when he sees Gloucester whose eyes were
plucked out. He says that “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great
stage of fools” (171-172).
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I think that these play metaphors express the consciousness of life’s finiteness.
Our life is supposed to end like the play ends after the limited play time. Also, these
play metaphors reveal that our life has many unwanted parts we must play in the course
of life. According to Herbert Weisinger, the theatrum mundi (all the world’s a stage)
metaphor Shakespeare uses is a “powerful, brooding Renassance theme of time” (62).
With the actual theatres and people’s play-going habits in the early modern England, the
play metaphor functioned as a mirror for the life as a theatre. Weisinger interprets the
appearance of play metaphor “as a symptom of sophisticated disillusionment” (63). He
thinks that this play metaphor “signalize that intellectual crisis of the Renaissance” (70)
and he summarizes the crisis citing Panovsky’s definition as “the consistent destruction
or obscurantism of borderlines which the Middle Ages had established and observed,
while not as yet renouncing the use of the concepts previously defined by these
borderlines” (70). Considering Weisinger’s thought about the play metaphor, I think
that the play metaphor used in the plays of Shakespeare blurs the borderline between
reality and illusion. It does not mean that the attitude of the audience is always alienated
from the play performed. Rather, it means that the play makes the audience engaged
some times and other times it makes the audience detached. I think this is the real
meaning of the “distancing” (Mack 280) Shakespeare supplied with the audience.
In connection with the ‘distancing’ effect, I think that Robert Nelson’s opinion
that “the Shakespearean subplot often serves as a kind of play within a play, an ironic
mirror of the main plot” (11) is interesting for the discussion of metadramatic
techniques in Shakespeare. According to his opinion, the two- plot structure of King
Lear gives the play metadramatic perspective. In other words, we can see King Lear
family plot in comparison with the Gloucester family plot and vice versa. And in this
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process, each plot functions as a mirror reflecting each other. Some similarities also
contribute to making mirror effect. Each plot has a father figure who doesn’t tell the
good from the evil with his eyes open and also has a villain type figure and a scapegoat
type one among children. In relation to the thematic aspect, we can also find some
parallel points such as the victory of villainy over justice in the early part, the sufferings
of the main characters in the middle phase and the awakening of them together with the
punishment of the evil characters in the resolution. Especially, the repetition of the word
‘nothing’ across two plots reveals the interdependence of them at thematic level.
Through these correspondences to the character types and the similar structures and
themes between the two plots, King Lear’s subplot can be said to do some metadramatic
functions.
I think most dramatic conventions based on the theatrical promise such as
soliloquy and aside can be categorized as metadramatic techniques because they give a
new frame to the audience. For example, asides assume that the speech cannot be
audible to other characters on the stage but audible to the audience. Through that
assumption, aside makes the audience see the stage in two ways. Considering the
explanation of Arthur Colby Sprague that in soliloquies and asides, “character and
motive are unfolded, plot and counterplot set going, events narrated, and the issues of
the play made clear” (72) and the fact that most soliloquies and asides are used by
surrogate dramatist figures, these conventional techniques can be said to play bridging
roles between the stage and the audience.
Disguises used by Edgar and Kent have some aspect of metadramatic techniques.
The explanation for this can be sought in the notion of play-acting mentioned above. In
a way, we can say that characters in disguise have two-dimensional acting space. In
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other words, they have double identities through the changes of garments or
appearances. The audience also must keep the changes in mind. In the mind of the
audience, the disguised characters are like people living in two different places at the
same time. Their existence itself needs double frame. This technique is also based on
the theatrical convention like soliloquies and asides and contains the play metaphor
within itself because the disguised characters make the audience keep thinking that their
external self (changed by garments) plays a new part other than their original self.
Lastly, I want to point out the 6th scene in act 4, usually called cliff scene. In this
scene, the audience comes to see some absurd scene in which Edgar describes the bare
stage to his blinded father Gloucester as if it is a cliff. We don’t accept Edgar’s
description of the landscape as real like Gloucester does. Nevertheless, we are engaged
with the movement Gloucester will take after Edgar’s explanation of the imaginary
scene. As Robert Egan explains, we know that “even on the play’s level of reality this
panorama is objectively an untruth, a purely artificial product of Edgar’s imagining”
(22). But, we find ourselves enjoying this scene on a borderline between the reality and
the illusion. I think this scene is like an inserted scene (or shot) in a play. With Edgar’s
versatile play-acting before his blind father (a kind of audience), this scene brings me up
the image of a cameraman taking a picture of a playing actor. This purely dramatic
artistry can not be called play-within-a-play, but its function and effect as a new frame
are similar to that of metadrama.
III
Like this, Shakespeare’s King Lear shows many metadramatic techniques
ranging from the simple use of the words related with the theatre such as ‘play’, ‘act’,
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and ‘part’ to the subplot devices. Though their uses and effects are a little different, the
common effect is that they give the audiences another frame other than the stage from
which they could see the play. So, at the moments where one of the metadramatic
techniques is used, the audiences come to have at least two frames to see through the
play. It’s like to see the world through the double window. So, theoretically thinking,
these metadramatic devices will make the audience detached from the play. But, when
we consider the Elizabethan theatre conditions and conventions, we come to realize that
these metadramatic techniques not always made the audience detached. Maynard Mack
explains that “the Elizabethan theater could hold a fine poise between elements making
for engagement and those making for detachment” (285). What makes this possible was,
according to Mack, that the theatre devices that drew the audience into the play and
those that insisted on the consciousness of artifice “could be used so as to exert an
influence in both directions” (285). For instance, the dramatic convention of soliloquy,
in most cases, encouraged “maximum identification of spectator with persona” (Mack
285). On the other hand, the technique of disguised characters, which usually
emphasizes “dramatic artifice”, “made it possible for boys who were acting girls to
become boys again, and so intensify realism” (Mack 285). So we cannot say that
metadramatic techniques always contributed to making the audience detached from the
play. Rather, I think that many metadramatic techniques used in King Lear helped the
audience to engage in the play in one way or another because, in most cases, the
techniques function as an “author surrogate” (Mack 283) to make the play proceed
smoothly. As many critics points out, the fact that theatre trope was commonplace in the
early modern England also makes us think of the effects metadramatic techniques took
as a kind of device for engaging the audience in the play. Of course, as I said above,
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these techniques make the audience aware that they are in the theatre and see a fictive
play. But at another level, they help the audience enjoy the play with the help of
information needed for the appreciation of the play. King Lear, with many
metadramatic techniques, does not prevent the audience from engaging in the play.
Though we know that it is a forged artwork, we don’t stop engaging in the play. That’s
why we feel some tragic effect after the performance of this play. So we can conclude
like this; the metadramatic techniques in King Lear work both ways, that is, engagement
and detachment. But the detaching power is not so great to prevent us from engaging in
the play.
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Works Cited
Abel, Lionel. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. New York:Hill and
Wang, 1963.
Calderwood, James L. Shakespearean Metadrama: The Argument of the Play in Titus
Andronicus, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream and Richard II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971.
Egan, Robert. Drama within Drama: Shakespeare’s Sense of his Art in King Lear, The
Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. New York: Columbia UP, 1975.
Fly, Richard. ‘The Evolution of Shakespearean Matadrama: Abel, Burckhardt, and
Calderwood’, Comparative Drama. 1986. Vol.20. 124-139.
Greenblatt, Stephen. ‘General Introduction’, The Norton Shakespeare Based on the
Oxford Edition. Eds. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and
Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1997.
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Cambridge UP, 1992.
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Shakespeare. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1981.
Howard, Jean E. Shakespeare's art of orchestration: stage technique and
audience response. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
Laan, Thomas F. Van. Role-Playing in Shakespeare. Toronto: University of Toronto
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Mack, Maynard. ‘Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare’s Plays’, Essays on
Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama: In Honor of Hardin Craig. Ed. Richard
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Hosley. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962. 275-296.
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Sprague, Arthur Colby. Shakespeare and the Audience:A Study in the Technique of
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Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. Abridged
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