Gabriela Chrysostomou’s essay “The 4th Wall in The Tempest(s)” effectively demonstrates how both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Césaire’s A Tempest purposefully break the fourth wall in order to engage the audience and blur the lines between fiction and reality. She uses Bertolt Brecht introduce the larger theoretical issues involved in breaking the fourth wall—for Brecht, theater that calls attention to itself as theater forces audiences to recognize the extent to which reality, too, requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Brecht believed that theater could be used to inspire revolutionary action by making audiences recognize that other worlds are possible. A Brechtian reading allows us to understand how both Shakespeare and Césaire blur the boundaries between theater and reality; but as Chrysostomou argues, the two playwrights do so with different aims. Read Chrysostomou’s reflection here.

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