In the meantime, it is true that the study of self-reflexive strategy, which is done in the plays of William Shakespeare as well as modern English and American plays, has mainly done in the view of dramatic tradition regarding human's life as a play. ...
In the meantime, it is true that the study of self-reflexive strategy, which is done in the plays of William Shakespeare as well as modern English and American plays, has mainly done in the view of dramatic tradition regarding human's life as a play. On the other hand, however, this tendency also have neglected the comparative analysis of self-reflexive strategy between Shakespeare plays and modern plays. In this viewpoint, the purpose of this article is to illuminate and reveal meta-theatrical similarities and differences in the plays of William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett.
It id definitely significant work that this article try to analyze the dramatic effects in the plays of Shakespeare and Beckett in term of meta-drama. In Beckett's stage world, word echoes word, sentence echoes sentence, scene echoes scene, Act echoes Act, character doubles character, the embedded text mirrors the enclosing text, the stage scene mirrors the auditorium, and finally the stage action echoes the mise-en-abyme text.
Contrary to Shakespeare's dramatic world, Beckett's major concern is not so much the content of the object as the shaping of the subject-object relationship where one mirrors the other.
According to Lynda G. Christian, the sixteenth and seventeenth-century version of theatrum mundi belongs to the patristic tradition, as represented by Shakespeare and Calderon. Christian's theatrum mundi explores the development of the topos from the Greek theatre to Shakespeare's Age. She identifies two major trends in the history of this convention: a patristic understanding and a secular understanding of theatrum mundi. Both stress the impotency of human beings face to face with transcendental beings; the major difference, however, lies in the fact that the former views life as a divine comedy whose plot concerns the redemption of human souls; the latter views life as a human tragedy, in which man falls victim to an unknown power. Sometimes the human tragedy is degraded to a farce.
Unlike Shakespeare, Beckett's reflexive stage, transcending the existential condition, probes into the nature of representation in contemporary art.