Metatheater and Modernity

Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque is the first work to link the study of metatheater with the concepts of baroque and neobaroque. Arguing that the onset of European modernity in the early seventeenth century and both the modernist and the postmodernist periods of the twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of the phenomenon of theater that reflects on itself as theater, the author reexamines the concepts of metatheater, baroque, and neobaroque through a pairing and close analysis of seventeenth and twentieth century plays. The comparisons include Jean Rotrous The True Saint Genesius with Jean-Paul Sartres Kean and Jean Genets The Blacks; Pierre Corneilles LIllusion comique with Tony Kushners The Illusion; Gian Lorenzo Berninis The Impresario with Luigi Pirandellos theater-in-theater trilogy; Shakespeares Hamlet with Pirandellos Henry IV and Tom Stoppards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Molires Impromptu de Versailles with impromptus by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, and Eugne Ionesco. Metatheater and Modernity also examines the role of technology in the creating and breaking of illusions in both centuries. In contrast to previous work on metatheater, it emphasizes the metatheatrical role of comedy. Metatheater, the author concludes, is both performance and performative: it accomplishes a perceptual transformation in its audience both by defending theater and exposing the illusory quality of the world outside.