ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the cultural anxiety about the nature of identity and its relation to playing, informs much of the content of early modern plays. It considers the ways in which the employment of disguise devices in plays reflected and circulated concepts of selfhood or identity. As Bruce Wilshire points out in his book Role Playing and Identity: In normal theatre people are confronted with manifest fictions: actors who are not princes, rubber knives that cannot cut, etc. The obviousness of this can lure people into the mistake of attributing the theatre event exclusively to the fictional things there onstage. People's encounter with experimental theatre reminds them that the 'world' of the play requires the participation of the interpreting viewers and auditors-as well as the artists-and that these persons are located in a theatre standing in the real world. The 'world' of the play must be nested in the world in complex ways before the event of theatre can occur.
