ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about problems related to removing a disguise, in considering some of the practical problems of putting a character into disguise, but there are issues here. In most disguise plays one would expect the removal of the disguise to be an important theatrical moment. In some plays, especially romantic comedies and certain kinds of tragicomedy, the audience's sympathies have been deeply engaged with the disguised character, and so the revelation gives both aesthetic and emotional satisfaction, as it does in the case of Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and of Innogen in Cymbeline. One of the most spectacular and sympathetically pleasing scenes of revelation in any of the plays of the period comes in As You Like It. Most commonly the revelation was engineered in some uncomplicated manner, and for disguised girls the discovery of long hair seems, in cases where any direction is given at all, to have been the conventional way.
