Metatheatre from Stage to Screen: Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

During the Early Modern Period the theatre spaces reflected the ideal environment for staging metatheatre – a device developed from the ancient Theatrum Mundi metaphor which originated in the Greek-Roman world. In fact, there was interaction between audience and actors and the people attending the performance were well aware of the fictionality of what was showed. The social space of the theatre was intimately involved with the social, political and economic life of Jacobean England, thus metatheatre was used through many devices in order to provoke in the audience a critical thinking about contemporary society. As a matter of fact, the stage was an imitation of the world and could influenced the spectators as well as have an impact on society, moreover it was highly persuasive and, for the influence it exerted, the boundaries between stage and world, life and theatre, were porous. During the centuries playhouses structure has changed creating more and more an illusion of actuality, furthermore the medium has developed and transformed up to the advent of cinema. Therefore, the enunciation mode has shifted from a theatrical verbal means to a filmic visual one and what was a collective and active experience has given way to a more individual-passive-close-to-reality event. Filmic techniques have continued to improve since their first appearance, in a short time the industry has moved from silent films to the so-called talkies, and the new millennium has undergone a series of rapid advancements that have brought to animated films, computer-generated graphics, 3D animation and CGI. All these great achievements lead naturally to the question: how can cinema translate such a specific device inherent to theatre like metatheatre into cinema, especially in a Millennium in which the CGI and AI have created perfect transposition of actuality on the screen? The Tempest relies widely on metatheatricality in order to stage through the plot different aspects of the England of that time: Renaissance humanism, colonialism, James’s political figure, as well as Shakespeare’s commentary on theatre and theatrical practice. The playwright has filled this play with hints to contemporary-real-life features in addition to a revision of themes already treated in previous works. Among other things Shakespeare’s text enables to evaluate how theatre and life are interconnected and how people adopt different roles throughout their lives, just like actors do. This dissertation, consisting of five chapters, aims at showing how metatheatre has been rendered on screen in the New Millennium, an era that sees the evolution of new high-tech and AI technology which give ever more actuality to films, hence an era that can leave little room for metatheatricality.