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1.
2. The Play within the Play
The Performance of
Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection
3. Internationale Forschungen zur
112 Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
In Verbindung mit
Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich
Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim
Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität
Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität
Wien)
herausgegeben von
Alberto Martino
(Universität Wien)
Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki
Anschrift der Redaktion:
Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien
4. The Play within the Play
The Performance of
Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection
Edited by
Gerhard Fischer
Bernhard Greiner
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
6. Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner
The Play within the Play: Scholarly Perspectives xi
I. The Play within the Play and the Performance
of Self-Reflection
Bernhard Greiner
The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit
of the Play within the Play: The Hamlet Paradigm 3
Yifen Beus
Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre
Manifestation 15
Klaus R. Scherpe
‘Backstage Discourse’: Staging the Other in Ethnographic and
Colonial Literature 27
David Roberts
The Play within the Play and the Closure of Representation 37
Caroline Sheaffer-Jones
Playing and not Playing in Jean Genet’s The Balcony and The
Blacks 47
II. The Play within the Play and Meta-Theatre
1. Self-Reflection and Self-Reference
Christian Sinn
The Figure in the Carpet: Metadramatical Concepts in Jacob
Bidermann’s Cenodoxus (1602) 61
John Golder
Holding a Mirror up to Theatre: Baro, Gougenot, Scudéry and
Corneille as Self-Referentialists in Paris, 1628-1635/36 77
Manfred Jurgensen
Rehearsing the Endgame: Max Frisch’s Biography: A Play 101
Barnard Turner
Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real
Thing (1982): New Frames and Old 113
Ulrike Landfester
The Invisible Fool: Botho Strauss’s Postmodern Metadrama and
the History of Theatrical Reality 129
7. vi
2. The Theatre and its Audience
Shimon Levy
Queen of a Bathtub: Hanoch Levin’s Political, Aesthetic and
Ethical Metatheatricality 145
Gad Kaynar
The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play within the Fictitious
Play in Israeli Stage-Drama 167
Zahava Caspi
A Lacerated Culture, A Self-Reflective Theatre: The Case of
Israeli Drama 189
III. Perspectives on the World: Comedy, Melancholy,
theatrum mundi
Frank Zipfel
‘Very Tragical Mirth’: The Play within the Play as a Strategy for
Interweaving Tragedy and Comedy 203
Herbert Herzmann
Play and Reality in Austrian Drama: The Figure of the Magister
Ludi 221
Helmut J. Schneider
Playing Tragedy: Detaching Tragedy from Itself in Classical
Drama from Lessing to Büchner 237
Gerhard Fischer
Playwrights Playing with History: The Play within the Play and
German Historical Drama (Büchner, Brecht, Weiss, Müller) 249
Birgit Haas
Postmodernism Unmasked: Rainald Goetz’s Festung and Albert
Ostermaier’s The Making of B-Movie 267
IV. The Play within the Play as Agency of Socio-Cultural
Reflection and Intercultural Appropriation
Lada Cale Feldman
The Context Within: The Play within the Play between Theatre
Anthropology, System Theory and Postcolonial Critique 285
Maurice Blackman
Intercultural Framing in Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête 297
Kyriaki Frantzi
Re-Interpreting Shadow Material in an Ancient Greek Myth:
Another Night: Medea 307
8. vii
V. The Play within the Play as Agency of
Intermedial Transformation
1. The Play within the Play and Opera
Yvonne Noble
John Gay and the Frame Play 321
Donald Bewley
Opera within Opera: Contexts for a Metastasian Interlude 335
Theresia Birkenhauer
Theatrical Transformation, Media Superimposition and Scenic
Reflection: Pictorial Qualities of Modern Theatre and the
Hofmannsthal/Strauss Opera Ariadne auf Naxos 347
2. The Play within the Play and Film
Erika Greber
Pushkin in Love, or: A (Screen)Play within the Play. The
Cinematic Potential of Romantic-Ironic Narration in Eugene
Onegin 361
Alessandro Abbate
The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen:
Multi-Layered Representations in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet
and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet 377
Ken Woodgate
‘Gotta Dance’ (in the Dark): Lars von Trier’s Critique of the
Musical Genre 393
3. The Play within the Play in Narrative Fiction
Tim Mehigan
The Game of the Narrative: Kleist’s Fiction from a Game-
Theoretical Perspective 405
Alexander Honold
French Beans and Mashed Potatoes: Agonistic Play and Symbolic
Acting in Gottfried Keller’s Prose Fiction 421
Ulrike Garde
Playing with the Apparatus: Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’
and Barrie Kosky’s Interpretation for the Melbourne International
Arts Festival 431
Notes on Contributors 447
Index of Names 455
9.
10. Acknowledgements
The essays in the present collection constitute a selection of papers delivered
at the 2004 Sydney German Studies Symposium, which was devoted to the
topic of The Play within the Play. The chapters have been thoroughly revised
and edited for publication. The Symposium, convened by the editors, was
designed to explore the wide range of aesthetic, literary-theoretical and philo-
sophical issues associated with the rhetorical device of the play within the
play, not only in terms of its original theatrical setting ranging from the baro-
que idea of the theatrum mundi onward to contemporary examples of a post-
modern self-referential dramaturgy, but also with regard to a number of dif-
ferent generic and theoretical applications, in narrative fiction and anthro-
pological writing, in musical theatre and film.
As editors, our thanks go, first and foremost, to the individual authors
who have made this volume possible; we appreciate their contributions as
much as their co-operation and patience during the preparation of this work.
We also wish to thank Marieke Schilling of Rodopi and Ernst Grabovszki
and the members of the editorial board of IFAVL for their enthusiastic adop-
tion of the project. A vote of thanks is due to the Sydney Goethe Institute,
notably Roland Goll and Rainer Manke, for providing once again their beau-
tiful venue with its cheerful ambiance that had so much to do with making
the Sydney German Studies Symposia a successful series of events over near-
ly three decades, as well as to the German Consulate-General in Sydney and
the German Research Council (DFG) for their essential support. We also like
to acknowledge the contribution of the German Academic Exchange Service
(DAAD) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of UNSW (Prof. Annet-
te Hamilton, Dean) who made the visit of Prof. Bernhard Greiner possible.
We owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Dr. Nita Schechet (Jerusalem)
and, in particular, to Dr. John Golder (Sydney) who helped with the arduous
task of proof-reading and copy-editing a complex and diverse manuscript. A
final ‘thank you’ goes to Maria Oujo (Sydney) who completed the electronic
layout of the book.
Lastly, it is our sad duty to report the death of our colleague Theresia Bir-
kenhauer who passed away on 6 November 2006.
Gerhard Fischer (Sydney) and Bernhard Greiner (Tübingen)
11.
12. Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner
The Play within the Play: Scholarly Perspectives
The curtain opens. The stage represents a theatre.
Ludwig Tieck, Die verkehrte Welt
The Play within the Play, Spiel im Spiel in German dramatic theory, or le thé-
âtre dans le théâtre in French, is a theatrical device or convention, or a kind
of sub-genre within dramatic literature and theatrical practice. Dramaturgical-
ly speaking it describes a strategy for constructing play texts that contain,
within the perimeter of their fictional reality, a second or internal theatrical
performance, in which actors appear as actors who play an additional role.
This duplication of the theatrical reality is often reinforced by the presence
onstage of an ‘internal audience’ which acts as a double to the actual audi-
ence. Like similar terms employed in theories of narrativity, e.g. mise en
abyme, Rahmenerzählung (‘frame story’), Binnenerzählung (‘inner story’, or
story within a story), dramaturgical terms such as ‘frame play’ or ‘outer play’
(Rahmenstück, pièce-cadre) and ‘interior’ or ‘internal play’ (Binnenstück,
pièce intérieure) are commonly used in order to identify the two characteris-
tic components of the play within the play. Its most salient feature is that it
doubles an aesthetic experience which already presents a dual reality: the
actor, who appears on stage both in his/her own physical presence and in the
part he/she portrays, assumes and plays yet another role, thus adding a third
identity which itself is constructed in the context of a third level of time,
space, characterisation and action.
The play within a play boasts a long and notable tradition in European
theatre and dramatic literature: it is a dramaturgical strategy that playwrights
from Aristophanes to Heiner Müller have put to a wide range of purposes.
However, scholarly perspectives on the play within the play do not need to be
limited to European theatre. Indeed, the anthropological ubiquitousness of
both play and performance as social action as well as aesthetic experience
testify to the international and multicultural dimensions of the play within the
play and its function as a motif in dramatic literatures around the world. Fur-
thermore, the play within the play also presents an ideal agency for shifting
13. xii Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner
between different media, as well as for expressing notions and experiences
involving cultural exchange or cultural conflict.
The play within the play was the focus and the exclusive topic of investi-
gation of an International Symposium held from 22 – 25 July 2004 at the
Goethe Institut in Sydney, Australia, under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts
and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales. The main aim of
the conference, convened by the editors of the present volume, was to present
a comprehensive account of the peculiar structural and thematic features of
the play within the play, to analyse its theoretical dimensions, and to provide
a comparative basis for discussion of this literary/theatrical phenomenon on
an international scale. The participants, some fifty academics from Europe,
Asia, the United States, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, repre-
sented a number of disciplines and research areas; they included scholars in
literature and cultural studies, anthropologists, theatre historians and practi-
tioners, musicologists, and specialists in performance studies. The present
volume presents a selection of the papers that were read and discussed at the
Sydney Symposium, edited and brought up to date for the express purpose of
providing a critical study at once wide-ranging and comparative.
The play within the play is manifest in a multitude of forms and constel-
lations, and it fulfils an equally diverse variety of tasks and functions within
the performing arts. Systematically, these can be grouped in four distinct cat-
egories. One can consider the play within the play primarily (1) as an artistic
agency of self-reference and self-reflection, i.e. as imaginative play that re-
fers back to itself. It thus appears as a meta-theatrical mode of aesthetic ex-
pression, in terms of its own specific nature as play and representation as well
as with regard to the function of the stage-audience relationship and in view
of the self-reflection of its acting protagonists. It may also be thought of (2)
as a special mode of perception that allows for different ways of presenting
perspectives of appropriating and placing itself in relation to the world at
large.
Likewise, it is (3) a particularly suitable aesthetic agency for the explora-
tion of fields of social and historical interaction or exchange, with a special
dimension in the area of intercultural and/or intracultural contact or conflict.
Lastly, the play within the play can be seen (4) as an artistic agency of media-
tion between conventional genres, or of generic transformation, permitting
shifts from one genre to another. The play within the play is thus by no
means limited to theatre, whether it be dramatic text or performance; it en-
joys a wide popularity also in film, opera and musical theatre, and it frequen-
tly appears as a device in narrative fiction as well.
14. The Play within the Play xiii
As a specific form of organizing a process of theatrical reflexivity, the
play within the play needs to be distinguished according to the different con-
stituents of its respective realisations on stage. It features most prominently
as a meta-theatrical strategy of self-reflection, especially in the modern con-
text of the establishment and foundation of a concept of the self, that is to say
in the affirmation of a self-conscious subject (‘the actor’) that transcends the
masks of social roles. Hamlet, as play and as character, thus presents the
succinct model of a social-historical and aesthetic-philosophical paradigm of
modernity. Similarly, the play within the play constitutes a special agency for
the self-legitimation of an evolving bourgeois subject within the parameters
of a philosophy of idealism; here, the constellations of the play within the
play favoured by the Romantics of the Kunstperiode offer the relevant para-
digm. On another level, as part of a system of thinking set within a specific
order of ‘representation’ (in the sense of Foucault’s meaning of the term), the
play within the play also appears as a preferred field of self-reflexivity, which
is why the meta-theatrical dialectic of play and representation achieved such
particular prominence in the period of the Baroque. Of course, it could also
be said that a postmodern art in which a reflection upon itself appears to be
an essential element (not only in the theatre, of course) is very much a feature
of our own era. Indeed, the play within the play would seem to be a particu-
larly apt device for the expression of the playful self-referentiality of the
post-modern condition.
Other forms of the play within the play offer themselves, and have been
employed, to provide a structure for self-reflection concerning the theatre au-
dience, or the recipient reader of a literary work, respectively. Here, the play
within the play functions as a ‘romantic’ site which encompasses all constitu-
ent elements of art (in the sense of borders being suspended or transcended),
or equally as the site of a didactic theatre, e.g. during the early Enlight-
enment period or, with similar but not identical intentions, in the Lehrstück-
concept of Brecht towards the end of the Weimar Republic. One could add
that, generally, the play within the play tends to be a prominent feature of the
practice of political and anti-illusionistic theatre.
Apart from these forms of self-referentiality and self-reflexivity, the play
within the play also offers an important organisational structure that high-
lights certain ways of approaching or dealing with the world. Perhaps the
most significant example of this is comedy. Indeed, it could be said that the
play within the play is a constituent and intrinsic component of the comedic
genre. Typical features of comedy, e.g. the use of parabasis (as in the plays of
Aristophanes), falling out of character, improvisations, or comic intrigues
generally, are all structured on the play-within-the-play principle. Other ways
15. xiv Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner
of approaching the world, in which the play-within-the-play constellations
can be seen, are melancholy and humour. In the former the world that con-
fronts us, our own world of social practice and process, is merely regarded as
play, however, when seen from the perspective of a protagonist who refuses
to join in. The humorist, on the other hand, accepts his or her role as a per-
former in the ‘play of the world’; even though he recognizes the play as idle
and transitory, he nevertheless accepts that he is an actor and that he has a
role to play. Thus, the time-honoured topos of ‘world theatre’ proclaims that
the world itself and all of its inherent processes and interactions is merely
theatrical play, performed in front of and judged by a higher authority. The
Baroque period in particular featured very powerfully staged presentations of
the topos of theatrum mundi at the core of many of its extravagant spectacles.
In another way, social or socio-historical interactions are often consciously
imbued with the aura of the theatrical, as shown in the example of the protag-
onists of the French Revolution who loved to see themselves and reflect upon
their historical roles by taking on the personae of the protagonists of the Ro-
man Republic of classical antiquity.
The play within the play has also found a very useful and productive
usage as a form of action and reflection within a wide variety of cultural and
intercultural exchanges. An example of this might be the appropriation of
classical culture, e.g. Greek or Roman, by later European cultures. It can thus
serve as an organisational agency to assist structuring encounters of different
European cultures of distinct epochs, as in the role model of Shakespeare
within German-language theatre, or the return to different forms of comme-
dia dell’arte at various stages within the development of European comedy.
Similarly, the play within the play has been an important factor as a structure
of mediation between European and non-European theatrical traditions; it has
enabled and facilitated the meeting of European and non-European cultures,
just as much as it has been used to question the validity of such forms of cul-
tural appropriations in the context of colonial encounters as well as in a criti-
cal postcolonialist discourse. As examples one could cite the case of Israeli
theatre which connects the European culture with a genuine Jewish theatrical
tradition, or the appropriation and transformation of certain aspects of Euro-
pean theatre to theatrical forms of the Islamic World. The staging of plays
belonging to a specific culture by directors or theatre practitioners whose cul-
tural background might be very different has opened up a special field in an
area which might simply be called ‘cultural contact’ in an affirmative sense.
But cultural encounters could also provide unforeseen and undesirable
outcomes. Attempts at intercultural mixing or interaction could result in mis-
understandings and misappropriations; they could result in opposition and
16. The Play within the Play xv
distanciation, cultural exchanges could fail. This leads to yet another promi-
nent usage of the play within the play, namely as an agency of action and
reflection in the context of cultural conflict. One could distinguish here be-
tween intracultural and intercultural conflicts. An example of the former
would be the conflict between high and popular culture, e.g. the proliferation
of the play within the play in the Volkstheater movement (a specific tradition
within German-language theatre), where it was used to ironically or comical-
ly subvert the idea of theatre as the property and domain of the ruling classes.
Here, the Viennese Volkstheater of Nestroy offers the most obvious para-
digm. Intercultural conflicts on the other hand might involve differences and
opposition between cultures or groups of more or less equal prestige and
standing, or between a majority culture (i.e. the ruling or leisured class) and a
minority culture; the latter variant occurs for example in the play-within-the-
play constellations that are being used in the context of postcolonialist en-
counters. Alternatively, some of the paradigms current in postmodern and
postcolonial studies (hybridity, syncretism) are well suited to explore the
topic in question, e.g. in relation to the notion of ‘intercultural framing’ as
part of the process of reception and appropriation of European theatrical
works by non-European playwrights and theatre practitioners.
Finally, the play within the play has played a significant role as a structur-
al principle to facilitate a process of mediation between media, or a move-
ment of ‘shifting’ between different media. Thus, a kind of intermedial strate-
gy can be observed in the change of medium or genre from theatre and other
forms of artistic and imaginative expression. The play within the play appears
here as the essential link, or as a kind of go-between.
In recent film versions of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, new forms of
the play within the play were widely discussed as prominent features. In mu-
sical theatre, similar shiftings also make use of the device. The transforma-
tion of plays into opera in the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries attests
to the versatility of a structural principle that allows librettists like Hof-
mannsthal and composers like Strauss to appropriate and to transform suit-
able dramatic models as well as pieces from the classical theatrical repertoire
into their own modernist operas. More recently, practitioners of modern
dance theatres have also found it useful and productive to explore the poten-
tial of the play within the play in order to contribute to the development of
original works that originated in other genres or media.
Alternatively, the play within the play facilitates and enables the dramati-
sation of certain prose narratives – as, for example, in some of Heiner Mül-
ler’s later works – or, in a more conventional mode, it can be found as a fairly
standard literary motif in a number of novels or other works of narrative
17. xvi Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner
fiction. One prominent example concerns the integration of theatre and of
theatrical practice in narrative texts, by way of specific constellations of the
forms of the play within the play that can be found in narratives by Goethe,
Keller or Pushkin, among many others.
20. Bernhard Greiner
The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit of the Play within the
Play: The Hamlet Paradigm
When the play within the play starts its career in early modernity, it revolves about the modern
subject as director, examiner, and judge of the play. Moreover, and vice versa, it produces this
position: the ego as the centre of the world. Referring to Hamlet and its multiplied plays within
the play, the chapter shows that this emergence of the modern subject takes place in a circle. The
play within the play requires a position beyond the play from which the play can be initiated,
directed, performed, examined, and judged. But, to achieve such a position (of a ‘true interior’,
an ego beyond all masks and all show), it is necessary to gain knowledge and certainty about the
interior, which can only be achieved by exteriorization of the interior, in other words, by playing
(by acting in masks, in the world of show). Thus the effect of the play within the play is its pre-
condition and vice versa. This chapter considers this circle in Hamlet as paradigm with refer-
ence, not only to an historical argument (the specific conditions on which the concept of the play
within the play is constituted in early modernity), but also a systematic argument (the position of
the ego, constituted as endless reflection, as the reference point and precondition of the play
within the play). The other meaning of the circle, in which the emergence of the modern subject
and the concept of the play within the play are connected, is the unification of producer (the ego
bringing forth plays within plays as acts of self-reassurance) and product (the ego brought forth
by plays within plays), and thus a purely immanent self-creation of the modern subject: it pro-
ceeds from the ‘spirit’ of the play within the play and no longer needs reassurance from a posi-
tion of transcendence.
‘It is a peculiarity of Shakespearean triumphalism,’ Harold Bloom remarks,
‘that the most original literary work in Western literature, perhaps in the
world’s literature, has now become so familiar that we seem to have read it
before, even when we encounter it for the first time. Hamlet [...] remains both
as familiar, and as original, as his play. [...] We hardly can think about our-
selves without thinking about Hamlet, whether or not we are aware that we
are recalling him.’ 1
If, in our awakenings to self-awareness, we have always been Hamlet, it
is because we equate the subject in its ideal boundlessness and respective
uniqueness with unending reflection, introversion, and an element of play-
1
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1998),
pp. 404-05.
21. 4 Bernhard Greiner
acting that is hard to pin down, in the sense that one can only be a person by
playing one. The play-within-a-play patterns developed with virtuosity in the
Hamlet drama bring these three constituents of the subject (self-reflection, in-
troversion and play-acting) together. Hamlet becomes, as a paradigm for the
play within the play, a paradigm of the subject.
The figure of Hamlet introduces itself with an ontological claim to an es-
sence independent of both role models and behavioural models. This claim is
conspicuously linked with the theme of grief that is raised at critical junctures
in the plot; that is to say, at critical junctures in the play’s redrawing of the
self. The theme is presented without delay in the exposition of the conflict
between Gertrude, Claudius and Hamlet over proper and false ways of
mourning Hamlet’s father. Likewise, the evocation of grief or signs of grief
becomes the subject of a debate that follows the Player’s monologue on the
grief of Hecuba, occasioning the play within the play in the narrower sense,
which triggers certain crucial incidents in the plot: Gertrude urgently de-
mands an interview with Hamlet, at which he kills Polonius; Claudius
removes Hamlet from court with the intention of having him killed in Eng-
land). Lastly, the final catastrophe, when all the protagonists except Fortin-
bras and Horatio meet their deaths, begins with the conflict between Laertes
and Hamlet as to whose grief over Ophelia is the more authentic. In grief the
subject is manifested as having experienced a fundamental loss that at the
same time implies a loss of self.2 The subject in mourning does not, in a
sense, maintain possession of itself. It is therefore all the more astonishing
that it is Hamlet’s grief that moves him to lay claim to a self beyond and be-
neath the forms of appearance. The outward signs of mourning, Hamlet ex-
plains to his mother in their first scene – clothing, gestures, modes of behav-
iour – are mannerisms that could just as well be faked (‘actions that a man
might play’; I.ii.84)3, whereas he himself is unacquainted with appearances:
‘I know not “seems”’ (I.ii.76). He has rather ‘that within which passeth
show’ (I.ii.85). Hamlet negatively introduces the ontological claim to a sub-
jectivity beyond appearance. Obviously, such a subject cannot otherwise be
delineated. Insofar as it is missing something, it experiences itself: this
indeed constitutes the grief of the ego through the concrete content of the
deficiency, in this case the death of the father.
The courtly ideal of ‘civility’, of cultivated behaviour, as proposed by
Baldassarre Castiglione in The Courtier (published 1508-16) and given a
2
Sigmund Freud, ‘Trauer und Melancholie’, in Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe, ed. by Alex-
ander Mitscherlich and others (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1974), III, pp. 193-212.
3
Quotations are taken from G.R. Hibbard’s edition of the play (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987).
22. The Hamlet Paradigm 5
political concretisation by Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince (1513), in-
cludes significant doses of ‘play’, ‘show’, and ‘seeming’; that is, the art of
concealing oneself, permitting no-one to see behind the mask, suppressing
the emotions, controlling the body and its expressions, moulding oneself like
a sculpture, all made to appear effortless, unforced, as ‘natural grace’ under
competitive pressure. No-one is expected to say what his ‘own’ thoughts and
feelings are, and each person expects similar treatment from his peers. 4 The
reference point for this ubiquitous seeming is not, however, the construction
of a personal identity, but rather that of a persona, that is of a mask.5 The goal
is social advancement, making the right moves in the game played conscious-
ly by all, without any claim being made to a self beyond or beneath the mask.
Hamlet is the figure that refuses to play the game, lays claim to an ego be-
hind the mask, and makes reference to truth rather than to functionality in
social intercourse. The refusal of the subject to play along in a world of
seeming stands thus in a reciprocal relationship to grief, through which the
subject has established itself as incorporating a fundamental lack. With all
this, Hamlet is in the position of the melancholic as developed in the figure of
Jacques in As You Like It, written immediately before Hamlet. The melancholic
recognizes that life is a play – ‘All the world’s a stage’, he says – but has no
desire to act in it himself. In As You Like It, the conditions of possibility of this
position are not discussed. We find ourselves in the Forest of Arden, that is,
outside the social world, and Jacques, after the Duke’s restoration to power,
will not return to court with the other exiled lords. In Hamlet, the question of
the conditions of possibility for the position of the melancholic is asked ex-
plicitly as a question of the possibility of maintaining the existence of a sub-
ject, a being beyond the social masks and roles assigned to each of us. This
ego-essence is connected significantly with the notion of the particular, that
is, of the entirely unique, that which is connected with the notion of the
authentic, and never allows itself to become an instance of a general rule. Ger-
trude questions the occasion of Hamlet’s grief and the grief itself as being
‘particular’ (‘Why seems it so particular with thee?’; I.ii.75). It is in response
to this that Hamlet lays claim to an essence beyond all seeming (‘I know not
“seems”’). But what is the basis of such an ego, and how can it be sure of
itself?
The scenes with the ghost of Hamlet’s father give the subject’s claim to
transcend ‘show’ a justification, although in a doubtful manner – a justifica-
4
Cf. Klaus Reichert, ‘Hamlets Falle. Das Paradox der Kultiviertheit’, in his Der fremde
Shakespeare (München, Wien: Hanser, 1998), pp. 57-86.
5
Cf. Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning:
From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
23. 6 Bernhard Greiner
tion by what is, after all, a ghost. The subject is called upon to restore the dis-
turbed natural order (‘Revenge his [i.e. the father’s] foul and most unnatural
murder’; I.v.25). On the other hand, he is not allowed to link his actions to a
pre-existing natural order which, ideally, would have a secure metaphysical
foundation. The subject is made rather to justify its actions through itself and
its own moral responsibility. This occurs with the second command that has
to be fulfilled in the restoration of order: ‘Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul
contrive/ Against thy mother aught’ (I.v.85-86). The subject is offered an elu-
cidation of the occurrences at court that permits it to see beyond appear-
ances, that is, beyond the show put on by the others. This fuels the subject’s
claim, based on a deficiency (that is, on grief), to an essence beyond all
seeming. Since, however, the subject does not wish to dirty its hands in per-
forming the actions the insight prescribes, it must initiate an investigation
before carrying out its revenge. But this means that Hamlet must achieve cer-
tainty about the nature of the Ghost – first, as to whether it is a ‘goblin
damn’d’ that hopes to destroy him;6 then, whether it is telling him the truth
when it claims that Claudius is his father’s murderer and has had an adulter-
ous relationship with Gertrude; and thirdly, whether he himself is capable of
correctly understanding the behaviour and speech, the signs, that the others
produce. On this last point he provides questionable proof. As his own words
he cites, ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me’, which the Ghost had said to him
(I.v.112). Is he here metonymically replacing the speaker with its audience?
Or, if the words Hamlet writes are truly his own, must we accept the Ghost’s
speech and perhaps even the Ghost itself as mere delusion? Hamlet maintains
that he swore ‘Remember me’, but until this point in the plot he has sworn
nothing. Instead it is his companions who must take an oath, not to ‘remem-
ber me’, but rather not to betray Hamlet or his investigative techniques.
Hamlet, who has claimed to know no seeming, to have that within, a subject-
tive essence, which is beyond all show, announces to his comrades that he
will ‘put an antic disposition on’ (I.v.179). This, however, means operating
behind a mask, play-acting. Self-contradiction is inevitable. From this contra-
diction arises, with and through the tragedy of Hamlet, the configuration of
the play within the play.
The subject, with its claim to transcend seeming, can only experience and
be aware of its subjectivity when it becomes apparent, that is, manifests itself
in the world of seeming. The ego must simultaneously play-act and judge its
own performance from the sidelines. This is precisely what Polonius suggests
6
Cf. Greenblatt, ‘Hamlet im Fegefeuer’, Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur frühen Neuzeit, 2
(1998), pp. 5-36.
24. The Hamlet Paradigm 7
to Reynaldo in Act II, scene 1, following the Ghost scene, as a method of
acquiring relevant information about Laertes’ conduct in Paris. The method
employs the negation of negation. Reynaldo should express negative opinions
of Laertes, and from the ways in which these are contradicted it will be possi-
ble to deduce the truth. Nor does Hamlet have any other method, but his
goals are more far-reaching. He has to prove the ego-essence that is beyond
all seeming, beyond all produced signs and masks, while simultaneously
proving his interpretation of the events surrounding his father’s death, an in-
terpretation which along with his grief has occasioned his departure from
operating behind masks in accordance with the rules of courtly role-playing.
Hamlet’s method similarly employs the figure of the negation of negation. He
stages, on the foundation of an ‘antic disposition’, performances of negation
that the others must then negate. Correspondingly, the ego whose foundations
and apperception are thus based proves itself negated; that is, it proves that it
in itself is fragmented. The subject can gain itself as ‘particular’, that is,
unique and indivisible, only by dividing into two subjects, one that acts in
self-staged productions and another offstage that judges the performances. It
refracts others’ masquerades through its own, then reflecting the consequent
figures of refraction as its legal instance. Thus, the putative ego-essence, be-
yond all show, manifests itself as a process of reflection within the medium
of the theatrical. Harold Bloom may have felt as much when he cited Richard
Lanham’s assessment that Hamlet’s self-consciousness ‘cannot be distin-
guished from the prince’s theatricality’.7 The subject, as manifested in the
tragedy of Hamlet, is embedded in masquerades. It is so deeply nested in
them that, Hamlet, for example, who has proclaimed that he will play at
‘madness’, is able in the fifth act to call upon his ‘madness’ as a defense
when asking for Laertes’ pardon. At the same time, the subject takes up a po-
sition beyond the play-acted representations, observing its own and others’
acting in reality. But such duplication is the essence of theatre. It is therefore
hardly surprising that Goethe, in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, de-
veloped the conception of representative acting that gave shape to his drama-
turgic and theatrical activities in Weimar with direct reference to Hamlet.8
The actor, Goethe writes, must be always absorbed in his role, yet at the same
time he must know and observe himself in the reality of acting.9
7
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 411.
8
Cf. my ‘Puppenspiel und Hamlet-Nachfolge: Wilhelm Meisters “Aufgabe” der theathra-
lischen Sendung’, in Bernhard Greiner, Eine Art Wahnsinn: Dichtung im Horizont Kants.
Studien zu Goethe und Kleist (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1994), pp. 29-41.
9
See, for instance, Goethe’s rules for actors in his Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und
Gespräche. Vierzig Bände, ed. by Hendrik Birus and others (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher
25. 8 Bernhard Greiner
A subject based on such a foundation is not ‘particular’, e.g. not unique, a
whole that behaves in response to the various masquerades in which it is em-
bedded. It is split, ‘dismembered’ and also in need of remembering, one
might say, with apologies to the ghost of Hamlet’s father. With this kind of
fragmentary self-justification and apperception, the subject is in a circuitous
movement that cannot end. In the collisions of its masquerades with those of
others, it becomes fragmented. To convey the semantic content of these re-
fractions, it must undertake new proofs that it simultaneously observes and
through which new fractures arise, again demanding new acts of judgment,
and so on. Embedded in an unending chain of references, the ego flees ever
deeper, itself becoming ghostly. Thus, the Ghost scene substantiates the sub-
ject, which had laid claim to a being beyond appearances, as an internally
refracted processual unit of reflexivity without any possible end, a reflection
taking place within the medium of theatre. The combination of its fragmented
nature and its inconclusive reflexivity give the subject the ontological status
of a ‘dismembered ghost’ that would have equally solid grounds for demand-
ing – the question is only of whom – ‘Remember me.’
After Hamlet, as a reaction to the Ghost’s revelations, has announced his
intention of assuming an ‘antic disposition’ and sworn his companions not to
reveal that his actions may be concealing something beyond what they seem,
it is impossible to decide whether or when Hamlet is play-acting both in the
represented world in the events and speeches that follow and in the reality of
the discourse (that is, for viewers and readers). From now on Hamlet defies
definition. To gain insight into such a subject, one needs to apply Hamlet’s
own method of apperception: The viewer, or reader, must confront Hamlet’s
semantic masquerades with his own – his reading strategies; at the same time,
he must step outside the semantic masquerades in which he nonetheless re-
mains involved, and pass judgment on the resulting figures of refraction from
a position offstage, in the wings. Thus he creates himself as a Hamlet-like
subject. It is this persistence in establishing subjectivity on the other side of
appearances, in the reality of discourse, that makes the ego-conception of
Hamlet so utterly compelling.
The method of establishing and qualifying a subject that transcends all ap-
pearances through the staging of masquerades (generated by the subject on
the basis of an ‘antic disposition’ and simultaneously performed and judged)
is already in place and visible with initial effects before the professional ac-
tors appear in the Hamlet drama. Polonius, Claudius, and Gertrude attempt in
Klassiker Verlag, 1987-), XVIII: Ästhetische Schriften 1771-1805, ed. by Friedmar Apel
(1998), pp. 857-83.
26. The Hamlet Paradigm 9
vain to arrive at a cogent interpretation of Hamlet’s behaviour toward
Ophelia. Hamlet is incomprehensible, precisely because as a subject beyond
all show he can conceal himself, rather than revealing himself, in the mas-
querade. Why is a further exponentiation of play-acting (through the perfor-
mance put on by the travelling players at Hamlet’s request) necessary? With
regard to the grounding of the ego as a process of inconclusive reflexivity in
the medium of the theatrical, and with respect to the attempt to bring out the
truth about the death of Hamlet’s father within this structure, nothing new
can be gained by the Players’ performance. The chain of staged action and
reaction, already well under way, can only become more complex. So the
question necessarily arises whether the play-within-the-play thematic forced
by the Players’ performance is yet another way of grounding and making sure
of the subject, while at the same time suggesting a different way of dealing
with the unexplained events that surround the death of Hamlet’s father.
What impresses Hamlet so much about the First Player’s presentation that
he engages the troupe for a performance before the King and Queen? The
answer seems clear. The actor, in his speech about Hecuba’s mourning for
Priam, puts himself so entirely into character – spanning two internal refrac-
tions, as he represents a narrator reporting how Dido reported the scene to
Aeneas – that he manages to evoke in himself that grief of which he is speak-
ing, even manifesting his feelings with an abundance of physical symptoms.
Apparently, the Players are engaged because they are effective in this man-
ner. They invite the expectation that their acting will elicit signs of Claudius’
guilt or innocence. This way of reading the text is suggestive, but it ignores
grave contradictions. The actor produced his emotional effect in himself, not
in Hamlet, his audience, who had every reason to empathize with grief over a
murdered king, and whose fixation on this very theme had led him to demand
this text from the actor. If Hamlet has shown no affect, how can he expect
Claudius, who has good reason to control his expressions of emotion, to be
moved by the play to the uncontrolled production of signs that would betray
him? The actor’s self-deluding performance has, however, produced a result
in Hamlet; reflection on himself, and renewed resolve, stemming from his
comparison of the actors’ text and performance with his own situation. Ham-
let offers a commentary immediately after the player’s speech: ‘O, what a
rogue and peasant slave am I’ (II.ii.538). That seems to be the effect he hopes
the play within the play will achieve: not the production of signs whose con-
tent can only be conveyed in further semantic performances in a ‘progressus
ad infinitum’, but rather the evocation, if not the creation, of a subject that
possesses an essence beyond the performances on display and behaves as
Hamlet has previously depicted. If one reads carefully, Hamlet describes
27. 10 Bernhard Greiner
exactly this as the hoped-for effect of the Players’ performance: ‘guilty crea-
tures’ will be compelled to ‘proclaim their malefactions’ (II.ii.578, 581),
which presupposes a moral subject: ‘The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch
the conscience of the King’ (II.ii.593-94). Hamlet is aiming for a subject that
does more than function in masquerades, for a moral ego that reflects on it-
self when confronted with represented performances. Hamlet has postulated
such an ego with reference to himself (‘I have that within which passeth
show’). The attempt to make sure of this subjectivity has shunted him on to
the track of inconclusive reflexivity in the medium of the theatrical on which
he himself threatens to become a ‘dismembered ghost’, while at the same
time threatening never to achieve any certainty with regard to the actions of
others. Thus, one can name two functions and attainments of the plays within
the play, as developed in Hamlet. On the one hand, they serve to reassure the
originator, actor, and observer of the play of the existence of his ego – postu-
lated as given – beyond and beneath all appearances. On the other, raised ex-
ponentially to plays within plays within plays, they should evoke, or even
create, this ego in their audience.
The Players’ play within the play seems, by virtue of its complex teleolo-
gy, to be entirely dedicated to the former function, yet it fulfills only the
latter. The scene presents so many levels of play-acting and corresponding in-
terpretative contexts that the formation of meaningful signs ‘betraying’
Claudius can no more be mastered than can their possible readings. Suffice it
to name a few of these levels. The play within the play duplicates and predi-
cates itself with a pantomime, the dumb show. Claudius does not react to the
dumb show, which reprises the entire plot, a king’s murder and his widow’s
marriage to the murderer. However, he does react to the spoken play, in
which it is not the King, but the Queen, that takes the leading role. In addi-
tion, Hamlet announces that he has inserted a speech of his own, though the
particular passage cannot be readily identified. It is everywhere and nowhere.
Hamlet proceeds to offer nonstop commentary, not only on the play itself, but
also on the Players’ acting skills and the meaning of the performance (refer-
ring to it, for example, as The Mousetrap). The performance immediately fol-
lowing the dumb show is largely taken up by the complexity of ‘the Queen’s
fidelity’, featuring, among other things, the Player Queen’s scandalous state-
ment that, by giving herself to her second husband, she will kill the first.10
The regicide is mentioned only briefly, yet it is not the Queen’s reactions to
10
‘A second time I kill my husband dead, / When second husband kisses me in bed’ (III.ii.172-
73). The double meaning of these words is stressed by Anselm Haverkamp, Hamlet: Hypo-
thek der Macht (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2004), p. 49.
28. The Hamlet Paradigm 11
the play, but those of Claudius that are supposed to be put to the test. Lastly,
the piece does not reflect the murder as described by the Ghost. The murderer
in the play within the play is not the brother, but the nephew of the King.
Thus, the play appears to refer not only to the death of Hamlet’s father, but
also to a possible future murder of Claudius by Hamlet. Hamlet has commis-
sioned the performance. Through his addition to the text, it becomes his own.
In the frame play’s presentation of a play for the King and Queen, he plays
along, yet maintains at all times the perspective of an outsider observing the
play and its audience. As end-effect of the piece and its performance, Hamlet
seems to have achieved the desired certainty about Claudius. But such cer-
tainty should be followed by an act of revenge that becomes conspicuous by
its absence. At first it fails because Hamlet misinterprets Claudius’s posture
as a token of deep prayerfulness, but he later fails repeatedly to carry it out;
as, for example, when Claudius questions him about Polonius’s whereabouts
and sends him to England, acting clearly not as a repentant sinner, but as a
conspirator with evil intentions. Meanwhile, the play within the play does not
have the hoped-for effect of eliciting unambiguous signs. Claudius’s reaction
on leaving the performance is ambiguous: it may be a confession of guilt, or
possibly a reaction to a clear threat of murder. At the same time, it is the only
appropriate reaction to a play generating meaning that has spiraled out of
control.
In addition to creating a diversity of signs that cannot be unambiguously
determined, the play within the play also fulfills the second function. That is,
it evokes in Claudius as its audience (and likewise in Gertrude, although I
will not discuss her case further here) an ego beyond all masquerade. This
subject announces its presence when Claudius leaves the performance instead
of interacting with the Hamlet-generated piece viewed by Hamlet and Hora-
tio that could be entitled Performing a Play about Regicide for a Regicide
Audience. This subject is evidenced by Claudius’s monologue as he prepares
himself for prayer. This evoked ego behind the mask can only be perceived
by the signs it emits, as was true for the ego-being claimed by Hamlet from
the beginning. These, however, can never be conclusively determined, as
Hamlet’s misinterpretation of the seemingly praying Claudius shows. Read-
ing such signs demands new semantic performances in which the interpreting
ego, as presented, would experience itself as being further alienated from it-
self and embedded in an endless self-reflexive process. So both achievements
of the play within the play (self-knowledge in its founder, actor, and observ-
er, and the evocation of an ego in the audience) remain under the spell of this
structure. Each launch of a play within the play necessitates further plays.
29. 12 Bernhard Greiner
But is it also possible to escape the influence of the infinitely partheno-
genetic plays within plays? The fifth act of the play puts this question centre
stage. The answer it gives is that it is possible to break the spell of the plays
within plays, if both achievements can be combined in a single figure. That is
demonstrated by Hamlet in Act V. The new quality that Hamlet gains re-
solves the great hermeneutic riddle of the piece, how the Hamlet of the fifth
act can be linked with the Hamlet of Acts I-IV, where he appears as the
modern subject in whom the world is centred, where he is expected to ‘set
right’ [the time] that is ‘out of joint’ (I.v.197, 196).11
The juxtaposition of the two attainments of the play within the play con-
tinues to proceed from the theme of grief, now in the conflict between Laer-
tes and Hamlet as to who can display the deeper grief over the dead Ophelia.
Hamlet has pursued the semantic performances that serve to assure him of his
subjectivity by assuming an ‘antic disposition’ on the very field where dissi-
mulation is least expected, that of love. His play-acting has destroyed, among
others, Ophelia. He was an actor in, as well as observer of, this play, and
Laertes’ grief over Ophelia confronts him once more with the signs that his
performance has evoked. When he rejects Laertes’ grief in favour of his own,
his argument is weak, purely quantitative. His ‘quantity of love’ exceeds that
of ‘forty thousand brothers’ (V.i.260, 259). Hamlet lends substance to his
grief with an emphatic first-person declaration, and this immediately after
Laertes has marked him as the guilty party:
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wand’ring stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane (V.i.244-48)
Thus, the play within the play that Hamlet once played with his and
Ophelia’s love has not only put him on track to apperception of his putative
subjectivity, but has also evoked in him – when Laertes puts him in the posi-
tion of the audience at his own play – a subject that confesses its guilt. This is
what Hamlet once expected from the performance by the Players, but he
could not be sure of its effect on others, that is, on Claudius as its intended
11
For two totally different interpretations of this, see Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, ‘Shake-
speares Hamlet: Apologie der “Innerlichkeit”’, in her Skeptische Phantasie: Eine andere
Geschichte der frühneuzeitlichen Literatur (München: Fink, 1999), pp. 102-26, and Aleida
Assmann, ‘“Let it be”: Kontingenz und Ordnung in Schicksalsvorstellungen bei Chaucer,
Boethius und Shakespeare’, in Kontingenz, ed. by Gerhart von Graevenitz and Odo Mar-
quard (München: Fink, 1998), pp. 225-44.
30. The Hamlet Paradigm 13
audience. The subjective essence claimed by Hamlet beyond and beneath all
appearances is present both as a creative force (bringing forth plays within
plays as acts of self-reassurance) and as a created product (brought forth by
the plays within plays). Such a unification of producer and product is an act
of self-creation of a subject whose character is purely immanent – it proceeds
from the ‘spirit’ of the play within the play – and no longer needs reassurance
from a position of transcendence. An ego that has brought itself forth in this
manner and has reassured itself of its self-generated semantic performances –
as unending reflection in the medium of the theatrical – can allow all trans-
cendence to rest on it alone. It has no need to involve itself in questions of
providence; it does not need to play at destiny. Hamlet’s speech ‘Let be’
(V.ii.170) and his apparent recognition and transfer of loyalty to a world of
providence is the utterance of an ego that has created itself and bears no trace
of transcendence. So the subject purifies, through its speech, transcendence
of all immanence,12 proving in the process that transcendence is the absolute
Other of the purely immanent self-creation of the subject out of the spirit of
the play within the play. This feeds the expectation that the self-negation of
this ego – insofar as Hamlet anticipates his probable death – creates ex nega-
tivo an opening into the transcendent world as a metamorphosis that takes its
evidence from the perfect immanence of this ego’s self-creation.
The two attainments of the play within the play through which the subject
creates itself are brought together in the realisation of the dramatic discourse
– that is, not primarily in the represented world, but rather in the reality of the
here and now of each performance or reading of the piece. For it is the order
of the drama that links the producer and product aspects of the Hamlet-
subject: it confronts Hamlet, who is the subject of plays within plays, a sub-
ject that must first make sure of itself, thrusting itself into a course of incon-
clusive reflexivity. The drama confronts this Hamlet with the Hamlet as au-
dience at his own performances that call forth in him a subjective essence
beyond all appearances, an emphatic first-person declaration of the recogni-
tion of guilt. The drama Hamlet achieves, in its discursive reality here and
now, the self-creation of the ego – the Hamlet-subject as a process of incon-
clusive reflexivity in the medium of the theatrical that we all are. It lends this
act, as the absolute Other of transcendence, its aura ex negativo. This makes
the ‘birth’ of the modern subject in Hamlet so compelling that we feel we
12
This argument is stressed in Walter Benjamin’s remarks on baroque allegory; see his
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by R.
Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), I, p. 246.
31. 14 Bernhard Greiner
have always known it: the self-creation of the subject out of the spirit and
matter of the play within the play.
32. Yifen Beus
Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre
Manifestation
The play within the play is often used as a form of irony and can be disguised as a simple perfor-
mance within the play itself, a character masquerading as another character, a character pretend-
ing to be out of his mind, or a complex fusion of theatrical realities. All these forms of the play
within the play carry a paradoxical significance in theory and practice and rely on a self-cons-
cious writing process on the playwright’s part and the self-reflexive aspect of the performance
itself. This paper concerns the theoretical development of self-reflexivity in the play within the
play and focuses its examination on early discussions that greatly influenced the poetics of
‘modern’ drama, namely German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel’s concept and definition of Ro-
mantic irony. It will also discuss the cross-genre application of the play within the play that func-
tions similarly in painting, drama and cinema by drawing examples from Diego Velázquez,
Ludwig Tieck and Terry Gilliam.
The play within the play is often used by playwrights to reveal the workings
of dramatic irony and the very nature of drama. It may come in a variety of
guises: (i) a simple performance within the play itself, as in Ludwig Tieck’
Der gestiefelte Kater or Puss in Boots; 1 (ii) a character masquerading
him/herself as another character, as in Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio;2 (iii)
a character pretending to be ‘beside’ his/her usual self, as in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet; or (iv) a complex fusion of theatrical realities, as in Luigi Pirandel-
lo’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.3 All these forms of the play
within the play carry a paradoxical significance in theory and practice and
rely on a self-conscious writing process on the playwright’s part and the self-
reflexive aspect of the performance itself. Thus, it is meta-drama, so to speak.
This is by no means a new concept. In fact, self-reflexivity can be regarded as
a marking of modernity in art and literature. This chapter examines the theo-
retical development of self-reflexivity in the play within the play, focusing on
early debates that greatly influenced the poetics of ‘modern’ drama, namely
1
In Schriften, 12 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985).
2
In Théâtre complet (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).
3
In Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello (New York: Meridian Books, 1952).
33. 16 Yifen Beus
German writer/philosopher Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony.4
By drawing examples from the work of Diego Velázquez, Ludwig Tieck and
Terry Gilliam, as well as that of Schlegel, it will also discuss the cross-genre
application of the play within the play as it functions in drama, cinema and
painting, in order to illustrate the working or reflexivity in various forms of
the play within the play.
First elaborated by Schlegel as part of his definition of the modern, Ro-
mantic irony later becomes a defining characteristic of all Romantic art.
Schlegel is the first to use the term ‘Romantic’ to describe modern literature.
In his Critical Fragments (Kritische Fragmente or Lyceum Fragmente),5 pub-
lished in 1797, in the periodical Lyceum der schöne Künste, Schlegel rede-
fines the concept of irony, in literature as well as in philosophy. He uses the
term Poesie (roughly translated as ‘poetry’) in its broadest sense, to mean
literature in general, and thus his theory of irony and poetry actually concerns
all literary genres. The two major aspects of Romantic irony are: (i) the har-
monious mixture of the comic and the serious, and (ii) self-reflexivity, i.e.
literature that reflects back on itself, that reflects on its own existence. In his
Athenäum Fragment 116, Schlegel defines Romantic poetry as ‘eine progres-
sive Universalpoesie’ (a progressive universal poetry):
Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht bloß, alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen
und die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung zu setzen. Sie will und soll
auch die Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen,
bald verschmelzen, die Poesie lebendig und gesellig und das Leben und die Gesellschaft
poetisch machen, den Witz poetisieren und die Formen der Kunst mit gediegenem Bildungs-
stoff jeder Art anfüllen und sättigen und durch die Schwingungen des Humors beseelen.
(Its mission is not merely to reunite all separate genres of poetry and to put poetry in touch
with philosophy and rhetoric. It will and should also mingle poetry and prose, genius and
criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature, render poetry living and social, and life
and society poetic, poetize wit, fill and saturate the forms of art with solid cultural material
of every kind, and inspire them with vibrations of humour.)6
4
For a more detailed analysis of Schlegelian irony, and of its working in Tieck’s drama, see
my Towards a Paradoxical Theatre (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), chaps 2 & 3. The pre-
sent essay derives the analysis of the play within the play from the re-definition of Romantic
irony advocated by Schlegel.
5
Schlegel’s key writings on irony and the Romantic poetics appear in two sets of fragments,
the Critical, or Lyceum Fragments and the Athenäum Fragments (1800), both published in
Kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Hans Eichner, 35 vols (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967).
6
Athenäum Fragments quotations are taken from volume 2 of Schlegel’s Kritische Ausgabe
and, unless otherwise noted, translations are by Ernst Behler and Norman Struc in German
Romantic Criticism, ed. by A. Leslie Willson, German Library, 21 (New York: Continuum
International, 1982).
34. Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play 17
This is a very ambitious – and obviously serious – definition of literature.
Few people have taken literature and the attempt to define it more seriously
than Friedrich Schlegel, yet he concludes his central definition by arguing
that literature should inspire laughter in the reader.
For Schlegel, the comic is a key ingredient in serious literature. He de-
rives this comic, ironic paradox from a number of literary sources, including
Hamlet, King Lear, and Tristram Shandy. In Hamlet, the comic play within
the play reveals the central, hidden truth that Claudius has murdered Ham-
let’s father. Fiction, here, becomes the perfect vehicle for truth. In King Lear,
the Fool’s jests show Lear the true nature of his daughters. The Fool’s jokes
both conceal and, at the same time, reveal the truth – and thus might arguably
be seen as another form of play within a play. In Tristram Shandy, Tristram,
the narrator, assumes the role of jester, informing his readers that he will
‘sometimes put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it’. At the same time, he re-
quests that his readers ‘courteously give [him] credit for a little more wisdom
than appears upon [his] outside’.7
In these examples, the line between folly and wisdom, the comic and the
serious, appearance and truth, becomes blurred. This instability – this comic
irony – forces the spectator (or reader) to view realities on different levels –
realities both within and outside the work. This ironic sentiment reflects a
quizzical attitude towards the traditional, classical views of reality or truth.
By mixing the serious and the comic in this way, the new Romantic poetics
challenges the old Classical definitions, and the very strict boundaries of a
play (in its broadest sense). Thus, this fusion of tones is essential to the play
within the play as a device of deception, intrigue and masquerade and an ulti-
mate truth-telling power about the nature of play/drama. Structurally, the play
within the play also takes on the (con)fusion of various levels of reality,
blending the theatrical reality as well as illusion while maintaining a reflexive
posture through this very design, for within the larger play’s illusion, there
are both reality of the spectator and illusion. It calls for the breakdown of the
spectator’s suspension of disbelief and draws his attention to the purpose of
this mise-en-abîme structure.
Schlegel does not simply advocate the fusion of comic and serious ele-
ments in a literary work. He argues for a universal poetry, a kind of literature
that embraces everything, an all-inclusive literature. The new freedom advo-
cated in Schlegel’s definition of Romantic poetry emancipates the poet’s im-
agination with regard not only to form, admitting every possible genre, but
7
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1967), I, vi.
35. 18 Yifen Beus
also to content, admitting all imaginable subject matter. In order to exemplify
his new ideals, Schlegel writes Lucinde, which he subtitles ‘a novel’. Far
from what we think of as a typical novel, Lucinde is a combination of short
narratives, essays, and dialogues. Besides containing a mixture of traditional-
ly separate ‘genres’, in line with the principle of universal poetry Lucinde
also attempts to challenge the concept of the novel as a single, complete work
consisting of a lengthy narrative with logical sequence or discernible chrono-
logy and providing a sense of closure after a climatic incident. Not only does
aforementioned irregularity and variety exist in individual sections of the
book, but the entire second part of Lucinde is never written! This ‘novel’ is
thus complete (in its structural intention) and yet incomplete. However, in the
midst of seemingly formless imperfection and a mixture of different genres,
Schlegel carefully arranges the novel’s content in a fashion that displays wit
and craft while Classical drama insists on a strict separation of the different
genres – tragedy, epic, and comedy – Romantic drama insists on mixing these
genres.
Of all the genres of literature in the Romantic period, drama pushes
Schlegel’s ideals the farthest in practice, although to Schlegel the novel (der
Roman) is the ideal genre. In the absence of Classical restraint, Romantic
playwrights are given so much freedom that their plays often exceed the
physical capabilities of the nineteenth-century stage. For instance, a sudden
change of location or the staging of multiple simultaneous scenes were not
easily achieved in the first part of the nineteenth century, until the advent of
devices such as the elevator stage and the revolving stage. The former is first
installed in 1884 in the new Budapest Opera House, and the latter in 1896 by
Karl Lautenschläger in Munich’s Residentztheater. Faced with the limitations
of the stage, Romantic dramatists such as Byron, Shelley and Musset write
closet dramas. Not intended for physical performance, these permit the poet’s
imagination to soar beyond theatrical boundaries. A play within the play also
allows the playwright freedom to incorporate elements, situations, characters,
and even dialogue that are inconsistent in tone and structure with the main
drama and would otherwise have not been included. This device literally
breaks the conventions that are contained within a drama and clears the space
for itself to exist separately and yet, at the same time, as part of the main play.
The physical stage is thus no longer an obstacle in terms of scene and loca-
tion change or even identity disguise for characters; such changes could easi-
ly be performed and staged in the context of a play within a play that justifies
any manipulation or inconsistency in technicality or illusion. These changes
might even be highlighted in the play within the play in order to hint at truth
and display the playful nature of the theatre.
36. Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play 19
The second major feature of Romantic irony is its self-reflexivity. Poetry
should always be meta-poetry, and drama meta-drama. The play within the
play is the most common device for this self-reflexivity. In Athenäum Frag-
ment 238, Schlegel says:
[...] so sollte wohl auch jene Poesie die in modernen Dichtern nicht seltern transcendentalen
Materialien und Vorübungen zu einer poetischen Theorie des Dichtunsvermögens mit der
künstlerischen Reflexion und schönen Selbstbespiegelung […] in jeder ihrer Darstellungen
sich selbst mit darstellen, und überall zugleich Poesie und Poesie der Poesie sein.
(That poetry not infrequently encountered in modern poets should combine those transcen-
dental materials and preliminary exercises for a poetic theory of the creative power with the
artistic reflection and beautiful self-mirroring […] thus this poetry should portray itself with
each of its portrayals; everywhere and at the same time, it should be poetry and the poetry of
poetry.)
The paradoxical self-creative and self-critical powers combine raw material
with theory and allow the work to present itself as meta-poetry (Poesie der
Poesie) that describes itself as well as the author’s mind at work. Schlegel
frequently refers to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which is full of digressions and
digressions from digressions, as the most quoted example of such a narrative
device that makes the author’s act of writing the novel evident. Besides
Sterne’s opening remarks warning the reader that he would occasionally act
as a jester to provide comic effect as mentioned previously, his voice
(through Tristram) is constantly heard, talking to his reader and asking how
he might continue the story, telling the reader to re-read a passage which she
has carelessly read, calling on the critic to render assistance in writing a diffi-
cult part of the narrative etc. Sterne’s narratology challenges Schlegel in his
reading experience to constantly think about both his own process of reading
and the novel’s own self-critical stance, while Schlegel commends Sterne’s
witty craft of a novelist who skillfully captures his reader’s interest and atten-
tion, giving them immense pleasure of confusing the reading and writing ex-
perience. Humour is but a disguise for criticizing the form of a novel and the
rules of reading a work the reader is accustomed to. Similarly, the play within
the play device serves as a digression in the main play from the development
of the plot, while at the same time it extends the implications of the inner
play into the main play. Thus, this disguised digression continues to develop
the story, supplies plot information and reveals the very process of writing
(both plays). In addition, the framing of the inner play exposes the existence
of the author from within and, in so doing, gestures towards the actual author
(of the outer play) at work.
In his own writing, Schlegel employs similar authorial intrusions, al-
though not as daringly digressive as Sterne’s or Denis Diderot’s narrative
37. 20 Yifen Beus
patterns, by confounding the authorship and the narration of each section of
Lucinde. Its very title-page sets up a frame for the reader to enter the world of
fictionality: ‘Lucinde, a novel, by Friedrich Schlegel’; but the authorship of
each section of the novel is deliberately ambiguous. After a prologue in
which the author, employing the German first-person ‘mein’, confesses his
inability to write verse like that of great poets Petrarch and Boccaccio, and
states his overall view of poetry, love, and romance, another subtitle-like
page insert appears: ‘Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten’ (Confessions of a
Maladroit), suggesting an ambiguity regarding the author of the confessions:
Is it Schlegel himself? Or Julius? Within the confessions, the main body of
the novel, the point of view shifts back and forth between that of the main
character Julius (using first-person narration) and that of an omniscient nar-
rator. ‘Sehnsucht und Ruhe’ (Longing and Silence), one of the shortest sec-
tions of the novel, even contains pure dramatic dialogue. Although autobio-
graphical parallels in Lucinde often confuse the narrative voice (of the author,
the narrator, or the character Julius) addressing the reader, Schlegel, through
such a deliberately ambiguous narration, is able to present his philosophy and
opinions from an ‘objective’ position, critiquing his work through his charac-
ters and their self-expression within this novel. Hans Eichner sees this inter-
posed narration as the novel’s main strength, illustrating the ‘fusion of
enthusiasm, caprice, self-criticism, and deliberate structuring’ demanded by
Schlegel’s theory:
Most strikingly, the novel exploits the technique of the interposed narrator in such a way as
to display the fusion of enthusiasm, caprice, self-criticism, and deliberate structuring de-
manded by Schlegel’s theory; Lucinde is an obvious illustration of the ‘witty’ or ‘arabesque’
form that Schlegel had singled out as a distinguishing feature of Romantic poetry.8
To Schlegel the self-reflexive (Selbstbespiegelung) and thus ‘objective’
presentation of an action in Romantic poetry also refers to portraying itself as
a whole with each of its portrayals. This reflexivity, which occurs every-
where, will thus be at the same time ‘Poesie’ and ‘Poesie der Poesie’ (Athe-
näum Fragment 238). As the author depicts his object, he constantly stands
above to look at his creative process and his creation and critiques it as he
moves along, and the work he produces in turn reflects all these individual
activities, forming a whole with a series of creative and critical components.
This self-mirroring power merges poetry/drama with theory and allows the
work to present itself as an organic self-revealing and self-critiquing entity
that describes its very nature and the writer’s writing process. Just as a play
8
Friedrich Schlegel, Twayne World Authors Series (New York: Twayne, 1970), p. 89.
38. Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play 21
within the play is a complete, self-contained work, it is also a part of the
larger play that contains it. Thus, it is both a fragment and a whole in the
post-modern sense. The very existence of the play within the play displays
the ironic structure of such a literary device and exposes the nature of play-
writing – it is a play (toying) with illusion and reality between the characters
and the spectator/reader.
As Schlegel points out in his Fragments, numerous pre-modern literary
works, as well as art works, already display this reflexive sensibility and for
him serve as forerunners of ‘modern’ literature.9 The seventeenth-century
Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez, demonstrates such modernity in his cele-
brated Las Meninas, a painting about painting that questions the nature and
representation of perception and thus invokes the effects of the play within
the play. 10 Acknowledged as the chief forerunner of nineteenth-century
French Impressionism, Velázquez presents a striking ironic fusion of Clas-
sical order and objectivity, of naturalistic details and obscure reflections, and
of the duality of creative and destructive powers in the very creation of the
work. Las Meninas is a great example of self-reflexive art, in which the
painter toys with various forms of disguise – through the motifs of reflections
in the glass/mirror, door frame, the very canvas itself, and the contextual real-
ity of the subject – much like that of a play within a play, while at the same
time, displaying a playful reality of the act of painting and artistic expression.
On the left-hand side of the canvas is a painter, ostensibly Velázquez himself,
painting the scene that we see inside the painting. As with the various reali-
ties superimposed through Romantic irony, this painting reveals to us layers
of existence and perspectives within and outside itself: ourselves (the specta-
tors), the painter, the King and Queen (reflections in the mirror), the José
Nieto (the figure standing in the doorway), and the infanta Margarita with her
ladies-in-waiting and the dwarf. The painter here creates a painting within the
painting. The figure of Velázquez looks out of the painting, at the spectator,
forcing the spectator to contemplate the whole question of artistic representa-
tion.
The playwright Ludwig Tieck, a contemporary of Schlegel’s, is the prime
exemplar of Romantic irony in literature. In his plays, Tieck’s self-reflexivity
systematically destroys the dramatic illusion of reality, just as does Veláz-
quez’s painting by revealing all the different levels of its representations, and
9
Besides Shakespeare and Sterne, previously mentioned, Cervantes, Milton and Diderot all
inspired Schlegel to rethink and define modern literature.
10
See Foucault’s detailed analysis of the painting in Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard,
1966), translated as The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage Book Editions, 1994).
39. 22 Yifen Beus
disrupts the ‘reality’ it appears at first to depict. In Tieck’s best-known play,
Der gestiefelte Kater, the characters go to see the play Puss in Boots. The
plot develops around the characters’ responses to and interaction with the
playwright, the actors and audience of the play within the play. The structure
of the play reflects itself as drama and meta-drama at the same time. Some
techniques Tieck uses include: this framing of the play within the play, the
double role of many characters in the play, and the constant interaction be-
tween the characters and the audience. All these elements are presented on at
least two, if not more, levels – the play itself, and the play within the play,
which both creates and critiques the ‘real’ play at the same time. The play it-
self is a process of writing and staging a play. Tieck manipulates the illusion
of reality in his plays, alternately increasing and decreasing the distance be-
tween the play and the audience.
By using the play-within-the-play structure, Tieck conveniently critiques
the clichés of his contemporary sentimental drama by ridiculing the author-
audience relationship within the play. It displays in essence more of a retro-
spective attitude of the author than a direct attack on a specific form/subgenre
or author and serves as a device to examine the nature of the genre. The
poet/playwright in Kater, for instance, defends his profession and role by re-
minding his audience at the end of the epilogue that he has done well to
transport them back to the remote feelings of their childhood years – a naïve
and innocent state closer to nature than adulthood.11 Although the audience
rewards the poet with ‘rotten pears and apple and wads of paper’, the latter
walks off the stage commenting that the audience is in fact better than he is at
creating a ‘eine neuerfundene Dichtungsart’ (a new kind of poetry), a farce
indeed. This farce, created by the audience within the play, leaves the real
spectator/reader to contemplate the nature of the dramatic genre, the mission
of the poet, and the entire viewing experience – a quite serious intent – after
the laughs and farcical caricature are produced during the play.
This sort of self-conscious reflection, this playing with the boundaries
between fiction and reality, remains quite common in more recent theatre and
film. The Verfremdungseffekt (device for making the familiar strange)
through laying bare the play’s structure in Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre does
this, for example, as does the ‘anti-play’ of the Theatre of the Absurd. These
twentieth-century dramas continue what Schlegel advocates in the Fragments
11
Wordsworth expresses a similar sentiment in his poem, ‘The Rainbow’. This call to return to
childlike innocence, in order to be closer and eventually united with nature, becomes one of
the defining characteristics of most Romantic lyric poetry. Tieck’s desire to transport his au-
dience back to childhood feelings is no doubt serious, and he does it by using fantastic ele-
ments rooted in the past and far removed from jest and imagination.
40. Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play 23
and set the stage for the cinematic use of similar kinds of ‘play within play’.
For instance, the subject of Federico Fellini’s film, 81/2 is the film itself.
Woody Allen’s characters jump in and out of the screen in The Purple Rose
of Cairo. Terry Gilliam’s films often blur the boundaries between fiction and
reality; his Adventures of Baron Munchausen even uses the stage as its very
backdrop and introduces the audience to a play within a play within a film.
This cross-genre application of the self-reflexive device illustrates how Ro-
mantic irony functions in the film’s content and form at different levels of
authorial control.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is based on a set of stories about
the preposterous eighteenth-century Baron Karl Friedrich von Munchausen,
who goes on all sorts of remarkable adventures, including sailing to the moon.
Gilliam uses these obviously impossible adventures to call into question the
nature of reality and explore the truth-telling power of fiction. The film opens
in an unnamed European city that is under attack from the army of the Grand
Turk. In a large theatre, a troupe of actors is trying to perform a dramatic ver-
sion of Baron Munchausen’s tales. As the play within the film begins, a man
claiming to be the real Baron Munchausen enters the theatre and disrupts the
performance. The first exchange between the ‘real Baron’, the actors portray-
ing the Baron’s story and a prominent member of the audience (Horatio Jack-
son) sets up the initial playful complexity of theatrical illusion and reality.
The Baron often comments on both the play and events in the ‘real world’
outside the play. In an interview with Eric Idle (who played Berthold, a mem-
ber of Munchausen’s gang), the actor marvels at the interplay of fantasy and
reality this film presents in the form of the play within the play:
They’ve cleverly interwoven them, so you don’t feel it’s several stories. It’s just drawn on
the sources. So he [Munchausen] goes into the whale, and he goes to Vulcan, and you do
feel it’s going somewhere because of the context in which Terry’s set the whole thing,
which is the conflict with the Turks and this little troupe of actors playing this awful version
of the Munchausen story. When you first see Munchausen, he’s played by this very awful
actor with a silly nose, and you think, ‘Oh no, it’s not going to be this’ – and it isn’t! The
Baron comes up out of the audience, and goes, ‘No, it’s not like this at all.’ And takes you
off into fantasy. So it’s good the way the fantasy and the reality keep [overlapping], so
you’re never quite sure whether the Baron – in one scene, for example, we’ve finally beaten
the Turks, and we win, and then he’s shot dead. And we’re going to a funeral and everything
for him, and we cut back to the stage and the Baron says, ‘That was just one of the many oc-
casions on which I’ve met my death!’ It’s a nice joke. Very strange.12
12
David Morgan, ‘Interview with Eric Idle’, available at <http://members.aol.com/morgands1/
closeup/text/idle.htm> (accessed 25 January 2005).
41. 24 Yifen Beus
When the Baron, backstage at the beginning of the film, says to Horatio
Jackson, ‘Your reality is lies and balderdash, and I’m delighted to say that I
have no grasp of it whatsoever’, we realize immediately that he is addressing
both the theatre audience within the film and us, the cinema audience outside
the film. A few moments later, the real Baron ushers the actors offstage and
begins to narrate the apparently ‘real story’ of his adventures. As he tells his
tale, the stage setting dissolves into the palace of the Grand Turk. The film
then follows the Baron through his adventures until, finally, he defeats the ar-
mies of the Grand Turk. As the city celebrates its deliverance, Horatio Jack-
son reappears and shoots Munchausen. The audience then picks up the story
at the Baron’s funeral – one of the many deaths Munchausen encounters dur-
ing the course of the play within the play. Gilliam’s strategy is to set up and
then dismantle a linear story-line. By the end, the spectator has no way of dif-
ferentiating between real events and the story Munchausen tells. When the
film cuts back to the Baron’s narrative, after his apparent death, the audience
does not know whether he is dead or alive, whether he has simply been tell-
ing crazy tales, or whether all the characters have been part of a great adven-
ture. Gilliam gives equal weight to each of these possibilities. His manipula-
tion of artistic illusion through the play within the play can be traced back to
Schlegel’s concept of irony; that is, the notion that a work of art should re-
veal the creator’s creative process, the mind at work, rather than simply pre-
sent an imitation of reality in the classical sense.
Since the Romantics coaxed irony out of its Classical shell as a rhetorical
trope, it has been an intrinsic attribute of modern literature and art, redefining
the relationship between the author, the work, and the reader through its
mode of expression and representation. Jonathan Culler describes Romantic
irony as ‘the posture of a work which contains within itself an awareness of
the fact that, while pretending to give a true account of reality, it is, in fact,
fiction and that one must view with an ironic smile the act of writing a novel
in the first place.’13 In a word, Romantic irony is self-referentiality, constant-
ly reminding the reader of the very act of writing and reading the text. The
modern concept of irony has generally evolved around Schlegel’s definition.
It remains a topic of constant interest and investigation in contemporary liter-
ary studies as well. From Shakespeare to the Romantics, and from the Ro-
mantics to the modernists and contemporary writers and theorists, Romantic
irony continues to play an important role.
13
Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974).
42. Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play 25
In Les Mots et les choses Foucault comments on the crisis of representa-
tion initiated by Romantic irony and the transparency of language as a sign-
system whereby representations represent nothing more than themselves:
La littérature, c’est la constestation de la philologie […] De la révolte romantique contre un
discours immobilisé dans sa cérémonie, jusqu’à la découverte mallarméenne du mot en son
pouvoir impuissant, on voit bien quelle fut, au xixe siècle, la fonction de la littérature par
rapport au mode d’être moderne du langage […] la littérature se distingue de plus en plus du
discours d’idées, et s’enferme dans une intransitivité radicale; elle se détache de toutes les
valeurs qui pouvaient à l’âge classique la faire circuler (le goût, le plaisir, le naturel, le vrai),
et elle fait naître dans son propre espace tout ce qui peut en assurer la dénégation ludique […]
elle rompt avec toute définition de «genres» comme formes ajustées à un ordre de représen-
tations, et devient pure et simple manifestation d’un langage qui n’a pour loi que d’affirmer
– contre tous les autres discours – son existence escarpée; elle n’a plus alors qu’à se recour-
ber dans un perpétuel retour sur soi […].14
(Literature is the contestation of philology […] From the Romantic revolt against a dis-
course frozen in its ritual pomp, to the Mallarméan discovery of the word in its impotent
power, it becomes clear what the function of literature was, in the nineteenth century, in re-
lation to the modern mode of being of language […] literature becomes progressively more
differentiated from the discourse of ideas, and encloses itself within a radical intransitivity;
it becomes detached from all the values that were able to keep it in general circulation dur-
ing the Classical age (taste, pleasure, naturalness, truth), and creates within its own space
everything that will ensure a lucid denial of them..[…] it breaks with the whole definition of
genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation
of a language which has no other law than that of affirming – in opposition to all other forms
of discourse – its own precipitous existence; and so there is nothing for it to do but to curve
back in a perpetual return upon itself […].)
This description of language and literature of the nineteenth century as self-
reflecting manifestation largely coincides with Schlegel’s central assertion
about Romantic poetry – that poetry ‘should portray itself with each of its
portrayals; everywhere and at the same time, it should be poetry and the poe-
try of poetry’. Lyceum Fragment 37 also describes this self-referentiality in-
herent in the paradox of irony – ‘Das Höchste: [...] Selbstschöpfung und
Selbstvernichtung’ (The highest goal: [...] self-creation and self-destruc-
tion).15 In Foucault’s words, literature creates within itself a space that en-
sures a ‘lucid denial’, it curves back in a perpetual return upon itself. But to
Schlegel, poetry is more than an independent form such as Foucault describes
it, which exists wholly in reference to the pure art of writing; it is also a re-
presentation of the author’s creativity, and it should also undertake a critical
approach that portrays its relationship not only to the creator but also to his
14
Foucault, p. 313.
15
Kritische Ausgabe, II, 151.
43. 26 Yifen Beus
surroundings. It is a paradox that transcends its intrinsic being as a ‘pure art
of writing’.
Romantic irony creates multiple layers of existence and meaning in works
of art. It also creates a resistance to fixed interpretations, permitting texts to
remain in a state of perpetual becoming. It makes the work of art a self-con-
suming artifact that protects itself from attempts to finalize its meaning. Ro-
mantic irony also reveals criticism as creatively destructive in the way it dis-
mantles the preconceptions and received opinions (of the author, the text it-
self, or the audience/reader). As we look at the myriads of the form of the
play within the play in its broadest sense, it is indeed this self-reflexivity that
underlines the working of dramatic irony generated by meta-drama. Play
within the play is its best representation and, at the same time, the best criti-
cism of itself.
44. Klaus R. Scherpe
‘Backstage Discourse’: Staging the Other in Ethnographic and
Colonial Literature
‘Backstage discourse’ is constituted by gestures, words and tales, which cannot be performed in
the face of power. Exploring the ‘hidden transcripts’ in ethnographic and colonial literature we
can follow a line of resistance from 18th century drama (Schiller’s The Robbers) to Jean Genet’s
Les Nègres, which – as play within the play – mimicks the front stage of domination and vio-
lence. Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ demonstrates the ape’s mimetic faculty as a means of
survival. Jean Rouch’s film Les Maîtres Fous gives evidence of resistance by incorporating the
colonial regime into the tribal ritual. The replay of the ceremony shows its real character. Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and George Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’ exemplify the perver-
sion of power indicating the failure of the colonial enterprise
The term ‘backstage discourse’ is taken from a fabulous book by James C.
Scott, an expert in South East Asian Studies at Yale. Its title, Domination and
the Arts of Resistance, refers to encounters of and confrontations between the
powerless and the powerful, the colonizers and the colonized. The process of
domination generates hegemonic public discourses (of morals, conduct, val-
ues and language) as well as a backstage discourse that consists of what can-
not be said in the face of power. Backstage discourse is to be found in gossip,
folktales, jokes, songs and all kinds of performances in which the vengeful
tone of mocking and mimicry display resistance to official onstage practices
and rituals of denigration, insults and assaults of the body. Making use of ca-
mouflage, disguised speech, and hence exploring the immanent possibilities
of acting against domination, these ‘hidden transcripts’ – another term for the
same issue – are part of a power play within the accepted framework of dia-
logue, participation and understanding. In its anonymity and ambiguity, back-
stage discourse harbors a permanent threat to those in power, who fear vio-
lence.1 Thus it is inherent in the colonial mode of production of reality. Mi-
mesis occurs, as Michael Taussig argues, ‘by a colonial mirroring of other-
1
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven:
Yale UP, 1990), p. 2.
