ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book indicates how difficult it is for to understand an element of early modern playing that was almost entirely a matter of spectacle. For early modern English playgoers the word 'play' meant what it chiefly means today: a generally relaxed diversion from the serious business of everyday life or as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, 'exercise or action by way of recreation; amusement, diversion, sport, frolic'. After all, what an actor does is dress up and pretends to be someone else, one of the most basic forms of human play. Modern performances of transvestite disguise roles are almost inevitably misleading if we think of them as a replication of what the original audience might have seen. A very large proportion of extant plays include roles that employ disguise, and unfortunately the majority of them are now never performed.
