Judd Herbert, Metatheatre 2, concentrates on the duplicity inherent in theatrical discourse as “combining overt mimetic representations of the story with covert performative and metadramatic clues pointed to its own operations at the risk of undermining or at the very least problematizing the fable.” In the simplest cases metatheatre involves “linguistic signs that, in addition to communicating developments in plot and characterization, explicitly designate the art of stagecraft and entertainment.” (The subsequent discussion shows, however, that he does not intend to exclude ambiguity or polysemy of the linguistic sign from his metatheatrical inventory.) Going beyond the notion of a dramatic “anti-form” in which the barrier between art and life is dissolved, Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama 5, intends “metadrama” in broader terms to comprehend the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are about “dramatic art itself—its materials, its media of language and theatre, its generic forms and conventions, its relationship to truth and the social order.” Such observations are common in metatheatrical criticism; cf. Gruber, “Systematized Delirium” 99: “Aristophanes’ real subject is drama, for his plays may be best understood as forming an ongoing self-conscious discourse on theatre.”
Excerpted from Figures of Play: Greek Drama and Metafictional Poetics, footnote 40, by Gregory W. Dobrov. Published by Oxford University Press, New York, 2001.