METADRAMA IN SHAKESPEARE'S CLASSICAL PLAYS

Abstract

The subject of this thesis is metadrama in the four plays, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Metadrama is a type of drama that lays bare its mediation process, drawing attention to its form and asserting itself as an autonomous work of art. However, these plays are historiographic metadramas which implies that they combine in their metadramatic form the material of history. Thus, their autonomy as fictional works is challenged by their dependence on history for their subject. When these plays reveal the mediation process in their various ways, they challenge their own representation of history and imply that history is created by the imagination although it is based on real incidents, thus, asserting the interpretive nature of history. They also reveal the narrative and textual nature of all historiographic works and, thus, challenge the facticity of history itself. The first play I am studying, Julius Caesar, suggests the theatricality of history and politics by incorporating within itself plays-within-the-play of political and historical situations such as the assassination of Julius Caesar and the subsequent civil war. The assassination of Caesar is plotted and directed by Brutus while the civil war is directed mainly by Antony. The characters are viewed as playing roles in these plays-within-the-play. The primary role that concerns the play is the mythic role which mythologises a character in the face of self-consuming time. This self-consuming time is the historical time represented by dramatic time in the play and is transcended by transposing it through dramatic time into mythic recurrence. This leads to an experience - of history and drama as timeless by elevating historical events represented by the dramatic mode into an archetypal gesture - much like the theatrical gestures presented in vivid onstage images such as the acts of kissing, kneeling and washing of hands in blood, all of whose meaning is cross-cultually unequivocal - unless expressed in an ironic context. By emphasising the theatricality of history and politics, Shakespeare is suggesting that life has a dramatic and narrative potentiality just waiting to be formulated into a fictional or historiographic work. This narrative and dramatic potential is seriously challenged in the next play, Troilus and Cressida. This play, in stark contrast to Julius Caesar which is neatly unified in its dramatic action, is filled with inaction, reversals, inversions and fragmented scenes. History, as represented here, is stuck in a dilated protracted middle. To will action into a beginning is futile. When it does begin, it does so because of a circumstantial incidental rather than because of one's will, for example, Ulysses' willing Achilles into action is fruitless; Achilles is spurred into action by Patroclus' death - a circumstance that Ulysses cannot control. In rare instances, when the willing of a state of affairs into action is successful, it is abruptly truncated. A case in point is the love affair between Troilus and Cressida. Thus, any action is consumed by the larger chaos of the "middle" of inaction or non-action. In this play, then, the narrative is an artificial construct that one wills into existence but has little bearing on the larger "reality" of the "middle" or "muddle" of life. The third play, Antony and Cleopatra, in contrast, revels in hyperbolic poetry, creating verbal presence out of absence. The mythic roles of the eponymous characters within the play, are largely absent in the form of their action but they are rendered mythic and dramatic presence through the words of the characters. The mythic role may be absent in dramatic action because it exists in the narrative past, or solely in the poetic imagination of the characters. With regards to the latter, the imagination "naturalises" the imaginative mythic role so that the role is actualised completely in language. By "naturalising" the mythic Antony, Cleopatra paradoxically "historicises" Antony in mythic time - which is atemporal because it is recurrent time - by placing him in a "new heaven and new earth." - a literal mythic reality manifested solely in mythic language. In antithetical opposition to this verbal "naturalisation" of the mythic role is Marci us' action-centred "naturalisation" of his mythic self in Coriolanus. So intent is he to transpose the mythic narrative of others into mythic action and to pre-empt their mythologisation of him in narratives that he devotes his entire being to the enactment of mythic deeds. Tirelessly constituting his mythic role on the stage of history, represented by the dramatic reality, which renders deeds once done as past action, Marci us' mythic role exists entirely in the dramatic present. For him, the body is an important mediator of mythic reality for it is instrumental in carving for him his mythic role. While Antony and Cleopatra, presents myth engendered by the imagination - with no physical presence, only verbal presence - Coriolanus presents myth engendered in historical-dramatic action, giving the mythic role full physical presence. The study of these four plays concludes with the realisation that all knowledge is mediated and, thus, is subjective in nature. Although inadequate as a means of knowing, narrativisations in the form of verbal and non-verbal narratives, which involve the body enacting deeds, are a necessary and human way of meaning-making. Without such mediation, life would be a nightmarish mirror of T&C.