Meaning of fourth wall | Babel Free

Definitions

1. The imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play.
   idiomatic
2. The boundary between the fiction and the audience.
   broadly

Equivalents

Examples

“This is a flat, unnecessary, and strangely disturbing denial of the fourth-wall convention, that unwritten agreement between playwright and playgoer whereby you think of yourself at the theatre as a privileged, exonerated, comfortably seated eavesdropper.”

“There's been a convention in the theater world to think of the division between audience and spectacle as a fourth wall, a wall that the playwright tries to eliminate through the force of his drama.”

“Even though you, the author, may be maintaining a fourth wall between your characters and your readers, he, the narrator, is not keeping that fourth wall between himself and the audience he thinks he's telling the story to.”

“The fourth wall is the imaginary barrier between the stage and the audience, and the phrase is a metaphor for the dramatic frame.”

“As actors, we are still looking out into the imaginary fourth wall. The difference is that in film, the fourth wall is no longer fixed;”

“... removes the fourth wall of the nineteenth-century novel and, in doing so, eliminates the border between a fictional inside and a nonfictional outside.”

“I've saved the worst for last. The crudest scheme is to drop the fourth wall and advise players as to actions that are inhibiting”

CEFR level