ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how disguise might have performed on the early English stage, by concerned primarily with the kinds of issue that are involved. Theatre is a form of communication and it is insufficient to know how a message might have sent. The chapter discusses how it might have received, and so how an early modern audience would have responded to the theatrical staging of disguise. At first sight the question of audience response might appear to be hardly worth considering; Elizabethans flocked to the playhouses and a large number of plays featured disguise, so disguise could hardly have found generally offensive. The chapter considers the term 'ideologies' to refer to the received ways of thinking by which the dominant institutions in a society control the general understanding of what is legitimate, so that current structures and practices in a society are believed to be natural and true.
