The storyline of Pyramus and Thisbe closely parallels Lysander and Hermia's story, which suggests theirs could have ended tragically. The rude mechanicals present Pyramus and Thisbe to the Athenian nobles, who openly comment on the performance as it unfolds. Apart from the dramatic linking of the character of Hamlet with the murderer Brutus (foreshadowing Hamlet's murder of Polonius later in the play), the audience's awareness of the identities of the actors and their previous roles is comically referenced.Īnother example from Shakespeare is in Act V of A Midsummer Night's Dream. ![]() Historians assume that Hamlet and Polonius were played by the same actors who had played the roles mentioned in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar a year or two earlier on the same stage. Within its original performance context, however, there is a more specific, metatheatrical reference. If the only significance of this exchange lay in its reference to characters within another play, it might be called a metadramatic (or " intertextual") moment. In Hamlet, there occurs the following exchange between Hamlet and Polonius: Metatheatricality of this kind is found in most plays of that period. While the actor is not necessarily engaged at this point in the direct address of the audience, the reality of the male performer beneath the female character is openly, and comically, acknowledged (qualifying in important ways, supported further in the scene and the play as a whole, the tragic act of her imminent suicide). ![]() When the defeated Cleopatra, performed by a boy player in act five of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, fears her humiliation in the theatres of Rome in plays staged to ridicule her, she says: "And I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness in the posture of a whore". Following the work of Robert Weimann and others, theatre studies uses the terms locus and platea (relating to "location" and "place", borrowed from medieval theatre) to describe this performance effect-the locus is localised within the drama such that its characters are absorbed in its fiction and unaware of the presence of the audience while the platea is a neutral space in close contact with the spectators that exists on the boundary between the fiction and the audience's reality. In early modern English theatre, characters often adopt a downstage position in close contact with the audience and comment on the actions of others sarcastically or critically, while the other actors assume the convention that the first remains unheard and unseen while so doing. Ancient Greek comedy in particular made frequent use of it (though examples can also be found in tragedy). One major purpose of this metatheatricality was to keep then spectators away from utter involvement or belief in the development of the plot presented. Metatheatricality has been a dimension of drama ever since its invention in the theatre of classical Greece 2,500 years ago. The words "metatheatre" and "metadrama" combine theatre or drama with the Greek prefix "meta-", which implies "a level beyond" the subject that it qualifies. ![]() ![]() Metatheatrical devices may include: direct address to the audience (especially in soliloquies, asides, prologues, and epilogues) expression of an awareness of the presence of the audience (whether they are addressed directly or not) an acknowledgement of the fact that the people performing are actors (and not actually the characters they are playing) an element whose meaning depends on the difference between the represented time and place of the drama (the fictional world) and the time and place of its theatrical presentation (the reality of the theatre event) plays-within-plays (or masques, spectacles, or other forms of performance within the drama) references to acting, theatre, dramatic writing, spectatorship, and the frequently employed metaphor according to which " all the world's a stage" ( Theatrum mundi) scenes involving eavesdropping or other situations in which one or several characters observe another or others, such that the former relate to the behaviour of the latter as if it were a staged performance for their benefit. "Breaking the Fourth Wall" is an example of a metatheatrical device. Metatheatre, and the closely related term metadrama, describes the aspects of a play that draw attention to its nature as drama or theatre, or to the circumstances of its performance.
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