In the same way as the popular returns to poetic discourses, as studied in Chapter 14, so does the Baroque – an aesthetic which, as Bolívar Echeverría has taught us, is not a passing phase, but rather one of modernity’s faces. In this chapter, a panoply of authors – some of them included in the seminal Medusario anthology, some of them readers of it – are considered in the light of the Neobaroque and postpoetry. The authors discussed include Gerardo Deniz, David Huerta, Coral Bracho, Myriam Moscona, Luis Felipe Fabre, Ricardo Cázares, and Alejandro Tarrab.

“Metatheatre,” the term coined by Lionel Abel, flourished in the baroque (roughly 1550–1650) and modernist (or neobaroque, twentieth century) in Europe and the United States. Rather than representing the illusion of reality, it represents the reality of illusion. Pirandello’s Henry IV may be read as a modernist rendering of Hamlet. More radically than Hamlet, “Henry” perceives the impossibility of grasping truth beneath appearances and chooses to live in theatrical play forever. This chapter compares Six Characters in Search of an Author to an untitled play by the baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Both feature characters angry at their author and discussion of a play to be made. In each, the “fourth wall” is removed to reveal theatre-in-process. Instead of portraying theatre as an imitation of life, metatheatre reveals life’s inherent theatricality.