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 cri tics 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". Though the study of Shakespeare's metadrama, along with its upper-caste cousin, the dream play, has had a robust critical career, beginning even before Abel's large claim and continuing through the 1960s and 1970s, there has been little continuing effort to work out a general theory of metatheatrical dramatic form or to trace its development over time as a unified field. An exception is Richard Hornby's essay "Varieties of the Metadramatic"; Homby's primary interest here, however, is less critical than taxonomic.

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