ABSTRACT
Renaissance drama compulsively reflects on itself. The playwrights composing for the London stage between 1580 and 1642 repeatedly stage performances of performance, repeating the conditions of their own productions: again and again, the theatre audience watches a fictional audience watch the work of a company of players, dancers, singers or mimes. Although most studies of Renaissance metadrama focus on the content of the play-within itself, plays-within and other metadramatic inserts represent both participants in the theatrical experience, providing images of the audience-stage interaction within the theatre. They are as much enactments of spectatorship-the interpretive work of a spectator-as of acting, and as such they are a potential source of information about Early Modern conceptions of audiences, spectatorship and perception. In metadramatic plays from Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy at the opening of the period to Brome’s The Antipodes at its close, the fictional audience provides insight into the way the playwright imagines his relations with his actual audience, providing a glimpse of the house from the tiring room.
