Disguise and Renaissance Tragedy

PETER HYLAND Disguise and Renaissance Tragedy I want to begin with a definition and a distinction, in order to avoid confusions that have arisen in much of the earlier writing on the subject of disguise on the Elizabethan stage. In 1915, Victor O. Freeburg, the author of what is still the only full-scale examination of disguise plots in Elizabethan plays, wrote this: 'Dramatic disguise ... means a change of personal appearance which leads to mistaken identity. There is a double test, change and confusion." In an essay which has had rather more influence than Freeburg's book, Muriel Bradbrook took issue with this, offering what is, on the face of it, a rather more subtle definition: 'I should prefer to define disguise as the substitution, overlaying or metamorphosis of dramatic identity, whereby one character sustains two roles. This may involve deliberate or involuntary masquerade, mistaken or concealed identity, madness or possession." I feel, however, that Bradbrook's definition blurs an important distinction, and contains such a degree of elasticity that it threatens to become meaningless. She allows, for example, the feigned madness of Hamlet and the real madness of Lear to be called 'disguise' - thereby, surely, falsifying the specific meaning of the word. I should like to draw a distinction between 'disguise' as a theatrical event, that is the physical changing of appearance, and the related but different act of 'role-playing,' which includes such performances as Hamlet's feigned madness and the hyocrisies of Angelo and lago, but does not involve a change in appearance. My reason for this is that if we accept Bradbrook's extension of the meaning of 'disguise,' we have a concept that can be applied to virtually any character in Elizabethan drama. That this is so is demonstrated by a recent book by T. Van Laan, Role-playing in Shakespeare, which treats physical disguise as merely one of many forms of role-playing, and goes on to define role-playing in such a way as to involve virtually every Shakespearean character, major or minor - that is, he means by role-playing what Bradbrook means by disguise.3 He deprives physical disguise of any meaning different from that inherent in role-playing - and indeed for him role-playing can even mean self-deception, an imposture of which the character himself is unaware. But there is a difference, if only from the theatrical point of view, between a deception that involves a change in appearance and one UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLU ME 55, NUMBER 2, W[NTER 19851 6 162 PETER HYLAND that does not, and so I should like to return to Freeburg's more limited definition of disguise; while I shall wish also to speak of role-playing, I want the distinction kept in mind. I have been insistent on this distinction at some length because another influential work of Bradbrook's has contributed to a mistaken belief about the dramatic use of disguise. In her study of the conventions of Renaissance tragedy, Bradbrook wrote: 'Disguise was so popular in both comedy and tragedy that there are very few plays without at least one instance of it.'4 Now in this case it is clear that Bradbrook is using 'disguise' in the sense that I myself have insisted upon, referring to an actual physical change, and her assertion that such disguise was as frequently a part of tragedy as of comedy has not been challenged. More recently, Manfred Draudt has written of 'the extensive use of disguise, which is typical of both the Jacobean tragic and comic plot' (p 207), adding to Bradbrook's claim that disguise is frequently used in tragedy the implication that it is frequently used extensively within individual plays' An examination of the situation suggests otherwise, however, and invites the conclusion that, although disguise was occasionally used in tragedy, its use was usually confined to special areas, as it was considered to be primarily a comic device. If we apply this literal definition of disguise to the two hundred or so Renaissance plays Freeburg lists in his book as containing disguisedevices , we find that fewer than twenty are tragedies. Although his list is by no means exhaustive (he omits...