Editing Story within a story (section)

=== Nested plays ===
This dramatic device was probably first used by [[Thomas Kyd]] in ''[[The Spanish Tragedy]]'' around 1587, where the play is presented before an audience of two of the characters, who comment upon the action.<ref>{{cite book
  | editor-last = Bevington
  | editor-first = David
  | editor-link = David Bevington
  | title = The Spanish Tragedy
  | edition = Revels student
  | publisher = [[Manchester University Press]]
  | year = 1996
  | location = Manchester, England
  | page =  5
  | isbn =0-7190-4344-1
  | quote=Andrea and Revenge&nbsp;... 'sit and see'&nbsp;... the play proper is staged for them; in this sense, ''The Spanish Tragedy'' is itself a play within a play.}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Erne|first=Lukas|title=Beyond The Spanish tragedy: a study of the works of Thomas Kyd|year=2001|publisher=Manchester University Press|location=Manchester, England|isbn=0-7190-6093-1|page=[https://archive.org/details/beyondthespanish0000erne/page/96 96]|quote=the first play-within-a-play|url=https://archive.org/details/beyondthespanish0000erne/page/96}}</ref> From references in other contemporary works, Kyd is also assumed to have been the writer of an early, lost version of ''Hamlet'' (the so-called ''[[Ur-Hamlet]]''), with a play-within-a-play interlude.<ref>{{cite book
  | last = Barton
  | first = Anne
  | title = The New Penguin Shakespeare Hamlet
  | publisher = Penguin Books
  | year = 1980
  | location = Harmondsworth, England
  | page = [https://archive.org/details/hamlet00will_1/page/15 15]
  | url = https://archive.org/details/hamlet00will_1/page/15
  | isbn = 0-14-070734-4
  | url-access = registration
  }}</ref> [[William Shakespeare]]'s ''[[Hamlet]]'' retains this device by having Hamlet ask some strolling players to perform ''The Murder of Gonzago''. The action and characters in ''The Murder'' mirror the murder of Hamlet's father in the main action, and Prince Hamlet writes additional material to emphasize this. Hamlet wishes to provoke the murderer, his uncle, and sums this up by saying "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." Hamlet calls this new play ''The Mouse-trap'' (a title that [[Agatha Christie]] later took for the long-running play ''[[The Mousetrap]]''). Christie's work was parodied in Tom Stoppard's ''The Real Inspector Hound'', in which two theater critics are drawn into the murder mystery they are watching. The audience is similarly absorbed into the action in Woody Allen's play ''God'', which is about two failed playwrights in Ancient Greece.  The phrase "[[The Conscience of the King]]" also became the title of a ''[[Star Trek]]'' episode featuring a production of Hamlet which leads to the exposure of a murderer (although not a king).

The play ''I Hate Hamlet'' and the movie ''[[A Midwinter's Tale]]'' are about a production of ''Hamlet'', which in turn includes a production of ''The Murder of Gonzago'', as does the ''Hamlet''-based film [[Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (film)|''Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead'']], which even features a third-level puppet theatre version within their play. Similarly, in [[Anton Chekhov]]'s ''[[The Seagull]]'' there are specific allusions to ''Hamlet'': in the first act a son stages a play to impress his mother, a professional actress, and her new lover; the mother responds by comparing her son to Hamlet. Later he tries to come between them, as Hamlet had done with his mother and her new husband. The tragic developments in the plot follow in part from the scorn the mother shows for her son's play.<ref>{{cite book|last=Pearce|first=Richard|editor-last=Miles |editor-first=Patrick|title=Chekhov on the British stage  |year=1993|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge, England|page=220|chapter=Chekhov into English: the case of 'The Seagull'|quote=A dominant motif in the play is the recurrent Hamlet theme}}</ref>

Shakespeare adopted the play-within-a-play device for many of his other plays as well, including ''[[A Midsummer Night's Dream]]'' and ''[[Love's Labours Lost]]''. Almost the whole of ''[[The Taming of the Shrew]]'' is a play-within-a-play, presented to convince [[Christopher Sly]], a drunken tinker, that he is a nobleman watching a private performance, but the device has no relevance to the plot (unless Katharina's subservience to her "lord" in the last scene is intended to strengthen the deception against the tinker<ref>{{cite book|last=Aspinall|first=Dana |title=The Taming of the Shrew|publisher=Routledge|location=London|year=2001|page=19|chapter=The play and the critics|isbn=978-0-8153-3515-3}}</ref>) and is often dropped in modern productions. The musical ''[[Kiss Me, Kate]]'' is about the production of a fictitious musical, ''The Taming of the Shrew'', based on the comedy ''[[The Taming of the Shrew]]'' by [[William Shakespeare]], and features several scenes from it. ''[[Pericles, Prince of Tyre]]'' draws in part on the 14th-century ''[[Confessio Amantis]]'' (itself a frame story) by [[John Gower]], and Shakespeare has the ghost of Gower "assume man's infirmities" to introduce his work to the contemporary audience and comment on the action of the play.<ref>{{cite book|last=Buchanan|first=Judith|title=Shakespeare—Four late plays|year=2001|publisher=Wordsworth Editions|location=Ware, England|isbn=1-84022-104-6|pages=5–8}}</ref>

In [[Francis Beaumont]]'s ''[[Knight of the Burning Pestle]]'' (c. 1608) a supposed common citizen from the audience, actually a "planted" actor, condemns the play that has just started and "persuades" the players to present something about a shopkeeper. The citizen's "apprentice" then acts, pretending to extemporise, in the rest of the play. This is a satirical tilt at Beaumont's playwright contemporaries and their current fashion for offering plays about London life.<ref>{{cite book|last=Gurr|first=Andrew|author-link=Andrew Gurr|title=The Knight of the Burning Pestle|year=1968|publisher=Oliver and Boyd|location=Edinburgh|isbn=0050015710|pages=2–6|chapter=Critical introduction}}</ref>

The opera ''[[Pagliacci]]'' is about a troupe of actors who perform a play about marital infidelity that mirrors their own lives,<ref>{{Cite web |last=Mercaldo |first=David |date=8 March 2018 |title=Pagliacci and Vesti La Giubba – The Million Selling Record! |url=https://italiantribune.com/pagliacci-and-vesti-la-giubba-the-million-selling-record/ |access-date=28 June 2023 |website=The Italian Tribune}}</ref> and composer [[Richard Rodney Bennett]] and [[playwright]]-[[librettist]] [[Beverley Cross]]'s ''[[The Mines of Sulphur]]'' features a ghostly troupe of actors who perform a play about murder that similarly mirrors the lives of their hosts, from whom they depart, leaving them with the plague as nemesis.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Mines of Sulphur |url=http://operascotland.org/opera/149/Mines+of+Sulphur |access-date=28 June 2023 |website=Opera Scotland}}</ref> [[John Adams (composer)|John Adams]]' ''[[Nixon in China]]'' (1985–1987) features a surreal version of [[Jiang Qing|Madam Mao]]'s ''[[Red Detachment of Women (ballet)|Red Detachment of Women]]'', illuminating the ascendance of human values over the disillusionment of high politics in the meeting.<ref>{{Cite magazine |last=Davidson Sorkin |first=Amy |date=17 February 2011 |title=Kissinger in China |url=https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/kissinger-in-china |access-date=28 June 2023 |magazine=[[The New Yorker]]}}</ref>

In [[Bertolt Brecht]]'s ''[[The Caucasian Chalk Circle]]'', a play is staged as a [[parable]] to villagers in the [[Soviet Union]] to justify the re-allocation of their farmland: the tale describes how a child is awarded to a servant-girl rather than its natural mother, an aristocrat, as the woman most likely to care for it well. This kind of play-within-a-play, which appears at the beginning of the main play and acts as a "frame" for it, is called an "[[Induction (play)|induction]]". Brecht's one-act play ''[[The Elephant Calf]]'' (1926) is a play-within-a-play performed in the foyer of the theatre during his ''[[Man Equals Man]]''.

In [[Jean Giraudoux]]'s play ''[[Ondine (play)|Ondine]]'', all of act two is a series of scenes within scenes, sometimes two levels deep. This increases the [[dramatic tension]] and also makes more poignant the inevitable failure of the relationship between the [[Human|mortal]] Hans and [[water sprite]] Ondine.

''[[The Two-Character Play]]'' by [[Tennessee Williams]] has a concurrent double plot with the convention of a play within a play. Felice and Clare are siblings and are both actor/producers touring ''The Two-Character Play''. They have supposedly been abandoned by their crew and have been left to put on the play by themselves. The characters in the play are also brother and sister and are also named Clare and Felice.

''[[The Mysteries (play)|The Mysteries]]'', a modern reworking of the medieval [[mystery play]]s, remains faithful to its roots by having the modern actors play the sincere, naïve tradesmen and women as they take part in the original performances.<ref>{{cite book|last=Normington|first=Katie |title=Modern mysteries: contemporary productions of medieval English cycle dramas|publisher=Boydell and Brewer|location=Melton, Suffolk, England|date=October 2007|page=86|isbn=978-1-84384-128-9 }}</ref>

Alternatively, a play might be about the production of a play, and include the performance of all or part of the play, as in ''[[Noises Off]]'', ''[[A Chorus of Disapproval (play)|A Chorus of Disapproval]]'', or ''[[Lilies (play)|Lilies]]''. Similarly, the musical ''[[Man of La Mancha]]'' presents the story of Don Quixote as an impromptu play staged in prison by ''[[Don Quixote|Quixote]]''{{'}}s author, [[Miguel de Cervantes]].

In most stagings of the musical ''[[Cats (musical)|Cats]]'', which include the song "Growltiger's Last Stand" – a recollection of an old play by Gus the Theatre Cat – the character of Lady [[Griddlebone]] sings "The Ballad of Billy McCaw". (However, many productions of the show omit "Growltiger's Last Stand", and "The Ballad of Billy McCaw" has at times been replaced with a mock aria, so this metastory is not always seen.) Depending on the production, there is another musical scene called "The Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollices" where the Jellicles put on a show for their leader. In ''[[Lestat: The Musical]]'', there are three play within a plays. First, when Lestat visits his childhood friend, Nicolas, who works in a theater, where he discovers his love for theater; and two more when the Theater of the Vampires perform. One is used as a plot mechanism to explain the vampire god, Marius, which sparks an interest in Lestat to find him.

A play within a play occurs in the musical ''[[The King and I]]'', where Princess Tuptim and the royal dancers give a performance of ''Small House of Uncle Thomas'' (or ''[[Uncle Tom's Cabin]]'') to their English guests. The play mirrors Tuptim's situation, as she wishes to run away from slavery to be with her lover, Lun Tha.

In stagings of [[Dina Rubina]]'s play ''Always the Same Dream'', the story is about staging a school play based on a poem by [[Alexander Pushkin|Pushkin]].

Joseph Heller's 1967 play ''[[We Bombed in New Haven]]'' is about actors engaged in a play about military airmen; the actors themselves become at times unsure whether they are actors or actual airmen.

The 1937 musical ''[[Babes in Arms]]'' is about a group of kids putting on a musical to raise money. The central plot device was retained for the popular 1939 film version with [[Judy Garland]] and [[Mickey Rooney]]. A similar plot was recycled for the films [[White Christmas (film)|''White Christmas'']] and [[The Blues Brothers (film)|''The Blues Brothers'']].