Appearance vs. Reality | M. C. Bradbrook (essay date 1952)
M. C. Bradbrook (essay date 1952)
SOURCE: "Shakespeare and the Use of Disguise in Elizabethan Drama," in Muriel Bradbrook on Shakespeare, The Harvester Press, 1984, pp. 20-7.
[In the following essay, Bradbrook discusses the dramatic conventions that may have influenced Shakespeare's frequent use of disguise.]
Today disguise is a living part of the drama. Sir Francis Crewe of The Dog beneath The Skin, the mysterious stranger at The Cocktail Party, the intrusive little girls of Giraudoux's Electra do not bear the limited significance which naturalism and the set characters of the nineteenth century imposed. Disguise was then reduced to a subterfuge, restricted to the Scarlet Pimpernel, the hero of The Only Way or the heroine of East Lynne ('Dead! and he never called me mother!'). Ibsen and Chekhov transformed it. Those implications of self-deception and fantasy which are the stuff of A Doll's House...
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