Guise and disguise: Rhetoric and characterization in the Renaissance

Disguise is a recurring motif in many Renaissance texts. Beneath its surface significance of deception, disguise raises notions of identity, motivation, and the construction of character. In so doing, Renaissance disguise reviews the traditional rhetorical concept of ethopoesis or "character-making," drawing out this notion's dialogic puzzle: Does character precede its making or is character always already being made? Does character represent an essentialist, Platonic form or is it a contingent, discursive function? Exemplifying the shift from a presentational to a representational conception of language that occurs through the sixteenth century, the rhetoric of disguise revises the traditional notion of "proper signification," where meaning and identity would ideally intersect. Through disguise Renaissance texts represent character as cultural process, mediated by rhetorical and dramatistic performance. Disguise discloses the social discourse through which Renaissance subjectivity is structured, especially in relation to political and sexual identity. These two types of identity were often ideally conceived at the origin of orthodox social discourses on politics and sexuality by works like James I's Basilicon Doron, Castiglione's The Courtier, and the religious writings of Calvin and Donne. The essentialist notions of selfhood in such texts are challenged by satirical, allegorical, and metonymic modes of characterization in other works. Shakespeare's history plays Richard II and Henry IV and John Marston's The Malcontent represent and interrogate the essentialist premises of the princely ethos. George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie and John Lyly's romance Campaspe depict an allegorical process of subjection, through which obedience can be realized and manipulated for the subject's benefit. Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique and Beaumont and Fletcher's play Philaster represent the means whereby an originary masculine ethos is metonymically supplemented by an androgynous rhetoric. These discursive challenges to a unitary selfhood are organized through strategies of disguise and character-making which reveal and challenge political and sexual motives underlying the discourse of the essentialist self. The Renaissance discourse of disguise unveils the rhetorical and dramatistic processes of selfhood, saying in effect, "I speak therefore I am not.".