Blog 3: Metatheatricality in Hamlet Due Wed. 2.22

In class today we talked about the concept of metatheatricality.  You can review the concept here, but essentially the term is used when a play is self referential about being a play.  We talked about how, in Hamlet, the metatheatricality of the play helps to convey how stuck Hamlet is.  He is literally and figuratively an actor stuck on a stage with a specific role to play.  His success and failure as an actor are to be determined by the audience.  In the end, Hamlet's only method of escape is through death.  Thus in Hamlet, death is literally the only escape from the roles one has to play in life.

For your blog, watch chapters 7 and 8 of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2008 production of Hamlet I've embedded below. You can find the whole play here. This is a mash up of Act II Scene ii and Act III Scene i. Write about the ways in which Polonius sets up the meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia as though it were a play and the ways in which the scene is filmed so that it seems like Hamlet is being watched and evaluated in the way an audience member might watch and evaluate a play. At what point does Hamlet know that he is but an actor in a play written and staged by someone else? What does the way this scene is performed say about the extent to which an individual is in control of his or her own destiny?

Watch Hamlet on PBS. See more from Great Performances.

Watch Hamlet on PBS. See more from Great Performances.