The mirror and the stage: Theatrical reflections in the plays of Kyd, Shakespeare, and Jonson

Lionel Abel in his Metatheatre---A New View of Dramatic Form (1963) argues that metatheater "shows the reality of the dramatic imagination," and though scholars have updated Abel's arguments, few have studied Renaissance culture as it is revealed within reflexive drama. Reflexive scenes and speeches in Renaissance drama commonly propel the plot, complicate sub-plots, and raise cultural awareness among spectators by imposing upon them social interests familiar to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century spectators.The reflexive speeches in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy situate private revenge against Biblical and Elizabethan theories regarding vigilante justice, but in theatrical terms that obscure instead of clarify vengeance. Shakespeare's metatheater---especially in his early plays---reveals his interest in the manner by which characters in plays and the spectators watching them perceive Elizabethan drama. The pageant scene that concludes Love's Labor's Lost, for example, addresses the "worthiness" of Elizabethan drama by metaphorically illustrating the merits of plays through the pageant of the "Nine Worthies." The "Induction" scenes in The Taming of the Shrew emphasize the distinctions between the perceptions of the actors on stage and those of audience members. Confusing perceptions also feature prominently in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the reflexive parodies in this play especially stress the imagination and its impact upon the audience's perceptions of the theater. Shakespeare's motif regarding perceptions develops in Hamlet into a study of temporal perceptions, but in terms that illustrate via "The Murder of Gonzago" the effects of metatheater on Claudius's and Hamlet's perceptions of time. Jonson's The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair call attention to the artifice of drama by satirizing the Puritans for their complaints against plays and, as Jonson believed, their hypocritical religious customs.Metatheatrical plays invite spectators to ponder the question, "What does a playwright intend by interrupting his central plot to allude to a common social concern?" This dissertation offers the following answer: playwrights disrupt the central action on stage to encourage audience members to re-consider a cultural or societal concern through a theatrical medium. Metatheatrical plays merit special notice because such plays at once "engage" their audience's social conscience and encourage them to reconsider accepted truths.