ABSTRACT
The art of theater often involves making the foreign or something other than the self appear to be natural or proper to the performed self.1 Who is to say, speaking with some cultural specificity, whether the pretense for a male actor of performing a female role required a wider leap of imagination and embodiment than the pretense of a commoner playing a king? How much more difficult or easy, then, might it have been to perform seriously and as oneself the role of a foreigner? This question gives us a useful opening for considering a central feature of the history of emotion as we find it performed in early modern drama: that the emotional characteristics of the self are performed and represented through the translation or importing of the foreign, so that in the psyche-of the text, of the actor, and of the audience-the local and the private intersect provocatively and emotionally with the foreign and the transnational.2
