In Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage, Peter Hyland delivers something truly impressive: a broad survey of thematic ideas and practical issues related to theatrical disguise. He covers the technical aspects of putting on and removing a disguise, the different effects disguise had when worn by boys or men, the various means of revelation, its use in disparate genres, as well as some theoretical and metadramatic implications. And he presents all this through multiple readings of an astonishing number of stage plays, many of them typically overlooked or just outright obscure. In the end, he overwhelms us with his sense of the importance and complexity of the motif of disguise.

But there is a drawback to Hyland’s approach. Early on he distinguishes his study from other treatments by declining to peer through disguise to examine the culture beyond or to limit himself to one type or use of disguise. His object is to hold disguise itself in view, to make claims about how disguise might have functioned and what its effects on an audience might have been. He organizes his book around a series of concerns, and in exploring each he addresses any number of plays, arranging and rearranging them to approach the issues from as many angles as possible. John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, for instance, turns up in discussion of disguise in different genres, the impact of boy players in disguise, revelation scenes, and the use of disguise to foreground theatrical illusion. Each set of comments is brief, and is preceded and followed by succinct readings of other plays. The result is sometimes frustrating, as Hyland steers onto a promising avenue of inquiry only to turn off before he can fully map out the neighborhood. I was left with questions about how disguise connected to other elements in a particular play, and to what extent it acted in concert with or against a given drama’s thematic or ideological currents.

The book’s early chapters survey disguise in a broad variety of plays — Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline; boy and adult company productions; comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, and history. Hyland is particularly attuned to a play company’s willingness to showcase its prominent actors’ versatility and inventiveness in plays involving multiple disguises. He also calls attention to the mechanics of disguise as they are represented in dialogue. Such speech might describe why and how a character intends to adopt an alternate identity, clearing up any audience confusion, and further advertise the challenges of a particular disguise. Hyland regularly reminds us of the primacy of performance: for a live audience the disguise produced a felt experience of doubleness only imperfectly suggested in the text. He points to play dialogue that hints at the greater complexity of the spectacle, as when Twelfth Night’s Orsino playfully marks the femininity evident beneath Cesario’s getup. But one might just as well conclude that Orsino notices such characteristics to make plain to an audience what otherwise might not be clear in performance (to say nothing of the less technical but ultimately more significant purpose of making normative his growing attraction to, and eventual wedding of, his “boy”). Indeed, in his insistence on the theatrical effects of disguise and its technical challenges, Hyland occasionally gives short shrift to less material but more searching readings. Examining the end of Twelfth Night, for instance, Hyland considers the inability of anyone to return Viola to her original identity to be more or less a technical problem — there was simply insufficient time so close to the end of the play for the actor to shift costume. Leaving aside the lack of confidence in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, the explanation is wholly unsatisfying, not because it isn’t true but because even if it is it ignores the extent to which the difficulty and risk of abandoning roles is thematized throughout the play.

In a lively chapter on disguise as “metatheatre,” Hyland discusses the ways various on-stage adoptions of and comment on disguise point to the complexity of the underlying stagecraft. His position isn’t so much a rebuttal of performance theory, concerned as it is with the constructedness of human experience, as a kind of complementary perspective: an appreciation of the dramatic artistry here helps us see the boys and men involved challenging and raising audience expectations. At the same time, as Hyland shows in his treatment of “disguised duke” plays, the technicalities and blatant theatricality involved in adopting disguise on stage lays bare to an audience its susceptibility to manipulation. And Hyland helpfully follows his discussion of the nuances of theatrical self-reflexivity with a brisk though thorough exploration of an early modern spectator’s likely ambivalence toward the act of conscious disguising. Finally, he concludes with a chapter on what was seemingly the most salient cultural concern over disguise, the suggestion that personal identity was unstable.

The book ultimately provides a starting point for investigation of disguise in virtually any early modern play. In his brief though multiple accounts, Hyland is unlikely to offer the last word on any of these dramas, but in his comprehensive framing of the issues, and in his widening of the focus on disguise to include the technical aspects of putting performers young and old, well-known and obscure (if uniformly male), in adopted identities, he persuades that there are important aspects of disguise yet to be revealed.