"Disguise is the most common artifice, not merely of comedy, but of the Drama generally" (D.J Snider - click here for link). We're all familiar with it. The use of disguise for dramatic effect. And it is particularly common in Comedy, for various reasons. with disguise, you get confusion, mistaken identities, and with these, you get laughter. On the Elizabethan stage, playwrights frequently included disguise, or deception, in their comedies, using it as a comedic device.
One of the most obvious and memorable examples of disguise used in Early Modern Comedy is that of Twelfth Night. Viola, shipwrecked and grieving, disguises herself as Cesario, a eunuch, in order to become a servant to the Lord Orsino ("Conceal me what I am, and be my aid/For such disguise as haply shall become/The form of my intent", I.ii). This disguise leads to more confusion and more mistaken identities than any other play I have ever seen, studied, or performed. Viola is believed to be a man (Shakespearen transvestite comedy in its purest form), Olivia falls in love with Cesario believing him to be male, Sebastian is mistaken for Cesario (and therefore his sister) and ends up marrying Olivia, Viola is mistaken for Sebastian, and everyone is thoroughly confused until the end of the plot when it is revealed that Sebastian is alive and well and Cesario is actually a girl. Phew.
But this is not the only example of disguise in the play. Olivia's steward, Malvolio, dresses in crossed garters and yellow stockings in the hope of winning the fair Olivia's heart, and Feste, the clown, disguises himself as a priest, Sir Topas, in order to fool Malvolio. This itself is an interesting deception. Although it is dark, meaning that Malvolio will not be able to see him, Feste still dons the costume of a priest, portraying the importance of clothing in identity. Feste uses the costume to concrete his new "identity", playing on the idea that by putting on different clothes, you can change your personal identity. To a varied audience of all classes, this would have been laughable for everyone. The thought that by dressing in a nobleman's clothes, you can become a nobleman? The very idea! Anyway, you see what I mean.
Malvolio's change of dress is not so much a disguise, but it does represent a change of identity. Malvolio dons his new clothes in the hope of appearing as a nobleman, much like Feste dresses differently to impersonate a nobleman. Ultimately, Malvolio's attempts fail (quite drastically), and his attempts to use disguise for personal gain end in his humiliation and failure.
This use of disguise for personal gain is a theme portrayed in similar ways in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, however disguise is used more subtly than in Twelfth Night. The Fair causes almost every character to assume a false identity, as the vulgarity and Carnivalesque nature of the Fair have bizarre effects on the Londoners. As Katharine Eisaman Maus writes, "[t]he Londoners assume they will experience the fair as tourists, from an emotional distance. But the shabby booths and dusty performance spaces have unexpectedly transformative effects on the visitors." (English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. D. Bevington. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. p.961). The visitors to the fair all experience some form of identity change, using the fair itself as a disguise.
The most interesting disguise in the play is that of Justice Adam Overdo, who adopts a disguise in order to seek out wrong-doings at the fair. This, like Malvolio's disguise in Twelfth Night, ultimately fails, and the Judge gets accused of theft, put in the stocks, and publically humiliated, shown to be as false as everyone else at the Fair. Overdo's disguise begins, as with most other disguises, with the costume ("They may have seen many a fool in the habit of a justice, but never till now a justice in the habit of a fool"), but, rather than this being the ultimate identity-altering factor, it is only when he is treated as a fool that he truly becomes one (what's here? A stoic in the stocks? The fool is turned philosopher"). Here Overdo's disguise is transformed from deceptive disguise to true identity, almost like his first identity as a Judge has diasppeared.
Disguise is used to hilarious effect in both these plays, in slightly different ways. But in both to portray the transient nature of identity: it is possible to transform oneself almost completely by assuming the costume and role of another person. Just, incidentally, as the actors themselves do on the stage.
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