fourth wall

• fourth-wall, 4th wall

A reference to the three walls of a box set, with the fourth wall being the imaginary wall separating the performers from the audience. Coined by philosopher and art critic Denis Didérot in 1758[1] and thus a calque of French quatrième mur.

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fourth wall (plural fourth walls)

1. (performing arts, idiomatic) 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.
   • 1916 February 20, “Second Thoughts on First Nights”, in New York Times, page X7:

     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.

   • 2005 August 31, Philip Kennicott, “Our Aura of Security, Shattered Like Glass”, in Washington Post, page C01:

     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.

2. (by extension) The boundary between the fiction and the audience.
   • 1999, Orson Scott Card, (Please provide the book title or journal name):

     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.

   • 2003, Robert Keith Sawyer, Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation, page 107:

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

   • 2003, Cathy Haase, Acting for Film, page 92:

     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;

   • 2004, Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them, page 207:

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

   • 2005, Chris Crawford, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, page 208:

     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

• fourth wall joke
• break the fourth wall