ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Freeburg's definition of disguise as 'a change in personal appearance' some ways in which disguising might have been staged. It considers the demands on the boy actor who played Aurelia in Middleton's More Dissemblers besides Women. In the opening scene Aurelia approaches her current lover Lactantio dressed as a gentlewoman. Disguise and doubling were closely related, because both provided the player with the opportunity to expand and vary his performance, thereby exhibiting his versatility. The problem of having a noble character disguise himself as someone lower on the social scale seems to have been particularly worrying for Elizabethan dramatists. In The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green by Chettle and Day there is a strange mixture of tensions about social identity. The play is set in the reign of Henry VI, and its opening act presents historical characters whose actions have no historical basis: Gloucester and Beaufort are rivals for Eleanor.
