Incognitos: Shakespeare’s Uses of Disguise in the Light of New Historicism and Its Legacy

The dissertation focuses on the interpretative significance of the convention of disguise in Shakespeare’s plays viewed against a wider cultural background of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. The analysis foregrounds the construction of stage disguise as a combination of controlled discourse and sartorial device, a powerful distortion of reality with multiple psychological, social, and political implications. The basic methodological framework derives from New Historicism, and revisits the seminal concept of renaissance self-fashioning by Stephen Greenblatt (1980), both elaborated and reshaped by Shakespeare criticism emergent in the following decades. The study consists in the analyses of Shakespeare’s characters in disguise, viewed as self-fashioning individuals whose masking strategies testify to a pre-existent identity crisis, a truly incognito condition, propelled by anxiety, political reasons, or societal pressure. The necessary employment of borrowed discourse(s) serves to suppress identity but it nevertheless proves revealing as regards the character’s inner motives and dispositions. In this sense the convention of disguise becomes a unique testing ground for the construction of the models of early modern subjectivity, and a fascinating feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic style.