The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- The Play within the Play: Scholarly Perspectives -- I The Play within the Play and the Performance of Self-Reflection -- The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit of the Play within the Play: The Hamlet Paradigm -- Self-Reflexivity in the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre Manifestation -- 'Backstage Discourse': Staging the Other in Ethnographic and Colonial Literature -- The Play within the Play and the Closure of Representation -- Playing and not Playing in Jean Genet's The Balcony and The Blacks -- II The Play within the Play and Meta-Theatre -- 1. Self-Reflection and Self-Reference -- The Figure in the Carpet: Metadramatical Concepts in Jacob Bidermann's Cenodoxus (1602) -- Holding a Mirror up to Theatre: Baro, Gougenot, Scudéry and Corneille as Self-Referentialists in Paris, 1628-35/36 -- Rehearsing the Endgame: Max Frisch's Biography: A Play -- Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and The Real Thing (1982): New Frames and Old -- The Invisible Fool: Botho Strauss's Postmodern Metadrama and the History of Theatrical Reality -- 2. The Theatre and its Audience -- Queen of a Bathtub: Hanoch Levin's Political, Aesthetic and Ethical Metatheatricality -- The Disguised and Distanced Real(ity) Play within the Fictitious Play in Israeli Stage-Drama -- A Lacerated Culture, A Self-Reflexive Theatre: The Case of Israeli Drama -- III Perspectives on the World: Comedy, Melancholy, theatrum mundi -- 'Very Tragical Mirth': The Play within the Play as a Strategy for Interweaving Tragedy and Comedy -- Play and Reality in Austrian Drama: The Figure of the Magister Ludi -- Playing Tragedy: Detaching Tragedy from Itself in Classical Drama from Lessing to Büchner.

Playwrights Playing with History: The Play within the Play and German Historical Drama (Büchner, Brecht, Weiss, Müller) -- Postmodernism Unmasked: Rainald Goetz's Festung and Albert Ostermaier's The Making of B-Movie -- IV The Play within the Play as Agency of Socio-Cultural Reflection and Intercultural Appropriation -- The Context Within: The Play within the Play between Theatre Anthropology, System Theory and Postcolonial Critique -- Intercultural Framing in Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête -- Re-Interpreting Shadow Material in an Ancient Greek Myth: Another Night: Medea -- V The Play within the Play as Agency of Intermedial Transformation -- 1. The Play within the Play and Opera -- John Gay and the Frame Play -- Opera within Opera: Contexts for a Metastasian Interlude -- Theatrical Transformation, Media Superimposition and Scenic Reflection: Pictorial Qualities of Modern Theatre and the Hofmannsthal/Strauss Opera, Ariadne auf Naxos -- 2. The Play within the Play and Film -- Pushkin in Love, or: A (Screen)Play within the Play. The Cinematic Potential of Romantic-Ironic Narration in Eugene Onegin -- The Text within the Text, the Screen within the Screen: Multi-Layered Representations in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet -- 'Gotta Dance' (in the Dark): Lars von Trier's Critique of the Musical Genre -- 3. The Play within the Play in Narrative Fiction -- The Game of the Narrative: Kleist's Fiction from a Game- Theoretical Perspective -- French Beans and Mashed Potatoes: Agonistic Play and Symbolic Acting in Gottfried Keller's Prose Fiction -- Playing with the Apparatus: Franz Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony' and Barrie Kosky's Interpretation for the Melbourne International Arts Festival -- Notes on Contributors -- Index of Names.