From Plays-Within to Players Without: Theatrical Hospitality in Hamlet and Sir Thomas More

Abstract

Much scholarly attention has been paid, deservedly, to the metatheatrical device of the play-within-the-play. However, in this essay I attend to the scenes surrounding the play-within, in which traveling players are received and made welcome. I suggest that the repeated representation of hosts welcoming uninvited players constitutes a distinct metatheatrical device, which I term the theatrical hospitality scenario. By staging the theatrical hospitality scenario, early modern plays theorized various ways that the professional theater might (and might not) fit into different forms of hosting and guesting that fell under the aegis of early modern hospitality. Using Sir Thomas More and Hamlet as primary examples, I demonstrate that the theatrical hospitality scenario offered a discursive testing ground in which to negotiate the place of professional entertainment both within, and in opposition to, dominant notions of sociable and charitable hospitality. In Sir Thomas More, the theatrical hospitality scenario complicates the form of hosting depicted in earlier scenes of an anti-immigration riot, while in Hamlet it deconstructs the meaning of “welcome.” Across these and other examples, I argue, playwrights deployed the theatrical hospitality scenario not only as a form of pro-theatrical defense, but also to intervene in ethical questions about the meaning of hospitality itself. [K.B.]