Clown shows: Anti-theatricalist theatricalism in four twentieth-century plays

Abstract

Metatheatre is an old practice but a comparatively recent critical interest. It attained momentum among critics in the early 1960s, stirred partly by Lionel Abel’s brief essays in Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. Abel claimed that a new dramatic ‘form’ had arisen in the English Renaissance and the Spanish Golden Age. ‘[T]ragedy would be replaced by metatheatre’ in the theatres of Shakespeare and Calderon, Abel argued, after whom extended a lineage that stretched to Pirandello, Genet, Brecht and Beckett. These plays had not been recognized as a distinct form, Abel said, and had no name: ‘I shall presume to designate them. I call them metaplays, works of metatheatre.’

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