Are Shakespeare's plays always metatheatrical?

The ambiguity of the term "metatheatre" derives in part from its text of origin, Lionel Abel's 1963 book of the same name. By his own admission, Abel's use of the term was "loose and sometimes erratic" (v). If we use the term in its broadest sense—to describe any theater that in some way draws attention to its own artifice—it becomes evident that early modern drama is always "metatheatrical" to some extent: these plays are designed never entirely to lose sight of the material realities of their performance, or of the physical co-presence of their audiences. If this is the case, how useful is the term "metatheatre"? Indeed, are Shakespeare's plays always metatheatrical? This article unpicks some of the conflicting notions of metatheatre suggested in Abel's book, and suggests a modified conceptual model based on the work of Arthur Koestler. Arguing against the tendency to see early modern theatrical self-consciousness as a form of proto-Brechtian alienation, it uses Koestler's concept of bisociation to think about the delight produced by "universes of discourse colliding, frames getting entangled, or contexts getting confused" (40). It considers several examples from performance, especially moments from productions at the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe, to argue that metatheatre functions as a kind of imaginative game. This game may be prompted by cues in the written text, but it is one that can be played only in performance. While Harry Newman's essay for this special issue argues that metatheatricality was available to early modern readers "on the paper stage of printed playbooks" (104), my essay posits a decidedly more theatrical definition of the term, contending that the agency of the actors plays a central role in determining the metatheatricality of particular moments on stage

Synecdoches and symbols : fictional performances of King Lear

A number of narratives in film, television and popular fiction feature central characters, who watch or perform in a fictional production of King Lear. Shakespeare's text itself can be represented only synecdochally in such narratives, using key scenes and speeches to represent the play as a whole: this article examines the moments that are most frequently chosen. King Lear generally functions symbolically in these narratives, echoing some of the themes of the text in which it has been embedded: these tend to include old age, parent-child relationships, memory and mental decline, human cruelty, the frailty of the human body, and the indifference or inhospitality of the natural world. Intriguingly, fictional performances of King Lear are often also catalysts for some form of reconciliation or communal renewal in their frame narratives. This article considers the fictional stagings of King Lear in Centennial (1979), The Dresser (1980, 1983, 2015), The King Is Alive (2000), Slings and Arrows (2006), A Bunch of Amateurs (2008) and Station Eleven (2014) in order to explore the ways in which film, television and popular fiction offer overlapping and contrasting distillations of the play

An Empirical Study of the Relationship Between Religious Orthodoxy (Defined as Religious Rigidity and Religious Closed-Mindedness) and Marital Sexual Functioning

Problem This study attempted to explore whether or not a significant relationship exists between religious orthodoxy (defined as religious rigidity and religious closed-mindedness) and marital sexual functioning. Methodology Two Likert-type scales were developed to measure religious orthodoxy and marital sexual functioning, respectively, in a sample of 217 subjects representing Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths. The relationship between the eleven indices of marital sexual functioning (overall marital sexual functioning, sexual interest, responsivity, foreplay, frequency, pleasure, inhibition, anxiety, guilt, shame, and disgust) and religious regidity, religious closed-mindedness, and four moderator variables (sex, age, education, and duration of marriage of subjects) were investigated using step-wise and best subsets regression procedures. Results 1. Overall, religious rigidity, religious closed-mindedness, and each of the four moderator variables correlated significantly with marital sexual functioning. 2. When the effects of the moderator variables were controlled, both variables significantly predicted marital sexual functioning. However, overall, religious rigidity was a much better predictor than religious closed-mindedness. Religious closed-mindedness appeared only in the cases in which religious rigidity did not appear. 3. Education emerged as the best predictor of marital sexual functioning among the moderator variables as well as its best overall predictor. 4. The variables of religious rigidity, sex, age, education, and duration of marriage constituted the best model for predicting marital sexual functioning. 5. Increasing religious rigidity, religious closed-mindedness, and age were significantly related to decreasing marital sexual functioning, increasing education to increasing marital sexual functioning, and females showed lower marital sexual functioning than males. Conclusions. 1. Overall, there was a significant relationship between religious orthodoxy and marital sexual functioning. 2. Of the two postulated dimensions of religious orthodoxy, religious rigidity emerged as a much better predictor of marital sexual functioning than religious closed-mindedness. This held true even when the effects of the controlled moderator variables considerably reduced the sizes of their correlations. Religious rigidity, therefore, constituted the main component of religious orthodoxy in this study

Frequency modulated self-oscillation and phase inertia in a synchronized nanowire mechanical resonator

Synchronization has been reported for a wide range of self-oscillating systems. However, even though it has been predicted theoretically for several decades, the experimental realization of phase self-oscillation, sometimes called phase trapping, in the high driving regime has been studied only recently. We explored in detail the phase dynamics in a synchronized field emission SiC nanoelectromechanical system with intrinsic feedback. A richer variety of phase behavior has been unambiguously identified, implying phase modulation and inertia. This synchronization regime is expected to have implications for the comprehension of the dynamics of interacting self-oscillating networks and for the generation of frequency modulated signals at the nanoscal

Role of fluctuations and nonlinearities on field emission nanomechanical self-oscillators

A theoretical and experimental description of the threshold, amplitude, and stability of a self-oscillating nanowire in a field emission configuration is presented. Two thresholds for the onset of self-oscillation are identified, one induced by fluctuations of the electromagnetic environment and a second revealed by these fluctuations by measuring the probability density function of the current. The ac and dc components of the current and the phase stability are quantified. An ac to dc ratio above 100% and an Allan deviation of 1.3x10-5 at room temperature can be attained. Finally, it is shown that a simple nonlinear model cannot describe the equilibrium effective potential in the self-oscillating regime due to the high amplitude of oscillations