Shakespeare making fun of Shakespeare: listing all of the self-deprecating meta-references in Shakespeare's plays?

Question

One of the things I've noticed through reading Shakespeare is that a lot of his plays include a meta-reference making fun of the play. For example, in *Twelfth Night* Fabian says "If this were played upon a stage now, I could / condemn it as an improbable fiction." And in *A Midsummer-Night's Dream*, Puck tells the audience that if they don't like the play, which he describes as "this weak and idle theme", they should pretend it was a dream. > If we shadows have offended,  Think but this, and all is mended,  That you have but slumber’d here  While these visions did appear.  And this weak and idle theme,  No more yielding but a dream, I'm hoping to get a list of every single meta-reference where Shakespeare makes fun of his own play. I've looked online, and I haven't been able to find such a list, so I'm hoping to use the collaborative power of the internet to make one.

Answer 1

To piggyback on John's answer, which is totally on-point, it was very common in early English drama to let the audience know exactly what they were in for. We sometimes find the plays titled with what we'd now consider to be essentially spoilers, such as: "True Chronicle History of the Life of King Lear and his Three Daughters, with the unfortunate life of Edgar, Son and Heir to the Earl of Gloucester, and his Sullen and Assumed Manner of Tom of Bedlam." And if you look at plays of the period in which characters go to the theater, you'll see them basically starting off by telling the audience everything that was going to happen (look at Act Five of Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women for an excellent example of this).

One thing this means to me is that the question for Shakespeare and his buddies wasn't "do I address the audience or not?" but rather "how elegantly and/or cleverly can I do it?" You'll notice that a couple of the plays have prologues that do it explicitly--Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V come to mind, but "making fun" isn't really appropriate for R & J, so it's up to you whether that one "counts." You can also look at Taming of the Shrew, which famously has an "induction," essentially putting the whole play in the context of an extended joke on a passed-out drunk.

You can also look at plays that have plays within them--Midsummer you've already got, and look at Love's Labours Lost for an interesting parallel.

One other place to look, besides final speeches, openings, and plays-within-plays, is titles. No less a Shakespeare scholar than George Bernard Shaw suggested that As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing were Shakespeare's own self-mocking (or audience-mocking) commentaries on those plays. Check out Shaw's short play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets for a little more on that.

Answer 2

This is a great topic, and I encourage you to make such a master list. When thinking of these "self-deprecating meta-references", it might be good to bear a couple of things in mind:

First, who is speaking the lines? Although we sometimes tend to ascribe lines to Shakespeare himself, his characters represent a variety of different and sometimes opposing perspectives. As a character who is often more of an observer than a featured participant in the action, Fabian seems like he might represent Shakespeare's perspective, but because we can't possibly know what Shakespeare actually thought, it might be wiser to note the potential similarities than to equate them. As a fairy jester (and the only character in A Midsummer Night's Dream who can inhabit all the worlds of the play: the fairy world, the world of the mortals, and even cross the boundary between the performance itself and its audience), Puck also seems to represent a kind of omniscient or outside perspective. Yet, there are things that he can't see and do as well. In 3.2, Oberon reminds Puck that "we are spirits of another sort", reminding him that the fairies aren't always tied to night (and death) in the ways that Puck often suggests throughout the play. This suggests that for all of Puck's versatility, he doesn't have an ultimately reliable perspective either.

Second, metatheatricality was a popular convention in early modern drama--and not just in the works of Shakespeare. Beaumont's brilliant play The Knight of the Burning Pestle has a metatheatrical framework that emphasises the play's wild satire. Drawing attention to the play as a play was not unusual, and while boasting might bring an unfavourable audience response, gentle self deprecation might tend to urge a more positive one, especially if the author really felt that the play was pretty solid.

Statements like those you've mentioned above may be a little akin to a host or hostess dismissing their masterpiece main dish as 'nothing' to their guests, even though they may have spent great time and effort working on the meal--it is a form of polite, accepted social engagement that may well have been regularly practiced in the early modern age as well.