ABSTRACT
The uses of incognito are many and various. There seems to be no limit, indeed, to the number of purposes for which it may be adopted by characters in stories — stories such as Measure for Measure or Fidelio, Reggie Perrins or Some Like It Hot, Rumpelstiltskin or The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington. One very obvious and common purpose is to conceal oneself from one’s enemies, as in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, where Arcite risks his neck for love by returning to Athens transfigured by love-sickness and disguised as a poor labourer. A study of the forms and purposes of incognito, even if it were confined to medieval chivalric romance, would be a large undertaking. The story of Ipomadon was devised, it would appear, by the Anglo-Norman poet Hugh of Rhuddlan and treated at length in his romance Ipomadon, written shortly after the year 1180.
