In lesser roles, Amy Roselle
personated Macduff to her brother's Macbeth (1864) and Fanny Lupino played Arthur in King John (1875).
While playwrights condemn "mimick action," Thomas Heywood famously praises an actor for personating "as though he were the man
personated" (Chambers 4: 251); the revelatory "as though" points up the fundamentally imitative habit of "playing a part to the life." In A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (written 1625, published 15 years later), Edward Reynolds likens men who know their desires to be base but cannot control them to "the Stage-Player, whose Knowledge is expresse and cleare enough, but the things which it is conversant about, are not personall and particular to those men, but belonging unto others, whom they personate" (71).
But whereas Criticus, despite his name, is fully integrated into the dramatic world of the play on which he is a commentator, Asper and Cordatus offer a shadowier sort of
personated gloss, working like their namesakes in the margins of Terence's legacy.
If, for instance, the boy-actor who
personated Mamilius in The Winter's Tale returned as Leontes' lost daughter Perdita later in the play, Leontes' "What might I have been,/Might I a son and daughter now have looked on,/Such goodly things as you!" (5.1.176-78) would have underscored an ironic poignancy for the audience, as the dead son and living daughter faced the morally-chastened father in the figure of one person, thereby making the play's ending perhaps more "palatable" (118-19).
In count three, the two Adelekes were accused of acting in concert, and '
personated as students of Ojo-Aro Community Grammar School when you fraudulently registered as students of the school in the June/July 2017 NECO.'
(15) On distinctions between these terms, see Bernard Beckerman, 'The Persons
Personated: Character Lists in English Renaissance Play Texts', Koshi Nakanori and Yasuo Tamaizumi (eds), Poetry and Drama in the English Renaissance: In Honour of Professor Jiro Ozu (Tokyo, 1980), 61-9; see also Taylor, 'Order of the Persons', 63-5.
Or, acknowledging that Elizabeth
personated on stage is a creation of Jonson, Jonson melds his authority into that of the monarch.
(32) The records clearly reveal that Chapman composed a drama in which real people were pointedly
personated, and that he did so within two years of the first staging of Sir Giles, though for a different company.
Labour backbencher Joe Clifford said; "If I had been elected by a
personated vote, I'd be concerned enough about that to resign my seat and fight a by-election."
Its three-pronged investigation considers the challenges facing the boy actor, who had to deal with the threat of a "cracked" or "squeaking" voice as he
personated women on the early modern stage (chapter 1); Shakespeare's representations of the powers of women to exercise agency through the wielding of breath (chapter 2); and the representation of women as auditors in late Shakespeare (chapter 3).
After explaining that the situation "remained doubtful" he continues, "And therefore, we
personated old Faringdon, not Fitz-Alwine, as the booke yet may be seene, to cut off all such contentious questions" (78-80).
Othello, almost the master-work of the mastermind--a part, the study of which occupied, perhaps, years of the life of the elegant and classical Kemble; a part, which the fire and genius of Kean have, of late years, made his exclusive property; a part, which it has been considered a sort of theatrical treason for any one less distinguished than these two variously but highly gifted individuals to attempt; and this is to be
personated in an English national theatre, by one whose pretensions rest upon the two grounds of his face being of a natural instead of an acquired tint, and of his having lived as a servant to a low-comedy actor.
