[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 argues,

It is not stretching plausibility too far to suggest that the term was called into being by the same developments—in the kinds of part given the actors to play and their own skill in their parts—that made two great tragedians succeed the extemporising clowns on the pinnacle of theatrical fame. By 1600 characterisation was the chief requisite of the successful player.¹

I suspect Gurr is right about this alteration in actors' goals and audiences' tastes; indeed, I suspect further that an increasing interest in characterization over improvisation was culturally significant. At this point, however, I shall simply borrow the term personation to indicate an activity frequently undertaken by characters in Shakespearean drama, the activity of personating someone else.² That is, I shall use personation to refer to onstage figures behaving as actors (rather than to actors carrying out their profession).³

It may be necessary to distinguish immediately between what I am calling personation and the broader term disguise. First, as I shall argue in more detail, personation requires disguise, but not all disguises are personations, at least not to the same degree. And second, I want to ask questions different from those often asked about disguise in the drama. Most studies of Shakespearean disguise have stressed either the thematics of illusion or a self-discovery presumably enabled by disguise.⁴ Rather than dismissing disguise on the stage as merely (uninterestingly) conventional, or considering what the act and actions of disguising tell us about the represented disguisers as "individuals," or pondering what metatheatrical effects disguises create, I want to look at what the plays tell us about the people Shakespearean disguisers personate. By asking what happens when Shakespearean characters don disguises, I want to ask how Shakespearean personators insert themselves (their alternate, invented selves) into a (putatively) preexisting social order.

Although in literature the act of disguising most often functions primarily as a plot device, as a factor of narrative necessity, I would argue that representations of the process and consequences of disguising—as a sort of secondary elaboration—inevitably incorporate local detail and historically specific practices. Extrapolations from drama to "real life" are surely fraught with difficulties, even as we increasingly interpret such life as itself theatrical. Generally, this theoretical tangle doesn't bother me much; I am more concerned with the prospect of intervening in the ways today's readings of Shakespearean drama inform today's selves than with retrospectively reconstructing early modern personhood. The two projects are, however, not unrelated, and to the extent that I want to grasp something of what it meant to be an early modern person, personations within the plays can suggest what their original audiences assumed about human interactions, about what people needed or wanted to know about each other.

A contemporary example may be useful. In the United States today, new acquaintances generally ask each other "What do you do?"—a question that everyone understands as "What do you do for a living? What is your job?" Were I to decide to pass myself off as someone (anyone) else, I would have to be prepared to answer this question and to conduct myself accordingly. Similarly, a dramatic representation of someone pretending to be someone else—for whatever reason—would be likely to include such exchanges.⁵ The point is that employment information need not be diegetically relevant, but the dramatization of plausible chat would reveal it. To my mind it is the very offhanded quality of such revelation that suggests its ideological importance.

Folktales provide another instructive example: no matter how similar the several versions of a widespread tale, specific renderings inevitably take on some local color. So too, although Arden, Belmont, and Illyria are never-never lands of romantic comedy, where Jack shall have Jill and nought shall go ill, they are also Shakespeare's England. Never-never lands, lands of Cockaigne, and big rock-candy mountains can only be imagined in terms of environments already known. And I would suggest that the homely particularities embedded in tales uninterested in naturalistic representation may well be ideologically revealing, may well signal attitudes and practices so taken for granted as to be invisible to tellers and their auditors as anything but "natural," or "inevitable," or "universal." It is to learn something of "what goes without saying" that I want to examine practices of disguise in Shakespeare's plays.

It will be useful to distinguish among four broad classes of disguise that appear in Shakespearean drama and the relations to which each answers. In choosing a disguise, characters may do any of the following: hide their own identities without asserting any other; substitute another, already existing identity for their own; invent a specific role or persona for a specific and limited purpose; or, finally, adopt a role—personate an invented, particular identity—to be played in multiple circumstances and for multiple audiences. This last category is the most interesting for the purposes of this essay, partly because it outlines for us what attributes seem to add up to a human being, what one needs to know and to present about oneself in order to interact with other people, what is required to act as a person.

More important, it allows us to track interactions through which a "self-conscious" personator maintains a fiction of identity. In other words, although personation involves disguisings, not all disguises are personations in the sense that they make up a new person. Still, each of the four categories of disguise offers some clues about the construction of early modern personhood.

The first sort of disguise, one that requires a minimum of personation, could be called that of the cloak, the mask, the vizard, or the veil. These are devices for allowing the disguise of without asserting any particular disguise as. Each of the various coverings hides whoever is behind it without asserting a specific (alternative) personage. However we evaluate Hal and Poins vizarded for robbery, Coriolanus in Antium, Polixenes and Camillo attending the sheepshearing festival, even Edgar armored to challenge Edmund, such disguises insist upon the hiding of a particular person rather than on the personation of someone new. Dialogically, cloaks and masks often enable an evasion of responsibility. As devices of concealment, these disguises seek either to evade one's own responsibility or to evoke in others responses that appearing in one's own guise would preclude. By hiding someone, these disguises allow for crimes (Hal), for spying (Polixenes), and for movement into enemy territory (Coriolanus, Edgar). In many cases disguise-by-cloaking acts as the antithesis of personation: if personation requires preparing a response, cloaking interposes a barrier that allows the disguisers to avoid answering for their actions.

In other cases disguise-by-cloaking lures the witnesses (or victims) of such disguise into statements that would never be pronounced in the acknowledged presence of the disguiser—Florizel's "One being dead" speech (4.4.387 ff.) is a clear example, as are those of participants in Shakespeare's various masked-ball scenes.⁶ Frequently these disguises function both dramaturgically and diegetically as techniques of deferral, tactics that delay recognition in order to intensify the strategic power of recognition. Indeed, one could almost say that the represented people in these maskings are complicit with the playwright; for example, Hal, Polixenes, Edgar in knight's garb—all withhold their identities toward a moment of revelation, a moment of recognition prepared to astound its onstage audience and move the theater audience as witness to this astonishment. This deferral by disguise is most obvious in two cases on the borderline between cloaking and impersonation: a veiled Hero pretends briefly to be her own cousin in Much Ado, and the Provost of Measure for Measure presents a muffled Claudio as an anonymous prisoner saved from beheading. In both these instances the figures impersonated (briefly) remain mysterious to the assembled group or to a significant part of it, and the disguise exists only to be discarded. That is, the hiding exists only as a precondition for revelation, and the revelation is explicitly dialogic, explicitly designed to evoke a response. Of course, to hide one's face is always to open the possibility of being taken for someone else, but in Shakespearean disguises of cloak or vizard, the pertinent move is the hiding of one identity rather than the active assertion of another. It is worth noting, however, that most often the impulse for cloaking or masking marks some distortion, disruption, or dislocation of reciprocal relations, of mutually implicating bonds—working either to evade the obligations attending such bonds or, more often and more obliquely, to enforce them.

One may, perhaps, endorse Hero's claims on Claudio, dispute Polixenes' demands on Florizel, and puzzle over Hal's casual theft from those he owes good governance; but in each case we can see that reciprocal claims are at stake. Taken in aggregate, the cloaking and masking disguises in Shakespearean drama seem to argue for a connection between the disruption of mutual bonds and the obscuring of personal identity. Like x in an algebraic formula, the vizard or veil inscribes an absence and an ignorance—a "meaning" that becomes singular and visible only within a network of orderly relations. Where reciprocal relations are some-how violated, persons are no longer themselves; when persons are no longer themselves, reciprocal relations are distorted. And as we shall see, relations are at stake as well when one Shakespearean character usurps another's identity.

Shakespearean drama includes only a few instances of this second form of disguise, of one character directly impersonating another, deliberately assuming someone else's identity. As I have already noted, for my purposes these substitutive disguises are less noteworthy than those for which a new "person" must be invented. To pretend to be a particular someone is an act of imitation (mimesis) rather than construction. (One might compare current inflections of impersonate: stand-up comedians do impersonations; variety performances include female impersonators; one may be arrested for impersonating an officer.) Imitative disguise requires simply adopting (wherever relevant) already established status, attributes, history, behavioral quirks, and so on—knowledge of which is shared in advance by both the disguisers and those they delude. Such disguises—substitutions—are acts of appropriation rather than invention and often tend toward the exaggeration of caricature.

Although substitutive disguises offer little useful information about precisely what in the early modern period was seen as constituting a person, they do suggest reasons (motives) for the social demand that people be constituted as singular. With one minor exception, all substitutive impersonations in Shakespearean drama involve illegitimate sexuality; they either accompany attempts to evade responsible relations or serve as protective reactions to such attempts. (The exception occurs when assorted soldiers in 1 Henry IV dress as the king, offering their lives and bodies as decoys to preserve his.) In the bed-tricks of Measure for Measure and All's Well, the substitution of one woman for another foils a man's illicit desire and legitimates a marriage of otherwise dubious status. In Merry Wives, Falstaff's will toward adulterous seduction leads to his disguises as the fat old woman of Brainford and as Herne the Hunter; this play uses impersonation to accomplish the comic humiliation of a braggart-lecher who presumes too far on the sexual privileges of his class. In Much Ado About Nothing and Cymbeline, on the other hand, the impersonations are calculated to humiliate innocent women: Don John's plot to have Margaret (offstage) taken for Hero implies sexual misconduct and provokes Claudio to sexual slander; Cloten dons Posthumus's clothing so that his intended rape of Imogen may be all the more painful to her. Even in The Taming of the Shrew, Tranio's impersonation of Lucentio and the Pedant's of Vincentio (at Tranio's instigation) work to sidestep the legitimating process of premarital negotiations. It is no wonder Bianca turns pale when the right Vincentio is recognized (5.1.138); she has married without securing any dower rights. If we are to read Bianca's petulance in the final scene as anything beyond a farcical reversal of expectations, we might think of it less as revealing some previously concealed nature, some longterm hypocrisy, than as symptomatic of a not unreasonable anger at an unsatisfactory marriage settlement.⁷ (Whatever Vincentio might mean when he tells Baptista "we will content you" [1. 135], it is probable that the arrangements would be less lavish than those Tranio—disguised as Lucentio—had promised.)

At any rate, it seems clear enough that, in Shakespearean drama, impersonation is most often a sexual ploy, specifically designed either to evade or to enforce social sanctions on sexuality. In such instances we may be reminded of the extent to which the social order is sexual positioning, of the extent to which subjectivity is marked by limits on desire. At this point, it is worth emphasizing how the circumstances and consequences of both types of disguise—masking and substituting—define subjectivity as thoroughly social. In all these instances, to alter one's relations to other people is to alter oneself as a person.

Of the varieties of disguise, I am most interested in the declarations and practices of those who are represented as inventing—creating, personating—a new identity. In these instances characters not only obscure who they have been but also must take pains to signal who they have become. When a new identity is to be personated, it has no preexisting relationships: no bonds, no reciprocal obligations, no legitimated sexual or other status. Yet the personator will be required to interact with other people; disguise is pointless without an audience. To watch and listen to characters undertaking personations, then, is to get some sense of what Elizabethans needed to know about each other. (I should perhaps stress that I take this information to be all the more telling in that it is not directly tied to authorial meditations on selfhood; rather, it appears as secondary elaboration of a plot device. As such secondary fleshing out, the details that accumulate around personations seem likely to point to what is taken for granted as constituting the identity of persons.)

Looking at the several occasions in Shakespearean drama when a character deliberately enacts a new persona, makes up a new person, we can divide them roughly into two types. Personations of the first sort are undertaken for one specific purpose; they are created for a limited and determinate audience and for a limited period of time, as when Feste personates Sir Topas to torment Malvolio, or Jessica dresses as a page to flee Venice. Such one-off personations can be thought of as task-oriented, as ad hoc. Most often this version of personation requires disguise as a type, generally an "occupational" type, visually marked for a predetermined slot in a socioeconomic hierarchy: priest, page, peasant, lawyer's clerk. The other sort of personations, which I shall refer to as "improvisational," are prepared for multiple audiences and for an indefinite period of time; that is, neither the audience nor the duration of the personation can be predicted at the moment of its adoption: think of Ganymede, Cesario, Caius, for example.

This division into task-oriented and improvisational disguises is, inevitably, somewhat arbitrary, and the resulting categories are impure. Portia, for example, invents the task-oriented role of Balthazar in order to save Antonio's life, but she quickly becomes improvisational—opportunistic even—when Bassanio insists that Balthazar accept a reward. In the case of Cymbeline's Posthumus Leonatus, it is dramatically irrelevant how long he's to play a peasant; his disguise is improvisational in terms of the play's imitated action but effectively task-oriented in its brevity and its limited audience. Where personations are more extended, however, the figures being personated must be more developed. And in the representation of such figures, practical demands of dramaturgy intersect with custom, with what might be called everyday life.

Among the many early modern tracts debating women's roles are two with bastard-Latin titles, Hic Mulier and Haec Vir.⁸Hic Mulier attacks as unnatural the spectacle of women wearing men's clothes, and in Haec Vir a figure named "Hic Mulier" defends women's crossdressing on several grounds, including the arbitrariness of custom, an arbitrariness demonstrated through examples. In the midst of assorted Roman and other non-English practices, one specifically English practice is included:

even at this day it is a general received custom amongst our English that when we meet or overtake any man in our travel or journeying, to examine him whither he rides, how far, to what purpose, and where he lodgeth. Nay, and with that unmannerly boldness of inquisition that it is a certain ground of a most insufficient quarrel not to receive a full satisfaction of those demands which go far astray from good manners or comely civility.⁹

The syntax is convoluted, but the import is clear enough: custom requires travelers to answer specific questions that would be rude if asked under other circumstances. The writer seems to find this interrogation of travelers as notably odd as bathing in oils, delivering orations from a bed, or wearing white to signify mourning—strange practices that "Hic Mulier" cites from Latin literature. I doubt that we can recover the extent to which journeys in early modern England actually mandated interactions contrary to those appropriate for other settings, but the pamphleteer indeed describes exactly what happens when Shakespearean travelers first encounter other people.¹⁰ They are asked questions.

This practice is certainly handy for dramatic exposition in general and specifically for letting an audience know the particulars of a personation. For example, Lear asks Caius:

How now, what art thou? …
What dost thou profess? …
Who wouldst thou serve? …
What services canst do? …
How old art thou? …
                            (1.4.9, 11, 24, 31, 36)

I would stress that such exchanges are not expository in quite the same way as "This is Illyria, lady," or "Well, this is the forest of Arden." That is, at the moments when travelers are questioned, the audience already knows all it needs to about setting and situation. Rather, these interrogations index salient information about any given person. Indeed, Shakespeare's personators are repeatedly offered the opportunity to present their new identities through a series of questions.

Frequently, questions are asked about one's current dwelling-place. In As You Like It, for example, Orlando asks Ganymede, "Where dwell you, pretty youth?" (3.2.334). Throughout this play people seem interested in each other's residences. Immediately on entering the Forest of Arden, Rosalind and Celia, seeking food and shelter, are, conveniently enough, able to buy from Corin's master "his cote, his flocks, and bounds of feed" and to hire Corin at better wages than the previous owner had paid him (2.4.83, 94). Their new house and grazing rights provide more than shelter and sustenance; they serve to demarcate the identities of Ganymede and Aliena. Indeed, it is specifically a discrepancy between dwelling-place and accent that prompts the invention of a biography for Ganymede:

ORLANDO Your accent is something finer than
  you could purchase in so remov'd a
  dwelling.
ROSALIND I have been told so of many; but
  indeed an old religious uncle of mine taught
  me to speak.
                                   (3.2.341-44)

Once this disjunction is accounted for, Ganymede and Aliena are identified throughout with the sheepcote, even to the point that, for no immediately apparent reason, Ganymede volunteers information about their dwelling-place to Phebe. Additionally, when Oliver is seeking Ganymede and Aliena, he first asks if they are the owners of the sheepcote and only afterwards comments on the garments, age, features, and deportment by which Orlando has said Ganymede could be recognized. And Oliver couches the announcement of his plans to marry Aliena as a decision to become a shepherd, to adopt her occupancy as his occupation.

Although other plays share As You Like It's concern with current dwellings, the single question most frequently asked of Shakespearean travelers is "Where do you come from?" And the question "From whence?" can be answered almost indifferently with information about regional or paternal origins, with a doubleness that perhaps sounds odd to our ears.¹¹ Some examples follow:

BAPTISTA Whence are you, sir? What may I call
  your name?
PETRUCHIO Petruchio is my name, Antonio's
  son,
A man well known throughout all Italy. BAPTISTA I know him well; you are welcome
  for his sake.
              (Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.67-70)

BAPTISTA Lucentio is your name, of whence, I
  pray?
TRANIO Of Pisa, sir, son to Vincentio.
BAPTISTA A mighty man of Pisa; by report
I know him well. You are very welcome, sir.
            (Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.102-5)

TIMON Whence are you?
CAPHIS       Of Athens here, my lord.
                              (Timon of Athens, 2.2.17)

THAISA And further, he desires to know of you
Of whence you are, your name, and parentage.
PERICLES A gentleman of Tyre, my name,
  Pericles,
My education been in arts and arms.
                          (Pericles, 2.3.79-82)

CYMBELINE        'Tis now the time
To ask of whence you are. Report it.
BELARIUS             Sir,
In Cambria are we born, and gentlemen.
                       (Cymbeline, 5.5.15-18)

And—as we might expect—Measure for Measure works a twist on the usual responses:

ESCALUS Of whence are you?
DUKE Not of this country, though my chance is
  now
To use it for my time. I am a brother
Of gracious order, late come from the [See],
In special business from his Holiness.
             (Measure for Measure, 3.2.216-20)

Tentatively, I would suggest that the importance of answers to "From whence?" signals a double sense of nativity as one of several related terms that conjoin inconsistencies in theories of origin. At this point, I want to consider another of these double-edged words: breeding.

Two words associated with breeding recur in the descriptions of Shakespearean personators: carriage and comportment. Some sort of reference to the way one carries oneself often accompanies the decision to don a disguise. And the young women can be quite amusing on the topic of assuming a swaggering manliness. Thus Shakespearean personators are frequently shown to be aware that they must change their manners along with their clothing. Roughly as often, however, their "breeding" is revealed by their comportment, as when Proteus tells Sebastian (Julia) that his/her face and behavior "witness good bringing up" (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 4.4.69). Such remarks have been read as evidence of Renaissance snobbery, of a belief that the innate superiority of those born to high rank will shine through the most humble clothing.¹² Yet the plays' stress on such terms as comportment opens a way to challenge the essentialism of such snobbery. Carriage, after all, is learned behavior. One's breeding, in the sense of rearing rather than of genetics, determines deportment, although the term breeding itself ordinarily works to occlude this distinction. Keith Johnstone claims that he teaches master/servant scenes as ones "in which both parties act as if all the space belonged to the master."¹³ And indeed Ganymede, Cesario, Balthazar, Sebastian, Fidele, Caius, Friar Lodowick, Morgan, and perhaps even Poor Tom seem to comport themselves in ways characteristic of people accustomed to "owning" much of the space around them. Further, other characters in the plays often acknowledge the possessive rights of the personator. Again, however, visible behavior rather than some (intuited) intrinsic merit coordinates the interactions.

Similar conditions account for even the extreme cases of characters who are disguised without knowing it themselves. I am thinking of Perdita, Polydore/ Guiderius, and Cadwal/Arviragus: royal children reared in ignorance of their true parentage. Apparently their noble blood prevails despite their humble upbringing. Camillo tells Polixenes that a certain shepherd "hath a daughter of most rare note" (The Winter's Tale, 4.2.41-42), and Imogen says the following of Polydore and Cadwal:

Great men,
That had a court no bigger than this cave,
That did attend themselves and had the
  virtue
Which their own conscience seal'd them,
  laying by
That nothing-gift of differing multitudes,
Could not outpeer these twain.…
                     (Cymbeline, 3.6.81-86)

Although these two romances seem to promote notions of innate nobility, they can as easily support a counterview. Neither play pretends that these children were reared in typically rustic circumstances. According to Polixenes, Perdita's shepherd father "from very nothing, and beyond the imagination of his neighbors, is grown into an unspeakable estate" (The Winter's Tale, 4.2.38-40), and we witness the Old Shepherd presiding over the sheepshearing festival, an important man in his own, albeit small, world. Indeed, Perdita's social status resembles that of Ganymede and Aliena in Arden. Strictly speaking, in terms of verisimilitude it would be difficult to imagine what models Perdita could have had for courtly deportment; but given her foster parents' standing in their neighborhood and their knowledge that her origins were rich and mysterious, it is only logical that she should bear herself in a manner suggesting high status. Similar arguments apply—even more strongly—to Polydore and Cadwal. Morgan/ Belarius has always known they are princes and has reared them on tales of noble valor. Of Polydore, Belarius directly tells the audience:

When on my three-foot stool I sit and tell
The warlike feats I have done, his spirits fly
  out
Into my story; say, "Thus mine enemy fell,
And thus I set my foot on 's neck," even then
The princely blood flows in his cheek, he
  sweats,
Strains his young nerves, and puts himself in
  posture
That acts my words.…
                            (Cymbeline, 3.3.89-95)

However lowly their surroundings, Belarius has taught Guiderius and Arviragus the posture of princes. Indeed, he so often tells the audience how royally these boys behave that one begins to suspect the play of protesting too much. And when he claims that "nature prompts them / In simple and low things to prince it much / Beyond the trick of others" (11. 84-86), we may well be tempted to counter, "No—it is Belarius that prompts them.… "In other words, these plays argue at least as strongly for nobility as learned as they do for its being innate. We might well look again at Imogen's description of Polydore and Cadwal:

Great men,
That had a court no bigger than this cave,
That did attend themselves and had the virtue
Which their own conscience seal'd them,
  laying by
That nothing-gift of differing multitudes,
Could not outpeer these twain.…

If the modifying phrases are removed, this speech reads "Great men … Could not outpeer these twain," but the conditions under which great men would be the equals of the rustic brothers are explicit: no court, no attendants, no flatterers, no followers. If read as a description of great men, this speech suggests that "greatness" is the consequence of circumstances and deference rather than of any virtue one's own conscience seals. Greatness is a visible circumstance rather than an inner or autonomous attribute, a set of practices rather than an essence.

Matters of relative "greatness," of rank and power, extend across all categories of Shakespearean disguise, and a discussion of rank and power might usefully begin with the fact that, most obviously and most visibly, disguisers change their clothes. Recent attention to sumptuary laws and crossdressing reminds us that Renaissance clothing participated in an elaborate system for signifying rank, gender, occupation, allegiance (household)—in sum, one's place in the social order. Given, however, that the much cited sumptuary laws seem never to have been enforced very effectively,¹⁴ I suspect they fall into that category of laws referred to by Kenneth Burke as "secular prayer." Burke writes that, although law is often "the efficient codification of custom," in its accumulation of abstractions by analogy, law is also a resource that can be "cashed in on … when the authority of customs threatens to wane.… Law then becomes a form of 'secular prayer.'" (A recent example would be laws forbidding drug abuse.) Burke then adds, "The attempt to pray by legislative fiat is particularly stimulated by distinctions in occupational and property relationships ('class struggle') as those who command the loyalty of the legislators encourage them to 'take up the slack,' between what is desired and what is got, by legal exhortations."¹⁵ I believe it was so with sumptuary laws.

Interesting in many ways, they are perhaps most interesting as symptoms of anxiety about stability in the social hierarchy, particularly about a disjunction between rank and income, about the possibility of social mobility.

Something of the same anxiety that engendered sumptuary laws may account for the remarkable fact that when characters in Shakespeare's plays change their clothes, and hence their status, they never of their own (represented) volition disguise up the social scale. (They occasionally do so at the behest and to the benefit of someone who outranks them—Tranio, King Henry's men at Shrewsbury, Autolycus in Florizel's clothing, for example.) To my mind, this absence of upwardly mobile personation suggests a potent taboo, all the more powerful in that it seems to have operated tacitly rather than through direct censorship.¹⁶ Although the stage itself was obviously exempt from sumptuary laws (not without objection), it seems to have been impermissible to represent the breaking of such laws. Apparently actors could with impunity dress as kings and dukes, but they could not play the parts of people successfully impersonating kings and dukes—or anyone who outranks the disguisers. (Think of the trouble Mosca gets into when—of his own volition rather than on Volpone's orders—he impersonates a magnifico. And note that the one decoy for Henry IV we actually see onstage—Sir Walter Blunt—also dies onstage.) One way to restate this apparent contradiction: the Shakespearean stage seems to have been free to imitate people exercising legitimated power but not to imitate the successful usurpation of power through any sort of disguise or impersonation.¹⁷ And I would stress that this taboo seems to have applied not simply to royal power but also to the more dispersed relations of power that accompany various ranks and degrees. Indeed, rather considerable care seems to have been taken to protect against representing personation as permitting any appropriation of power.

The cases of an unwitting Christopher Sly and a calculating Autolycus are instructive. Here are the lord's instructions for his joke on the drunken tinker:

What think you, if he were convey'd to bed,
Wrapp'd in sweet clothes, rings put upon his
  fingers,
A most delicious banquet by his bed,
And brave attendants near him when he
  wakes,
Would not the beggar then forget himself?
              (Taming of the Shrew, Ind.1.37-41)

The fantasy outlined here is one of physical comfort: a soft bed, fresh clothing, music, bountiful food, bodily care by deferential servants. (Compare the fairies' quite similar treatment of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.) The appeal of such fantasy is underscored when we remember that soft bedding, changes of clothing, and ample food were all luxuries reserved to the wealthy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁸ Sly himself tells us he has "no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet" (Taming of the Shrew, Ind.2.9-10).¹⁹ It is no wonder that in the anonymous Taming of a Shrew Sly exclaims to the tapster who wakes him at the play's end, "I have had the bravest dream tonight that ever thou heardest in all thy life."²⁰ Notably, however, the perquisite of wealth and rank not provided to Sly is power—even the servants who pamper him are in on the joke. (We might compare Malvolio, whose once considerable power in Olivia's household evaporates when he apes the dandified apparel of his social superiors.)

The case of Autolycus is also telling. Having snapped up more than unconsidered trifles in exchanging clothes with Florizel, the professional swindler is quick to recognize opportunities his new guise offers, and he immediately cons gold from the shepherds as a bribe for promises to persuade the king in their favor. In his borrowed robes, the quondam peddler of ribbons and gloves becomes an influence peddler. The plot of The Winter's Tale, however, transforms Autolycus's fraud, and the rogue's usurped power works toward the good of all concerned—particularly, one might note, the good of Perdita and Florizel, whose rights to royal power are restored through the revelation of her origins. The usurpation of a courtier's power to corrupt ultimately serves here to confirm royal authority.

If Shakespearean drama indeed acknowledged some sort of public taboo against representing upward mobility through disguise, it also seems to have resisted staging the implications of downward mobility. The plays frequently represent disguised characters, despite the downward direction of their personations, either as relatively powerful or as compensated for their loss of status. Certainly the young women who dress as men gain a freedom of movement denied them in their women's weeds, and in some cases at least, they quickly accrue perquisites of status and power in their new environments. Portia's bravura rhetoric makes her the most powerful figure in the Venetian courtroom; she is able to do what the Duke of Venice cannot (or will not). Further, she is able to manipulate Bassanio's dawning sense of obligation toward securing the sort of marital relationship she wants. Viola, too, quickly becomes more powerful in Illyria than her status as page would seem to warrant. When Olivia falls in love with Cesario, she vests him/her with a degree of power (marked by the envy manifested by the members of Olivia's household), and, perhaps more important, Cesario exposes limits to Duke Orsino's power. Some sort of cultural logic may demand that Olivia be chastened for her independence, and we may see her humiliation in loving a man/woman as resembling that with which Oberon designs to punish Titania. Equally, however, in Twelfth Night it is the dispossessed woman, not the independent one, who loves Orsino. (Perhaps, like Phebe, he is not for all markets.) In As You Like It, Ganymede and Aliena seem to be acknowledged by other denizens of the forest as superiors. Although the sheepcote's previous owner is referred to as a "carlot" (3.5.108), or peasant, Ganymede and Aliena are treated deferentially. They may no longer be recognized as princesses, but they do outrank those in their immediate vicinity.

Speculatively I can offer two explanations for this insistence that power is retained even as status is lost. First, Shakespeare may well have suffered effects of his own father's downward mobility.²¹ Second, a considerable body of recent research indicates that in early modern England downward mobility was an everpresent threat.²² It seems plausible, then, that the repeated pattern of a disguised character's retaining or regaining power served first to arouse and then to assuage a potent anxiety, one Shakespeare may have shared with members of his audience. If so, it makes all the more interesting the few instances where disguise involves a clear diminution of power accompanying a step down in rank. Duke Vincentio, Kent (with Oswald), Coriolanus at the house of Aufidius, and (I would argue) Henry V as he moves in Erpingham's cloak among the soldiers all seem surprised—testy even—when they don't receive the automatic respect and obedience to which their offices have accustomed them. And I take it as significant that the disguisers who experience a disturbing loss of power all appear in plays where questions of power, authority, and office are explicitly thematized: Measure for Measure; Henry V; Coriolanus; and, most acutely, King Lear. Indeed, Edgar's disguise may be the most disturbing in the canon in that he not merely drops in rank but rather drops out of the social order altogether. We might say that for his onstage witnesses Edgar personates demonized otherness, and what power he then possesses is that of the outcast, the shaman, the madman, the devil. And—unlike those of other Shakespearean personators—Edgar's one disguise fractures into multiple personations, and this multiplicity is stabilized only through the donning of another disguise. (It is surely no coincidence that Edgar reestablishes his singularity by defeating his brother and thus relegating Edmund once again to the position of outsider.)

In sum, although disguise usually involves a change in rank and hence in automatic power, Shakespearean personae in disguise nonetheless seem to preserve power and status relative to those around them—except in those plays that explicitly interrogate the grounds of power and authority. We might say that rank and its perquisites tend to be taken for granted as "natural" properties, securely possessed by those who inherit them, unless a play specifically scrutinizes the conditions (and conditionality) of power. We might say as well, however, that the plays represent rank as a system, constitutive of persons. Indeed, this survey of what happens when Shakespearean characters go into disguise suggests a range of discourses pertinent to early modern subjectivity. Bonds, reciprocal obligations, sexual positionings, dwelling-places, regional and paternal origins, hierarchies of comportment and deference, the distribution of power—all serve to define Shakespearean characters as represented persons.

Notes

¹The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), p. 98.

²Character here should be understood as under erasure—i.e., it is a word still in use though the totalized concept to which it purports to refer is no longer considered valid. Despite the distance between early modern uses of this word and our own, it remains the only readily available term we have for "a represented person in a play." To my ear, all my efforts to replace character in this discussion were distracting and tended to focus attention on the figure represented as personating rather than on the figure personated.

³ In suggesting this specialization for the term personate, I indicate as well my debt to J. Leeds Barroll, Artificial Persons: The Formation of Character in the Tragedies of Shakespeare (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1974). Also relevant is Amélie Oskenberg Rorty, "A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals," in the collection she edited, The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), pp. 301-23.

⁴ No doubt influenced by Muriel Bradbrook's important essay, "Shakespeare and the Use of Disguise in Elizabethan Drama," Essays in Criticism, 2 (1952), 159-68, most critics have defined disguise broadly to include all sorts of illusion and deception. I agree with Peter Hyland, however, that a narrower definition is more useful, an argument he makes in "Disguise and Renaissance Tragedy," University of Toronto Quarterly, 55 (1985/86), 161-71. Other important studies, broader and more thematic than mine, include Anthony B. Dawson, Indirections: Shakespeare and the Art of Illusion (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978), and Thomas F. Van Laan, Role Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978). Victor Oscar Freeburg's Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama: A Study in Stage Tradition (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1915) remains a helpful survey, especially for situating Shakespearean practices in the larger context of early modern drama.

⁵ At one time this particular exchange would have been relevant primarily to men; women were much more likely to be asked "Are you married?" Today this question about marital status would be considered rude in many circles, and a movie character who asked it would thereby be signalled as sexually predatory. This change in patterns of "casual conversation" signals social change in process.

⁶ All citations of Shakespeare refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

⁷ Jonathan Miller typifies the usual reading: "In contrast to Kate's rather graceful submission, the disagreeable behaviour of her sister Bianca becomes repugnant and you can then see that the real shrew is Bianca and not Katharina at all" (Subsequent Perfomances [London: Faber & Faber, 1986], p. 122).

⁸ The 1620 texts are reprinted in Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640, ed. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 264-89.

⁹ Henderson and McManus, eds., p. 283.

¹⁰ The author of Haec Vir draws so many examples from literature that it is not impossible that this description refers more explicitly to plays than to actual travel. Indeed, it seems to me thoroughly plausible that practices developed for drama's expository needs may have been taken as models for the very behavior Haec Vir's anonymous author finds peculiar.

¹¹ The distance between our "Where do you come from?" and that of early modern England can be high-lighted by imagining a typical conversation with one's airplane seatmate. For us "Where do you come from?" asks where one currently lives; questions about where one was born or who one's father is would be discomfiting—despite the obvious relevance of such matters to who we are.

¹² A recent instance appears in Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988): "Yet in Renaissance stories, paradoxically, the apparently fragile and mutable social codes are almost always reinscribed—despite his savage upbringing, the true prince reveals his noble nature" (p. 76).

¹³Impro: Improvisation in the Theatre (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1981), p. 63.

¹⁴ See Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1926). It should be noted that sumptuary laws regulating clothing had a long history in England; such laws were enacted at least as early as 1362. Still, the sheer number of acts and proclamations regulating clothing increased during the reign of Elizabeth. Baldwin offers three kinds of evidence for her view that sumptuary laws were largely unenforced: few records of their enforcement survive (pp. 54, 82, 86, 117, 167); numerous writers rail against extravagances in dress which effective enforcement would have prevented (pp. 34, 67, 166, 196, 204); the many acts and proclamations themselves decry laxity in the enforcement of their predecessors (pp. 141, 150, 164, 207, 214, 220-24). Sporadic efforts at enforcement are noted on pages 107, 113, 152, 167, 234, 237. For a helpful survey and bibliography of work on crossdressing, see Jean E. Howard, "Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England," Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 418-40. In Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), Marjorie Garber emphasizes Tudor sumptuary laws as symptoms of cultural anxiety (pp. 21-32).

¹⁵Attitudes Toward History (1937; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1961), p. 291.

¹⁶ In Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), Annabel Patterson stresses the self-censorship practiced by writers subject to official censorship.

¹⁷ Leeds Barroll presents evidence that after the performance of Richard II on the eve of the Essex Rebellion "not the play but the persons involved in the production—both players and those who commissioned the performance—were deemed dangerous because they were doing something they thought to be seditious" ("A New History for Shakespeare and His Time," SQ, 39 [1988], 441-64, esp. p. 454). The "taboo" I am discussing may have operated in a similar fashion.

¹⁸ For information about famine and hunger in Shakespeare's England, see Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 142-46.

¹⁹ While too many people today live in Sly-like poverty, playgoers and readers of Shakespeare are unlikely to be among them. Although Sly himself is described as never having seen a play, more people at the Globe than at Ashland or the Barbican would recognize or remember pangs of hunger and the itchy discomfort of straw bedding.

²⁰ Cited from excerpts given in the Oxford edition of Taming of the Shrew, H. J. Oliver, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 235.

²¹ A recent account of John Shakespeare's rise and fall can be found in Russell Fraser, Young Shakespeare (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 42-49.

²² For example, Keith Wrightson cites B. G. Blackwood's research on Lancashire, where of the 763 families identifiable as gentry in 1600, 278 had suffered serious economic and social decline by 1642 (p. 27). Similarly, Andrew Gurr notes that "In the wealthiest companies, such as the goldsmiths, nearly a third of apprentices were the sons of gentlemen. Gold was the principal alchemy for converting citizenry into gentry. Lack of it, for younger sons, worked the opposite way" (Playgoing in Shakespeare's London [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987], p. 52).