ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on meta-theatre or metadrama, as Lionel Abel defined it in 1963 and as James Calderwood followed up during the 1970s and early 1980s, in relation to Shakespeare. It discusses how the theatre represents the human over time suggests changes in the uses of mimesis in the ways form and content interact. In long-used dramatic techniques, playwrights express the changing shapes of human dilemmas. The comedies represent self-conscious theatricality and that has the audience remembering the distinction between life and art, world and theatre, as the characters call attention to it. Shakespeare uses Bottom's theory of acting, theory and mimicry – his rhyming triplets, too, punctuated with delayed rhyming single lines– as a way to create humour and to explore the nature of the theatre and its relation to the world, its role in mimesis. Bottom is like folk or naive theatre, vigorous and enthusiastic but also subject to dramatic irony.
