3 - Metatheatre and the Spanish Comedia Religiosa: An Overview

Summary

With the publication of Lionel Abel’s seminal work on metatheatre, critics were provided not only with a basic definition of the concept of metadrama, but also with specific terminology with which to analyse self-referential plays. According to Abel, metaplays are

Theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized. By this I mean that the persons appearing on the stage in these plays are there not simply because they were caught by the playwright in dramatic postures as a camera might catch them, but because they themselves knew they were dramatic before the playwright took note of them. What dramatized them originally? Myth, legend, past literature, they themselves. They represent to the playwright the effect of dramatic imagination before he has begun to exercise his own; […]. (Metatheatre: A New View, p. 60)

Abel was intent on giving metatheatre a working definition, treating it as a genre in itself as opposed to tragedy. He polarises tragedy and metatheatre by providing a summary of what he describes as the values and disvalues of tragedy and metatheatre. Catherine Larson regards Abel’s concern with the ‘generic purity’ of the metaplay as ‘an unnecessary complication of the issue’ and suggests that we move away from Abel’s attempts to pin down what metatheatre is and focus instead on what metatheatre does.

However, before the publication of Larson’s article, Abel’s ideas on metatheatre were already having an impact on comedia scholarship. The mid- 1970s witnessed a major debate between those critics who believed that Abel’s theories could be usefully and significantly applied to the comedia, and those who regarded them as invalid. Thomas Austin O’Connor’s article which posed the vital question, ‘Is the Spanish Comedia a Metatheater?’, was specifically responsible for initiating this debate. O’Connor believed that the concept of metatheatre was at odds with seventeenth-century Spain’s theocentric and moral view of the world in which role-playing was viewed negatively. O’Connor states: ‘To be an actor is to be false, a mime or mimic of what really is. The Christian cannot be thus and be sure of salvation’ (p. 287). O’Connor recognises that metatheatre gives many insights into the structure and form of the serious Spanish comedia, but claims that it fails to explain the Christian response to pretence and theatricality (p. 287). He defines role-playing as ‘The road to sure deceit and possible damnation’ (p. 288).