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 hmited 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 Chekov transformed it. Those implications of selfdeception and fantasy which are the stuff of A Doll's House and The Cherry Orchard lurk in a masquerade dress, or a few conjuring tricks at a ball. Yet even in its revival, disguise has not attained the manifold significance which it enjoyed in the Elizabethan theatre and which Shakespeare alone fully revealed. A study of the subject was provided by V. O. Freeburg as long ago as 1915 and has not been superseded (Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama, Columbia University Press, New York). Dr. Freeburg's conception of disguise belongs, however, to the nineteenth century: 'Dramatic disguise . . . means a change of personal appearance which leads to mistaken identity. There is a double test, change and confusion'. He eliminates the mere confusion of The Comedy of Errors and the substitution of Mariana for Isabella in Measure for Measure, where, as in the similar situation of All's Well, Shakespeare himself actually uses the word:
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