Could the World become a Stage? Theatricality and Metaphorical Structures

The concept of theatricality has taken many forms during its history, and—perhaps because of this—its meaning may seem difficult to grasp when one is to make a theoretical approach to the field. Often theatricality shows itself as a metaphorical relationship between the theater and the world. The Shakespearean metaphor “all the world’s a stage” (87) is an expression of this. With this as a point of departure, I will read some theatrical phenomena metaphorically, as “metaphorical structures,” to see if the well developed theories on metaphor can help us better understand the concept of theatricality. The thesis of this paper can be summed up in the following analogy: theatricality relates to real life in the same way that the metaphor relates to literal language.