Peter Thomson (1997), 'Rogues and Rhetoricians: Acting Styles in Early English Drama', in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 321-35.

IN THE SURPRISING second scene of Twelfth Night, the shipwrecked Viola turns for help to the Sea Captain who has brought her safely to Illyria:

I will believe thou hast a mind that suits With this thy fair and outward character. (1.2-46-47)

A twentieth-century auditor, hearing "outward character," will experience briefly a sense of disjunction, even of oxymoron. Character is inward, a property of the psyche. There would have been no such sense of disjunction in an Elizabethan audience. The word character was most immediately associated with the formation of! etters in writing or printing. The character is the visible symbol of a sound. It is something already formed. It may, of course, be subsequently deleted, but it is not plastic. It cannot transform itself, or be transformed, into another character, although, if it is badly formed, it may be confused with another character and so impede the clear reading of the text. In addition, the clearly readable character may be part of a lie, as Viola is aware. She prefaces her declaration of trust with the cautionary reminder that "nature with a beauteous wall I Doth oft close in pollution." But the character itself is initially neutral. It takes color only from its context in the word.