Metadrama In Shakespeare

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Brutus, Cassius and others as actors, self consciously fashioning Roman politics as competing theatrical performances the play enacts the representation of itself to ideology, and of ideology to subjectivity. Moreover if the subjects within the fiction of Julius Caesar are radically unstable by virtue of their representations then so is the theatre whose function is to stage this instability. This means that Julius Caesar fits within this essay’s definitions of Shakespeare’s work reflecting art not life, but also if we are to think of life in terms of people playing roles within their lives where ‘All the world’s a stage’ , and perceiving reality in a myriad different ways then theatre reflects life reflecting art - a complication that students of Shakespeare would expect the Bard to enjoy. Feste in Twelfth Night exemplifies this notion,
“Nothing that is so is so”
(Act IV scene i, line 8)
Shakespeare uses Feste to foreground the ...

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audience and there is evidence to suggest that he wrote specifically for these people who no doubt kept returning because they enjoyed the way he wrote and the experience of the play.
One convention which foregrounds the theatrical is the ‘aside’ where for example Hamlet speaks very loudly so that the audience who may be ten meters away can hear him clearly and yet another person on the stage only three meters away cannot hear a word. The audience accepts this as a known convention. The effect of this is that the audience continues to interpret and actively participate in the metadramatic constructs, and co-operating with the artificiality of the play thereby increasing ...

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