「仲夏夜之夢」中戲中戲的「型塑幻境」

The 'Shaping Fantasies' of Inset Playlets in a Midsummer Night's Dream

This study examines the significance of an inset playlet, or a play-within-a-play. An inset playlet can lend a fuller insight into the interplay of illusion and reality, presenting two, sometimes even more, different planes of dramatic illusion. It mirrors the larger play in some detail, from the casting of roles, rehearsing, and playacting on the same stage, to matching a play to an audience. A Midsummer Night's Dream brings up the subject of theater and theatrical performance in their dramatic action, the internal theatrical practices reflecting the self-conscious and self-reflexive impulses common in the early modern period. By bringing in a group of players, the play draws our attention to the whole business of theater. A Midsummer Night's Dream plays up the nature of dramatic performance, including the impersonation of the player and the falsification of feelings. Bottom discloses his real-life identity as a weaver during his performance in Pyramus and Thisbe, thus questioning the genuineness of Pyramus's playacting pretense, a gesture underscoring his own theatrical impersonation and pretense as Bottom. The predominance of self-reflexivity and self-consciousness in A Midsummer Night's Dream highlights its self-analysis. Through using the metatheatrical device of an inset playlet the comedy holds up a mirror that keeps reflecting itself and defines itself as a medium where illusion, imagination, reality and truth may meet and interact.本研究探討戲中戲的戲劇意義。戲中戲往往並置兩個或兩個以上的戲劇世界，讓觀眾一窺現實與幻相交織與糾纏的戲劇世界與現實世界。戲中戲映照著主戲本身的戲劇性，舉凡選角、排演、現場舞台演出等皆映襯著主戲。《仲夏夜之夢》一劇將劇場與戲劇表演融入劇情，呈現出英國早期戲劇經常可見的自我反身性，透過一班戲中戲演員的演出，該劇將戲劇藝術的種種問題呈現於觀眾眼前。《仲夏夜之夢》探索戲劇藝術表演的本質，包括演員的演出與角色塑造、情感的偽裝。例如，巴頓演出《皮樂摩與希思比》時，提醒觀眾他是織工巴頓，因而揭示出他所扮演的角色皮樂摩演出時的情感偽裝，進而揭露在主戲中他的真實身份織工巴頓也不過是一種戲劇演出。《仲夏夜之夢》一劇透過充滿自覺與自我反身的後設劇場手法不斷的反思戲劇藝術，自我分析，舉起一面鏡子映照自我，界定戲劇作為虛幻、想像、現實與真實可以彼此相遇或產生糾葛的空間。