Bare Facts, Endless Tragedies

Turning first to the classic revenge play sansrevenger, Arden of Faversham, this concluding chapter considers how this book’s findings bear on strongly held assumptions concerning the way concepts and categories relate to tragic works and their literary or theatrical afterlives.It is uncertain whether or not such works attain to ‘tragedy’ itself, or whether they prove incapable of it – but ‘metatheatre’ is a troublesome substitute. ‘Metatheatre’ is one of the most ubiquitous and influential concepts in contemporary study of (early modern) drama, yet the term’s origins and implications are very poorly understood. It conceals a host of naïve assumptions about the history and purpose of theatre, but survives precisely because its inadequacy reflects the confusion provoked by the figurative experiments identified for the first time by this book.