Salma Parvin Suma*
Abstract: One of the greatest literary icons, William Shakespeare, is the author of different dramatic means and methods which prove his writings as literary legends. Disguise became a common and powerful term in most of his plays among those means and methods. He uses it very often to change themes, develop plot, hide identity, face reality, and sometimes to enhance the comic ambiguity. His disguised characters make differences between outer appearance and inner reality, which sometimes create misperceptions of deception. Nevertheless, he successfully presented follies, trivialities, and restrictions of the Elizabethan society through the artistic beauty of disguise. This paper exposed a theoretical and conceptual investigation of some profound disguised characters from Shakespeare’s selected plays to reveal truth through their disguise. To elaborate the thought, I have used Dusinberre’s (1996) ideology on disguised women in the argument of Howard (1993). Thus, the paper found the motif of Shakespeare’s characters using disguise and exploring his stylistic beauty in this regard.
Keywords: Shakespeare, disguise, deception, appearance, reality
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