Abstract
This article contests the notion that in early modern performance, metatheatre operated to limit the claims made by stage illusion by examining a scene that foregrounds the notion of metatheatrical representation, the artisans’ forest rehearsal in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I demonstrate that the metatheatrical effects of the scene are only fully triggered when the audience commit to an imaginative translation of the actual stage conditions into the illusions of the play's fictions, and I argue that the theatrical management given to Bottom's magical metamorphosis operates self-reflectively to remark this arrangement.
Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated (3.1.103) 1
The third act of A Midsummer Night's Dream opens with the reappearance of the artisans. This group of workers have gathered in the forest outside Athens to rehearse the play they hope to perform at the wedding celebration of Theseus and Hippolyta. We might imagine that these would-be-actors, led by Peter Quince, the group's playwright and – to give him an anachronistic but not wholly unsuitable title – director, come in bearing some bundled theatrical props, and perhaps, in readiness for their rehearsal, are already when they enter kitted out with one or two items. At their first appearance in 1.2 these artisans almost certainly carried the tools of their respective trades (something that has been pointed out by Helen Cooper – ‘How else’ she asks, ‘would the audience know Quince is a carpenter?’ 2 ), and a nice parallel would be had if in their return to the stage, these artisans-turned-actors had swapped their tradesman's tools for theatrical props. 3 The arrangement would accord well with the game of ironic transformation that the play works throughout and make immediately apparent the self-reflexive potential offered by the rehearsal, wherein the artisans’ inept performance is expertly rendered by the foremost theatrical company of the day.
The scene's metatheatrical intent is given exuberant announcement in its first few moments. Quince, gesturing before and behind him, declares, ‘This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring house’ (3.1.3–4). It is a deliberately conspicuous piece of scene-setting that makes ironic play with the relationship that existed between actor's exposition and fictional locale in the early modern theatre. Present-day audiences are more familiar with a stage in which setting is manifested through scenography, and where fictional locale is independent of, and precedes, the entering actor(s). In early modern theatre, however, actor precedes fictional locale, with the latter deriving from the former. 4 Locale is established by the actor (when, that is, it needs to be established) through means of an exposition, usually within a few lines of entering. Before this happens the stage remains – not wholly to be sure, but more or less – untransformed; that is to say, the actual conditions of the stage are in the scene's opening moments most prominent. Once the actor has detailed his fictional surroundings, these actual features recede somewhat and the audience commits to a certain re-imagining of the space.
Quince's line exploits the audience's process of re-imagining rather neatly. The ‘green plot’ that he asks his group of aspiring actors to reconceive as a stage is of course the actual wooden stage on which the Dream itself is being performed. Similarly, when Quince re-designates the ‘hawthorn brake’ as the actors’ tiring house (the house for attiring, or dressing room), he indicates one of the doors at the stage rear that leads to the theatre's actual tiring house. But Quince's line is more than simply a witty reversal. It indicates how the business of stage representation is predicated on the audience's act of, what I have elected to call, imaginative translation. The term refers to the ability to perceive the stage action at one and the same time as both illusory and real – ‘seeing’ simultaneously an Athenian forest and an Elizabethan stage. Imagination translates the actuality of the stage into something other, but, and this is vital, translation remains an active process, a negotiation between different yet simultaneous modalities of which the spectator maintains an awareness throughout. The skilful playwright may of course, and depending on the extent of his skill, influence the degree to which the spectator ignores or remarks this awareness, but the awareness remains throughout in place. The joke produced by Quince's announcement is dependent on the existence of such a simultaneity of perception; without it there either would be no joke (as with a wholly credulous audience which would attend only to a fictional forest), or the joke would be rather lifeless (as with an entirely alienated audience that would attend only to the actual stage conditions in effect).
The principles that inform this understanding of metatheatre coincide with a critical line that can be thought to have in part developed out of some acute investigations carried out in the eighties by W. B. Worthen and William E. Gruber. Worthen argues that Shakespeare's drama compels its audience to adopt a ‘double perspective’, and that this is brought about by the way in which Shakespeare ‘forces our attention to the means of theatre … as part of our attention to the drama itself’. 5 Not dissimilarly, Gruber claims that early modern spectators would ‘not only tolerate visible contradictions’ between the actual conditions of the theatre and the fictions being played out, but that they clearly ‘consider[ed] them to be the affective basis of spectating’. 6
Imaginative translation is similarly posited. ‘Imaginative’ refers to the investment that the theatregoers, having elected to view a play, are compelled make in the representational structures the drama proposes. ‘Translation’ indicates these spectators’ volitional acquiescence in viewing the elements of the presentation as ‘art’, or as a form of pretence that distinguishes it from the world outside the theatre. The arrangement points to the theatregoers’ imaginative investment in the translated representation (that is, an investment in the ‘forest’ that the wooden stage derives) as occurring simultaneously with an imaginative investment in the processes of that translation. It further emphasises that everything on the stage, regardless of how literally it is framed, is, for the duration of the play, viewed as taking an aesthetic function; nothing that appears in the drama, person, or prop, whether it is presented in figurative or ‘literal’ terms, escapes or rescinds the overarching conditions that the pretence of art institutes.
Exploring Shakespeare's metatheatre through an approach of this kind is, however, far from a critical given. A great deal of research into the subject, from the eighties to the present day, views the contradictions that abide between the literal and figurative as having the potential to disrupt, fatally even, the audience's engagement with illusion, and sees any self-reflexive marking of drama's artifice as sabotaging the audience's imaginative investment in playworld fictions. By addressing these contrasting positions, my perspective on metatheatre's operation will be clarified and the validity of my argument better demonstrated.
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The sense that Shakespearean metatheatre engenders estrangement takes its principal impetus from Bertolt Brecht's theory of drama. For Brecht, ‘the general drug traffic conducted by bourgeois show business’ acts to stupefy its spectators, subjecting them to artistic illusion but also rendering them complicit in their own ideological exploitation. 7 Brecht proposed a new dramatic model, which he termed epic theatre, in which the ‘audience's tendency to plunge into illusion has to be checked by specific means’. 8 Divorced from any imaginative engagement with the stage fictions, theatregoers are cast back upon reality, and, in proper Marxist fashion, the immediate and actual conditions to which they are subject are impressed upon them. Such a theatre takes no pains to divert attention from its own constructedness, but rather, as Walter Benjamin observes in a remark that highlights the form's metatheatricality, ‘incessantly derives a lively and productive consciousness from the fact that it is theatre’. 9 Brecht himself saw epic theatre's Verfremdungseffekt as anticipated in the metatheatrical techniques of Elizabethan drama: he names Shakespeare as the outstanding example of this tendency, even going so far as to credit Shakespeare with achieving ‘a theatre full of alienation effects’. 10 As W. E. Yuill claims, Brecht found in Shakespeare ‘a model for the … style to which he aspired’: that is, ‘a stage with minimal technical resources, incapable of creating illusion or mesmeric “atmosphere”’. 11 While Brecht himself may not have wholly subscribed to such a categorical assessment (a point I will return to shortly), when subsequent critics of Shakespeare's metatheatre make use of the estrangement model it will nearly always operate through a conceptualisation of dramatic representation which (while it often dispenses with the ideological dimensions of Brecht's thought) continues to view the literal and figurative as discrete and oppositional elements, and which understands the former as coming at the expense of the latter.
Such an application of Brecht's thought can be found in the seminal studies of Shakespeare's metatheatre conducted by James Calderwood in the seventies and eighties. Writing for example on Hamlet, Calderwood describes how ‘instances of theatricalization … serve as Brechtian alienation devices to shatter our illusion of Danish reality and cut the cord of our imaginative life there’, and goes on to express the representational binary that underwrites such an effect: ‘We cannot be simultaneously conscious of actor and character, of theatre and depicted life, of art and nature. We cannot be imaginatively involved in the immediate experience of the play and, at the same time, be intellectually detached from it’. 12 When the cultural materialists emerged on the critical stage some years later, the estrangement model continued to exert its hold. Jonathan Dollimore writes explicitly of the need to approach early modern plays via a ‘critical perspective deriving from Brecht’, 13 wherein the ‘drawing attention to the play as play … is a kind of estrangement effect’. 14 In ‘How Brecht read Shakespeare’, Margot Heinemann further details how cultural materialism posited an early modern audience that was imaginatively detached from the claims of stage representation. In words that echo Yuill's, Heinemann breezily configures the economy of Shakespeare's stage as one in which ‘illusion was impossible anyway, with daylight performances, boys playing girls and so on’. 15
Even as the twenty-first century saw a move away from materialist accounts of Shakespeare's metatheatre the estrangement model remained formative. Jenn Stephenson sees metatheatre as a ‘phenomenological shift in perceiving consciousness’ that brings about ‘a change of flow, rather than an act of violence shattering the theatrical illusion’. Such a description allows metatheatre to be conceived of as a ‘particularly fluid characteristic of identity’ – an understanding that would initially seem to point to a breaking down of the binaries of the figurative and actual. But Stephenson's thinking is still entrenched within the dialogical structure that informs her approach and posits a ‘spatial matrix between the actual “here” of reception and the fictional “not-here” of execution’. 16 Inevitably, this leads us back to familiar critical territory, as Stephenson argues that ‘daylight performances, the bare minimally adorned stage and boy-players in female parts, demanded significant interpretive work on the part of the audience to manage the relationship between the actual … and the fictional’. Consequently, ‘the perceptual gap between the fictional and the actual’ remains for Stephenson ‘wide and inescapable’. 17 Stephen Purcell pursues the phenomenological lines that Stephenson lays out, but makes a deliberate attempt to question the critical ‘eagerness to reach for the word “Brechtian” and its related concepts of alienation and critical distance whenever we see self-conscious theatricality in early modern drama’. 18 Purcell argues that the circumstances of the early modern theatre mean that the audience never forgets that ‘the play is just a play’, and as such, no real disruption is brought about by metatheatre's remarking it. 19 Metatheatre instead ‘functions as a kind of imaginative game’, its moments of self-reflexivity more likely to lead to delight than to disjuncture. 20 Yet Purcell's interpretation still reverts to the literal-figurative binary that the estrangement model imposes. For this writer, metatheatre takes place when the ‘Now and Here’ of the actual and the ‘Then and There’ of the play-world ‘become entangled, a line or theatrical moment resonating on both levels at once’. 21 As such, the operations of metatheatre remain confined within this exchange, and they are restricted in terms of effect and extension: ‘metatheatricality cannot be a constant state: it is always the result of a shift in the ways in which the two planes relate to each other’. 22
Andrew Gurr cedes to Shakespeare's metatheatre a more agile and comprehensive potency. He argues that Shakespeare's use of metatheatre is more extensive and urgent than criticism most usually allows, and that any proper assessment of the plays is required to locate metatheatre centrally: ‘We need to heighten our consciousness about the places where the early players’ sharp use of metatheatricality impacted on their performances, and how deeply they might have affected the original staging practices and therefore our reading of the plays’. 23 Understood according to Gurr's approach, metatheatre can become a determining and all pervasive structure in Shakespeare's drama, something underlined in his comments on Hamlet, where he offers an interpretation suggesting ‘the play's insistence that the whole performance was anti-realist, metatheatre, a play within a play’. 24 But as the adjective ‘anti-realist’ indicates, Gurr still conceives of metatheatre as opposed to illusion. And in line with arguments by others outlined above, he sees this operation as emerging out of the physical affordances of the early modern theatre space (Gurr points to the natural lighting and the almost bare apron-stage) and the dramatic conventions in effect (which for Gurr follow in the traditions of boys fulfilling female parts as well as soliloquies, asides, and the speaking of verse). 25
As indicated earlier, however, Brecht himself may not have seen the estrangement model as facilitating such an unequivocal denial of illusion, identification, and empathy. The German playwright highlighted how his own drama made recourse to different representational registers, remarking that ‘[i]t must never be forgotten that non-Aristotelian theatre [realized, that is, according to the estrangement model] is only one form of theatre … I myself can use both Aristotelian [which is to say, conventionally illusionistic] and non-Aristotelian theatre in certain productions’. 26 Herbert Blau underlines the point, writing ‘Brecht was very much aware that the [estrangement] effect has … a remarkable capacity for receding into illusion’. 27 Significantly, Brecht often recognises Shakespeare's work as marked by a similar operation. For instance, discussing the role played by empathy in ‘A Little Private Tuition for My Friend Max Gorelik’, Brecht cedes to it an occasional though not inefficacious operation: ‘What a contradictory, complicated and intermittent operation it was in Shakespeare's theatre.’ 28 The adjectives here suggest not so much a minor element as an intricate and potentially impactful effect that the playwright takes pains to direct.
Reports of how Shakespeare's original spectators responded to stage fictions are of course far from comprehensive, yet in line with Brecht's previous comments, they often point to an audience that can be moved by illusion's power. We might turn to Thomas Nashe's account of the figure of Talbot from Henry VI Part 1 for example: How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times) who in the tragedian that represents his person imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.
29
An excerpt from ‘Henry Jackson's letter to “G.P.” September 1610’ can be understood as further indicating the particular way in which Shakespeare's spectators amalgamated the literal and figurative aspects of dramatic representation. It reads: ‘Moreover that famous Desdemona killed before us by her husband, although she always acted her whole part supremely well, yet when she was killed she was even more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored the pity of the spectators by her very face’. 30 The notion that ‘boys playing girls’ rendered ‘illusion impossible’ on Shakespeare's stage hardly seems to hold here. Rather we can observe that the attention to the actual and performed nature of the part does not invalidate, or even work in opposition to, its dramatic appeal. To revert here to the revealing ambiguities of Nashe's formulation, the representation of the person imagined as Desdemona is experienced as a fluid configuration, conceptually compound to the extent that the experience of the stage action serves to mingle the actor with his part while at the same time foregrounding performed gender over its actual opposite. (‘Note too’, writes Anthony B. Dawson, ‘that the actor's vitality is invoked even though the represented character is dead’ – a remark that suggests that such a theatre makes no final and unadulterated representational positions available. 31 ) The descriptions of Jackson and Nashe then would seem to indicate that the aspects of the figurative and literal were accepted by the audience as occurring together within the broader artifice of dramatic representation itself.
It is useful to place beside these early modern responses some final remarks on Brecht's dramatic model made by Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, illusion is not merely a representational characteristic of art; illusion is what art is. 32 Even as the theatregoer recognises the wooden stage as such, this wooden stage is not identical to its extra-artistic counterpart but – to return to a formulation I used earlier when outlining the concept of imaginative translation – maintains its character as a function of an artistic presentation. Accordingly, the effect of ‘estrangement’ that a particular dramatic arrangement facilitates is no more than another representational resource, another aspect of dramatic form. As such, the Verfremdungseffekt remains incapable of overturning the representational structure through which it is compelled to operate and within which it remains lodged. This sense is captured precisely when Adorno comments that ‘Brecht's efforts to destroy subjective nuances and halftones with a blunt objectivity, and to do this conceptually as well, are artistic means; in the best of his work they become a principle of stylization’ (emphasis added). 33 Frederick Burwick, writing about the relationship between metatheatre and stage illusion in light of Adorno's research, lends the point further elucidation: ‘[I]llusion is always accompanied by the evidence that the illusion is only an illusion. Thus, the triumph of illusion is never more than a convenient capitulation. By the same token, however, the pretence of annihilating illusion … only thematizes the inherent dialectics of art’. 34 Metatheatre, it follows, ‘involves not a disruption of illusion, but a shift to another dimension of illusion’. 35
Now we might return to the artisans that we left to their forest rehearsal a couple of thousand words back. Selected for discussion due to its acutely metatheatrical character, the forest episode allows an extended exploration of the operation of imaginative translation. My reading will make clear the inappropriate nature of an interpretation that would inevitably understand the scene as producing an estranged and critically reflected insight, demonstrating instead that the scene's metatheatrical strategies are concerned primarily with the nature of theatrical representation – and that rather than undermining illusion's appeal, metatheatre provides its elaboration and intensification.
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Quince's scene-setting has drawn attention to the episode's self-reflexive play, and as the artisans’ rehearsal progresses this is provided a further exploration, subtler and more complex. Bottom, playing the part of Pyramus, is instructed by Quince that after speaking his opening lines he is to ‘enter into that brake’ (3.1.63) – that is, to enter the tiring house (Shakespeare's lexical choice must be thought deliberate here: refraining from using something like ‘go behind’, which would have foregrounded the fictional forest locale, in preference for the literally descriptive ‘enter into’) – and await his cue. 36 In the decidedly self-aware terms of the Elizabethan stage, providing a stage figure a brief and explicit trip to the tiring house, especially when so marked up, creates the prospect that the figure may re-emerge in altered state – a prospect that is underlined by Bottom's cue words, ‘never tire’, teasing his dressing up. It is an expectation that Shakespeare strings out by having the artisans muddle the signal for Bottom's re-entrance. In the confusion of their rehearsal Bottom's cue words, ‘never tire’, are spoken three times, and this suggests a piece of comic stage blocking by which a flummoxed Bottom twice over (in untranslated state) emerges from and then retreats back into the ‘brake’ (that is, enters and exits the stage), before making his final and fantastically transformed entrance. 37
Bottom's first return to the stage comes as Flute, in the part of Thisbe, speaks the cue but continues on, running the separate sections of Thisbe's dialogue together and delivering them as a single speech (3.1.80–4). Quince's exasperated response points out the mechanics of the confusion: ‘Why, you must not speak that yet; that you answer to Pyramus: you speak all your part at once, cues and all’ (3.1.85–7). It is worth briefly unpacking this moment as it seems to tell us something noteworthy about the Elizabethan audience's relationship to drama: the joke reflects the playwright's understanding that at least a good portion of his audience would have been intimate with the specific ins and outs of dramatic practice. Flute's confusion stems from the fact that actors in the early modern theatre were not given the full text of the play in which they were to perform. Providing each performer with a handwritten copy of the entire drama would be unnecessarily time-consuming as well as costly. Doing so would also have meant that several more playtexts would be in circulation, thereby increasing the likelihood that a rival company or printer might come into possession of the script. Instead, the actors were each supplied with their own ‘part’ – the term, as well as indicating the character in the play, referred to the written paper, usually made into a roll, on which the lines for the part were transcribed. It is these rolls that Quince distributes in the first act when he says, ‘here are your parts’ (1.2.81–2). Beyond the lines the actor was to deliver, the roll provided no information about the part; neither was any of the surrounding dialogue given aside from a one- to three-word cue that preceded each speech. The actor memorised his part, cues and all – only unlike the confused Flute, the actor waited for another actor to speak the cue before he came in with his own lines. 38 The joke of Flute's amateurish mistake – speaking his part all ‘at once, cues and all’ – can only be shared by an audience that has a rather specialised knowledge of the processes of dramatic production, familiar with how the part was written up, and how actors negotiated their onstage exchanges. And, it would follow that for an audience so acquainted, the shifting representational value the play gives to the aspects of illusion and actuality would be all the more conspicuous.
Quince then goes on to call to Bottom, ‘Pyramus enter: your cue is past; it is, “never tire”’ (3.1.87–8), and in this way prompts the weaver's second entrance. Flute, however, responding to Quince's reprimand, has begun his part over, and Bottom, so that he might correctly come in on cue, again exits. His next entrance comes quickly on the heels of the last, and the brief time the role is offstage intensifies the effect created by the comic rule of three. When the punchline does finally arrive, it is as absurd as it is unexpected: Bottom reappears wearing an ass-head. In terror, the artisans flee into the forest – that is, they careen in and out of the doors at the stage rear (a comic callback that reproduces, visually, the translational seesaw effected by Quince's exposition at the beginning of the scene). 39
It is important to note that in so far as Bottom's metamorphosis needs to be brought off quickly, the transformation that the stage prop presents cannot render anything like a visually realistic transformation. And the play text itself seems to indicate the straightforward manner of the transformation's practical management: when later reporting the event to Oberon, Puck explains, ‘An ass's nole I fixed on his head’ (3.2.17). Similarly, the prosaic manner by which the play physically renders Bottom's eventual return to human form is indicated by the Fairy King's unvarnished instruction to Puck: ‘take off this head’ (4.1.78).
It is not without pertinence to here repeat the interesting surmise that Helen Cooper makes as to the artistic genesis of Bottom's transformation. 40 She draws attention to the one other early modern performance that we are aware of in which an actor disguised himself with an ass-nole: Balaam and the Ass, from the Chester cycle. The ass is a speaking part and, in an intriguing foreshadowing of Bottom's exclusive experience of the fairies, it is the only stage figure that is able to see the drama's angel. The late sixteenth century suppression of the cycle plays would have rendered the property of the ass-head superfluous, and we might imagine that the cash-strapped Capper's guild who had performed the pageant (their financial difficulties are attested to by the need for the government to provide the trade financial support around this time) would be looking to sell the rather elaborate property. Cooper introduces the possibility that the Queen's Men, in one of their visits to Chester (we know, thanks to Gurr's research, that the company was there in October–November 1589, 1580, and 1591 41 ) purchased the property from the guild. Soon after this, the Queen's Men were to run into difficulties of their own: the closure of the London theatres in 1592–93 impacted them significantly, and by the mid-nineties the company was no more. Shakespeare's troupe, the Chamberlain's Men, took over some of their playbooks, prompting Cooper to ask, ‘might they have taken over the ass-head too, giving the cue to Shakespeare to work it into a play?’ 42 The supposition is intriguing for all sorts of reasons, most of which are beyond the scope of this text, but it does encourage me to an observation that I will advance after finishing the discussion of the business of Bottom's transformation.
Stuart Sillars has also given attention to the nature of this stage property, and his comments can be thought of as complementing Cooper's conjecture. Sillars remarks that it is likely that the ass-head used in the original performances is the same type as that which would have been worn by the ‘hobby horse’ figure that featured in the mummers’ plays and pageants (and though the popularity of these guild performances had declined even in Shakespeare's time they remained a familiar tradition). That the artisans, ‘played in Shakespeare's theatre to represent figures of exactly the kind who would perform in the mummers’ plays’, flee when confronted with a figure whose appearance would have been absolutely familiar to them only adds further to the metatheatric and comic absurdity of the passage. 43
Reconceiving the stage action in light of Sillars's observation intensifies the complexity and comedy of the scene's representational strategies. It also encourages an imaginative reconstruction of how the business of Bottom's reappearance might have functioned. I would ask the reader to bear in mind a circumstance that distinguishes the original audience's particular experience of the Dream from our own. Where present-day readers or audience members will almost invariably come to the Dream with some foreknowledge of Bottom's magical transformation, this is not something that would have been shared by the first audiences, or even, perhaps by large portions of the audiences that came to the ‘sundry’ performances of the play that were given in the years that followed. 44 Before beginning to outline my imaginative reconstruction of the scene I would also like to remind the reader that I have earlier supplied the artisans of my imagination with a small array of props, and to state that in keeping with the characterisation lent to these figures, it would be only natural that these props be thought of as those that the Elizabethan audience may have associated with mummers’ pageants.
With these points in place, let us now turn back to the emergence of the transformed Bottom. It seems to me we must imagine that the original audience is permitted a few moments of theatrical grace in which to enjoy the outrageous spectacle of the metamorphosised Bottom before his fellow artisans are allowed to notice him and offer their terrified reaction. 45 This would mean that rather than the audience immediately understanding the weaver's transformation as being brought about by Puck's magic it is just as likely that in these first moments the spectators may have assumed they were watching a piece of guild rehearsal drollery: assumed, that is, that Bottom had thought to give his fellows a laugh by re-entering with one of the group's stock props on his head. This point, I contend, would prove highly significant in regard to the scene's already complex exploration of artistic self-reflexivity.
The line that cues Pyramus’ entrance also hints at just such an arrangement. It is Thisbe's description of Pyramus, and given in full it is ‘[a]s true as truest horse, that yet would never tire’. The simile must be thought of as reflecting the idiosyncrasies of Quince's literary technique. There is nothing similar in Ovid's version of the Pyramus and Thisbe story from which the carpenter-playwright derives his Interlude, and the content of the line that Shakespeare has allowed Quince to come up with must then be thought deliberate. The words Quince speaks ironically anticipate the equine nature of Bottom's metamorphosis, while the homophone that the line ends with works to point up that this ‘translation’ is effected by – as has already been suggested - a simple piece of tiring house business. For the Elizabethan auditors these two aspects would have folded back on each other, since, as well as denoting the actor's change of costume, another sense of ‘tire’ was ‘headdress’ or ‘raiment’. We might turn, for example of this use, to Cleopatra's description of her frolics with Antony (where the term is again employed to reference a play of transformation): ‘and next morn, / Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed, / Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst / I wore his sword Philippan’. 46 The audience could be forgiven for imagining that were there an ass-nole to hand in the Dream's fictional forest, the ambiguities in the cue line, ‘[a]s true as truest horse, that yet would never tire’, might be thought sufficient to inspire a character like Bottom to improvise a visual pun for his fellows’ amusement: re-emerging from the brake to figure a comic reversal of Thisbe's words: Pyramus is not a true horse, but a tired (that is, an ‘attired’) one.
Understanding the audience as guided towards an interpretation that initially conceives of the spectacle of the ass-headed Bottom as representing the weaver's tomfoolery with a prop that was lying about rather than his supernatural translation extends and intensifies the various metatheatric complexities that the scene has so far instituted. Just as importantly, the arrangement is perfectly feasible. In that the prop of the ass-head is a familiar mummers’ item it fits right alongside the other props that I suggest the artisans have brought to the stage. In such a context, it appears likely that when the theatregoers first see the translated Bottom emerge they would have originally understood the ass-head as enjoying the same representational value as the artisans’ other items: which, to reiterate my point, is to say that in the Dream's fictional world this ass-head would have been perceived as just another of the artisans’ props. That no audience member remarked the ass-head being carried on stage with the other props would not detract from this understanding: the alacrity and unexpectedness of Bottom's transformation does not really allow the spectator time to reflect on this; the audience only needs to entertain the idea of the ass-head-as-artisan-prop for a few moments. And there is after all no reason for the original audience to automatically see the ass-headed Bottom as indicating that the weaver has been magically transformed. The play itself does nothing to direct such expectations: the marvelous translation that Puck works on Bottom is not in any way foreshadowed in the words that the sprite speaks when he comes across the artisans. In fact, his lines direct the original audience to assume his interference in the rehearsal will take quite different form: ‘I'll be an auditor – / An actor too perhaps, if I see cause’ (3.1.67–8).
If the Elizabethan experience of this scene unfolded in the manner in which I have outlined, the effects it arranges would be quite striking. At the same time, these effects would serve to climax the scene's self-reflexive commentary: the audience members, having initially taken the explicitly quotidian ass-head for what in actuality it is – a familiar prop, and one incapable of producing a ‘realistic’ illusion – are then directed to reconceive of it as instantiating a magical transmutation. In this way, the comic framework instituted by Quince's opening declaration is again revisited, making explicit the audience's imaginative translation of the actual performance conditions into the illusions of the play's fictions. Once more, it is in lines given to Quince that Bottom's altered state is registered as an effect that is supernatural rather than mundane: ‘O monstrous! O strange! We are haunted!’ (3.1.93). A few lines after this, Quince will re-render Snout's equivocal ‘thou art changed! What do I see on thee?’ (3.1.103) (equivocal, since the second sentence still carries the suggestion that the head is no more than a hastily assumed prop) as ‘[t]hou art translated’ (3.1.105), and so indicate a more marvellous transformation. This arrangement points back once more to Quince's earlier scene-setting declaration, and to its foregrounding of the dramatic technique whereby dialogue determines play-world reality. Just as occurred then, the dramatic technique is sent up at the same time it is successfully executed: the play's spectators, having had the banal actuality of the ass-head as prop made apparent to them, are persuaded to re-register it as evincing a fantastical metamorphosis. This seems an astuteto me a quite brilliant move – for Quince's permutation of Snout's line not only remarks the fantastic nature of Bottom's reappearance but ties together the magical transformation worked by fairy magic with that of the transformation worked by the audience's imagination. The fact that Snout's description was supplied with the playwright's (let us make the most of the ambiguity of the referent) correction underlines that at the same time the audience members surrender to their investment in the illusion of Bottom's metamorphosis they are too made aware of the imaginative act of translation by which this is accomplished.
If we return to Cooper's conjecture that the ass-head used was a prop inherited from the Cycle plays, then we are encouraged to see an analogous relationship between the play-world action – whereby what might initially be assumed as a banal guild property is reregistered as instancing magical metamorphosis – and the playwright's creative appropriation and redeployment of a prop from an older and, in terms of sophistication, rather remote dramatic tradition. As a Cycle play property, the ass-head would have previously facilitated an antiquated dramatic representation that was stylised and particularised, more emblematic than it was illusory, and while Shakespeare offers an episode that initially locates the prop in just such a dated representational context, he transforms the ass-head into an elaborate device whose representational status is realised through a complex exchange between enchantment and self-reflexivity that is only made possible by cutting-edge experiments in the metatheatre of the 1590s.
The episode's comic and complex metatheatrical unfolding takes one final twist. The circumstances of the Elizabethan stage would dictate that the scene arrange itself so that any ‘props’ that the artisans brought onto the stage also left the stage with them. This would mean that when the group flee the transformed Bottom they do so bearing – and also, most probably, wearing – these ‘props’. It is not unlikely in fact that the scene presents two further masks alongside the one given to Bottom: at their first meet Quince has told Flute that he shall play Thisbe in a mask (1.2.41), and Snug may already at this point in the play be sporting the Lion's mask (Bottom's comment on Snug's costume earlier in the scene, ‘half his face must be seen through the lion's neck’ (3.1.31–2) may not necessarily refer to a future arrangement but indicate the act of Bottom readjusting Snug's mask as the line is spoken). This spectacle offers a further parodic reflection on the processes of imaginative translation by which the audience negotiate the levels of representative theatricality: Bottom's magical metamorphosis is realised by a crude guildsman's prop, while the artisans that flee from this spectacle, as mentioned above, in and out of the doors at the stage rear, though kitted out from the same group of props, take on no new fictional identity, remaining instead dramatically untranslated.
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Even if one is reluctant to accept the argument in its entirety as to the audience's experience of Bottom's transformation, the analysis of the scene as a whole nonetheless demonstrates that, in contrast to the theories of metatheatre developed out of Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, Shakespeare's drama does not operate through a dismissal of illusion, nor does it facilitate at any point a unilateral estrangement. As demonstrated, the audience's attention can be directed to the absolute artifice of the form's construction, while at the same time, still be seduced by its illusions. This simply depends on the extent that these conventions are either marked up or ignored, as well as to which aspects of the performance such metatheatric attention is directed. There exists, in other words, a gradated register of representation. At one extreme there is the fictional play-world conceived of as absolutely real, and at the other, an understanding of everything on the stage as actual, and never as other. Art – as long as it is art – does not have access to either of these extremes of course, but as the scene in the Dream demonstrates, between these ends, there remains a wide-ranging representational register which the skilful artist can play on, and to which the alert and imaginative audience attends.
The Dream's representations then must be thought of as rendered through the tension of economies that metatheatre affords: the synchronic and overlapping claims of the visual and verbal, of the actual and imagined. As well as functioning as a reflection on the processes of dramatic representation, the rehearsal scene also acts to point up the processes by which the spectators themselves negotiate the stage's representations. Despite self-reflexively directing the audience members’ attention to the intricate layering by which these representations are realised, the play still demands that, simultaneous with an appreciation of this, these audience members never forfeit their imaginative engagement in the stage fictions presented. For underlying the scene's unpacking of the business of theatrical representation is the fact of an involvement in the illusion of the forest rehearsal. Real comedy is only realised when both of these elements are present, and their contrasts exploited. If the audience does not admit an imaginative engagement in the illusory – if it does not recognise the fumblings of Flute and Bottom, or the limitations of Quince – then the humour is attenuated and loses a dimension of its humanity. What I have argued as being the scene's most brilliantly realised piece of meta-commentary – the comparison of Bottom's fantastical metamorphosis with the imaginative translation that Shakespeare's audience makes – is only made available if, consciously or not, the tiring room is presumed a brake, if Bottom is ceded the illusion of agency, and if a transformation that is impossible and absurd is imagined.
Therefore, rather than seeing metatheatre as engendering an estranged disenchantment, it seems more profitable to think of metatheatre as facilitating a withdrawal into form – a withdrawal through which it might best exploit the duality of the structures that early modern theatre makes available, and the multifarious effects these structures afford. It is an arrangement that is predicated on the audience's engagement in a continual process of imaginative translation – a ceaseless movement through modalities of dramatic representation. One which, in this ceaseless movement, remains always compassed within the sense of art's duality. As such, the representation the plays offer never rests in a position that is final, exclusive, or unilateral, but is instead always myriad, simultaneous, and unfolding.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
