Reading Metatheatre

Abstract

Is it possible to read metatheatre? If so, to what extent was metatheatre part of the playreading experience in early modern England? Focusing on "paratexts" to a range of plays printed in England in the early seventeenth century, from printed character lists to manuscript marginalia, this article investigates implied and actual readers' responses to the self-reflexive qualities of playbooks, whether or not those qualities are intentional. In doing so, it argues that early modern printed playbooks prompted "performative" reading practices through which readers actively reflected on the relationship between the real-and play-worlds, and enacted their own roles in the production of metatheatre. While Stephen Purcell proposes in this special issue that metatheatre is a "game … that can be played only in [theatrical] performance" (XXX), I contend that certain forms of metatheatre are accessible through-and sometimes even dependent on-the interplay between different agents of meaning-making (dramatists, stationers and readers) on the "paper stage" of the printed book. Such an approach offers a new methodological framework and uncovers a neglected body of evidence for the analysis of metatheatre in early modern drama, including character and errata lists, printing errors in Shakespeare's First Folio, and readers' marks. Metatheatre, I suggest, needs to be reassessed from the perspective of book history as well as theater history, and especially intersections between the two. Early modern metatheatre was largely experienced through the conspicuous mixing of media, manifestations of the theatricality of the book and the bookishness of theater.