Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form.

by Lionel. Abel

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Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

Reviews

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lionel Abel, Metatheatre (Hill and Wang, 1963)
[originally posted 31Jan2000]

According to Lionel Abel, classic tragedy died with Macbeth, and a new kind of pseudo-tragedy rose with Hamlet. Since "pseudo-tragedy" is a mouthful and Abel is a contemporary of those critics whose life's work, it would seem, was to add "meta-" to everything, Abel decided to call this new kind of drama "metatheatre." What is metatheatre? Simply put, it's the conversion of the tragic (anti-) hero's firm belief in forces outside his control-- the gods in Sophocles, or the Weird Sisters (Abel's take on them: a corruption of the Three Furies, a view I suspect myself) in Macbeth-- to the (anti-) hero's less firm belief in the motives of humanity, and more importantly, the (anti-) hero's ability to put on an act in order to deceive the other players. The layers of an onion-- the actor acting a part to the audience, and acting a different part to the other actors.

Hamlet, according to Abel, was the turning point. It not only contained this mechanism-- given free rein by letting the other actors in the play think Hamlet was mad, leaving Hamlet to essentially do what he liked—but was also metaphorized by the play-within-a-play Hamlet stages to uncover the treachery of his stepfather. If you believe Abel, Hamlet is, simply, the finest drama in the history of the form, and I'm not inclined to disagree. After this explication (a lucid and interesting one—unlike many) of Hamlet, Abel whirls us through the next three hundred odd years of playwriting, giving us examples of metatheatrical works which have been mislabeled as tragedy down through the ages, both in drama and fiction (he specifically contrasts Don Quixote with El Cid in one essay), and makes a strong case for metatheatre as a valid genre on the stage.

Unlike most works of theatrical criticism-- I'm not a big stage fan, so I find most of it way above my head-- Abel's little work is readable, understandable, and finishable by the average joe on the street with more than an eighth-grade education. It may even lead more people to want to experience the theatre (at least, as long as it stays away from musicals). A fine little achievement that I hope is still in print. ***

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book being totally awesome, and I was only sometimes disappointed. I am really intrigued by metatheatre or metadrama as a form, though I think there may be more of a difference between the two than Abel deals with. I think metatheatre would be a self-conscious representation of the conditions of performance, while metadrama would be a literary device inherent in the written version of a play and commenting on the nature of drama as a literary form (though of course these are not absolutely exclusive). I think Abel's notion about metatheatre and the director-character (such as Hamlet, who sets the stage and directs people to perform in certain ways, and I mean that beyond The Mousetrap) is a really smart one; it has expanded the way that I think about metatheatre.
I am also interested in Abel's argument in the opening section about why Macbeth is Shakespeare's only successful tragedy (though I'm not sure I'm totally on board with this argument), but I find a lot of Abel's broad statements off-putting. For instance, he writes that As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night aren't really comedies because the humor in them is labored and sometimes gross. Apart from the fact that he gives no further justification for this point of view, I don't think there are any comedies that are not sometimes labored and gross in their humor. Another instance is when in the final essay of the collection--"The Theatre and the 'Absurd'"--Abel gives a really bad reading of a Camus passage and of Martin Esslin's (admittedly not tremendous) book The Theatre of the Absurd. Abel is very critical of Esslin's work, despite fundamentally misidentifying the theory of the Absurd coming out of Camus' work and misreading the relationships Esslin draws between the experience of the absurd and the dramatists working in the Theatre of the Absurd.