Appearance vs. Reality | Susan Baker (essay date 1992)
Susan Baker (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "Personating Persons: Rethinking Shakespearean Disguises," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3, Fall, 1992, pp. 303-16.
[In the following essay, Baker discusses Shakespeare's treatment of rank and power in terms of his characters ' changing personages, concluding that the grounds of power remain fixed within a natural hierarchy.]
I want to borrow an old word and its inflections. Shakespeare's contemporaries used the verb personate for the theatrical activity we designate as acting a part or creating a role, and this obsolete word has at least two advantages over those in current use: first, it suggests "character" as activity; second, its invention in early modern England hints at a changing view of subjectivity. The first recorded appearance of personation occurs in the Induction to John Marston's Antonio and Mellida (probably 1599-1600), and, as Andrew Gurr...
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