Story within a story: Encyclopedia II - Story within a story - Play within a play

Story within a story - Play within a play

This dramatic device was apparently first used by Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy around 1587, where it forms the spectacular resolution of the story. Kyd is also assumed to have used it in his lost Hamlet (the so-called Ur-Hamlet). In The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo is so convinced of the far-reaching consequences of his "revelation" that he predicts it will bring about the "fall of Babylon". In his use of the play within the play, Kyd seems to take Aristotle's idea of drama as catharsis to its apocalyptic conclusion.

William Shakespeare used this device notably in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labours Lost, and Hamlet. In Shakespeare's Hamlet the Prince of Denmark Hamlet himself asks some strolling players to perform the Murder of Gonzago. The action and characters in the play mirror some of the events from the play Hamlet itself, and Prince Hamlet writes additional material to emphasise this. Hamlet wishes to provoke his uncle and sums this up by saying "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." Hamlet calls this new play The Mouse-trap, a title which Agatha Christie later took for the long-running play The Mousetrap.

When characters in a play perform on stage the action of another play, often with other characters forming an "audience", the audience in the theatre sometimes loses its privileged omniscient position because it is suddenly not clear who is in the play and who is in the play within. The device, then, can also be an ironic comment on drama itself, with inversions and reversals of its basic elements: actors become authors.

Alternatively, a play might be about the production of a play, and include the performance of all or part of the play, as in Noises Off, Les feluettes or The Producers.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Play within a play", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki