ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the unfamiliarity of a body of texts that had their origins in a theatrical culture that is distant from people's own. Disguise devices were far more popular in plays of the early modern period than at any time since, and the reasons for this are located in the particular theatrical and social conditions of the age. There were continuities between the private playhouses of the early modern period and the theatres that emerged with the Restoration of Charles II, and, indeed, the need for material meant there were many revivals of Tudor and Stuart plays after 1660. New plays sometimes staged disguises, and disguises have occasionally been used in plays in most periods since then, but there has never again been the widespread enthusiasm for them that flourished on the early modern stage. A clue as to why is perhaps provided by a twentieth-century English play.
