"Staging Subversions: The Performance-within-a-Play in French Classical Theater" defines a new type of metadrama using "Le Tartuffe" as its paradigm and explores the complex, ambiguous, and enlightening relationships that metadrama maintains with the social and political orders. While metadramatic scenes are most often concerned with theater itself, the performance-within-a-play adopts an important function in the play's plot, and, consequently, in the social world of the play. The performance-within-a-play is particularly associated by the classical playwrights with the family structure, with the class system, with women's social roles, and with the politics of absolutism.