In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, metatheatre is presented as a conscious centralisation of action, embodying the blurring of boundaries between appearance and reality, actor and character; metatheatre is used to demonstrate the actor paradox to question one’s identity – a theme that runs through the play through the dual-identities of the two ‘Hamlet’s, the role of the ‘uncle-father and aunt-mother’ and Hamlet’s madness. Thresholds are created and destroyed between play and reality, calling into question what ‘roles’ the characters and audience hold in the ‘play’ of Elizabethan society.
In Act 2.2, ‘theatre’ itself, through the ‘antic disposition’ of Hamlet, and the First Player’s performance, is centralised, meaning that it is brought into the forefront of dramatic action, provoking the audience to see the players not only as the characters, but as actors themselves. This activates the manifold nature of the ‘play’ as a ‘mirrored truth’ (G. Woods), compelling the audience to be consciously complicit, submitting to the fiction whilst being aware that it is fictitious. The idea of a double-vision of truth in fiction, and the audience’s role of being forced to submit to such, is mimicked in the emotional connection of the First Player to the ‘passionate speech’ that Hamlet asks him to perform, Aeneas’s Tale to Dido; submitting to his role as an actor, the Player seems to truly ‘become’ Aeneas, and ‘has not turned his color and has tears in ’s eyes’ – blurring the boundary between what is the Player’s emotion and what is Aeneas’. Similarly, a modern audience might call into question what we know as the ‘fourth-wall’ boundaries being blurred, between ‘Player’ and actor – a conscious recognition of the people themselves on stage, and our human empathetic connection to identity and ‘roles’ in society, what W. B. Worthen named a ‘double-vision’ of ‘theatrical setting’.
Furthermore, The 'Tale', as a story of grief and bloody revenge, has immediate implications for Hamlet's own predicament and provokes Hamlet into a frenzy of self-abasement; Hamlet's fervent anticipation, Polonius's dismay at the Player's force of performance, and Hamlet's ensuing soliloquy, as such, are seen as the repercussions of the lack of recognition of the appearance/ reality distinction. Act 2.2 in Hamlet seems to epitomise Shakespeare’s understanding of theatre as a dramatic representation of Elizabethan social life, an idea which can best be summed up in his quote from As You Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage’, which equates the Seven Ages of man to the roles of an actor, such as the movement from childhood roles of femininity to the adult roles of ‘Anthony’, ‘Hamlet’