Shakespearean Metatheatre
Shakespeare employs metatheatrical devices throughout his plays. Some examples include The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest. In each of these plays, there is a play or masque presented as part of the larger plot.
In Hamlet, there occurs the following exchange between Hamlet and Polonius:
Hamlet: My lord, you played once i'th'university, you say.
Polonius: That I did my lord, and was accounted a good actor.
Hamlet: And what did you enact?
Polonius: I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i'th'Capitol. Brutus killed me.
Hamlet: It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.
Hamlet (3.2.95-100).
If the only significance of this exchange lay in its mentioning of dramatic characters within another play, it would be called a metadramatic moment. Within its original context, however, there is a greater, metatheatrical resonance. Critics assume that the roles in each case were played by the same actor in their original productions by Shakespeare's company; Polonius and Caesar by John Heminges and Hamlet and Brutus by Richard Burbage. Apart from the dramatic linking of the character of Hamlet with the murderer Brutus (and Hamlet as a murderer of Polonius in particular, as will occur in 3.4), the audience's awareness of the actors' identities and previous roles is being triggered.
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