ABSTRACT
The Roman Actor is Massinger’s most metatheatrical play, and is thus the logical starting point for this study. Although many of his plays present the responses of onstage spectators to inset spectacles, The Roman Actor is unique, both in Massinger’s canon and in the period as a whole; it contains three plays-within performed by Paris’ company before the Emperor Domitian over the course of the main play. Not only are the plays-within Massinger’s most elaborate inset pieces, but their relation to the outer play is the most complex of all his works. Most importantly, The Roman Actor’s analysis of the function of spectatorship, presented via the reception and interpretation of the plays-within, is at the heart of Massinger’s approach to all his forms of inset art. The play is an examination of how drama and audience interact-essentially, an analysis of how the theatre works. That Massinger claims to have “euer held it the most perfit birth of my Minerua” (“Dedication” 19-20; E&G III: 15) suggests that this analytic impulse is central to the rest of his work. In many ways, The Roman Actor is a map of Massinger’s wider concerns about the nature of theatre, and his approach to drama in general.
