Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has many elements of meta-theatre. The most significant one is play within a play. This play within a play method enables a theatrical technique which is double characters. An actor plays his role in the play while playing his role in the play within the play which is the sub-play. The audience gets excluded from the theatrical process by this method. In play within a play, both actors and the audience are the actors. The real audience is not the audience of the sub-play. This technique might give to the audience the sense of watching a play from outside point of view, which might be even omniscient point of view.
There are many similarities between Pyramus and Thisbe’s play and the play itself. Both plays feature love stories under the pressure of families. Both love stories experience misunderstanding and confusion. In the actual play, the misunderstanding resolves for lovers’ advantage, but in the sub-play it does not. At the end of both plays, a character comes to the stage and declares that the play was not real (Puck says the play was a dream). This mirroring in the sub-plots gives the audience the opportunity to view the same story as it is played by bad actors, and laugh to a story that is depressed and painful.
Peter Quince and his friends fear that the audience might feel uncomfortable when they see a lion on the stage, and they might think that the lion is a real one. So they tell to the audience that the lion is not real. But with the stupid and unrealistic acting, the audience already would know that the lion is not real. This situation creates a comedy while the sub-play meant to be a drama. The audience can both laugh to the foolishness of the acting, and they can still feel catharsis. That is why A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not just a drama, but drama and comedy at the same time.
The audience normally suspends its disbelief in the reality of the play. But by using such methods, the audience is no longer suspending its disbelief, and recognizes itself as it is watching a play. By these methods, William Shakespeare breaks the fourth wall. If the audience watches a play that is so terribly acted that it cannot be real, by this terrible acting the audience recognizes the illusion of the theatre. By this tool, William Shakespeare might aims to criticize the audience’s often-ignored foolishness in order to achieve a catharsis in plays, book, or movies.
The double characters present in the A Midsummer Night’s Dream have an effect to break the fourth wall. Thus, meta-theatre characteristic of the play increases. If Nich Bottom would be taken as an example, the actor that play Nick Bottom plays not only Nick Bottom, but he must play Pyramus in the sub-play. So play within the play is in the same line with the double characters which might be called as character within a character. When the audience sees that an actor in the play can play another role in the sub-play, then he/she might very well act in the first place. When one recognize that what he/she is watching might be only a matter of acting, the fourth wall becomes easier to break.
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