Lesser Included Offenses FALSELY
PERSONATING AN OFFICER--843.08 CATEGORY ONE CATEGORY TWO FLA.
at the end of which--a little figure
personating Fame with the trumpet--will descend and place the wreath of immortality on his head, at which moment four representatives of Europe, Asia, Africa and America with Banners inscribed will group around him, forming a beautiful allegorical Tableau.
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).
The loathsome sight of men of [sic]
personating characters which do not and cannot belong to them."(13) By contrast, the introspective poet believed himself equal to representing the violent passions of the (as we shall see) highly theatrical Cenci family.
A similar "miracle" took place during Anne's entry into Edinburgh in May 1590, in which historical figures "
personating all the previous kings of Scotland" awaken at the royal couple's approach (Bergeron, 69).
In this framework of forces, the
personating actors and the audience commune in a joint experiential, visceral moment that is exemplified by violent death through "killing, hewing, stabbing, dagger-drawing, fighting, butchery."
(44) 'There is a minuteness of observation that qualifies him abundantly for the
personating the lower orders of men'.
It provides that falsely
personating an officer of the Department of Financial Services is a third-degree felony.
The term's appearance in this 1605 letter also precedes the livret or printed brochure for the Ballet de Monseigneur le duc de Vandosme (Paris, 1610) which references entrechats performed as part of an exuberant, antic set of figured dances by eight skilled dwarfs
personating servants to the sorceress Alcine: 'Ils etoient tous petits et choisis pour les plus dispos hommes de la Cour, et faisoient (presque toujours a saults, capriolles, et entrichats) les figures biens marquees'.
(41) Susan Baker, "
Personating Persons: Rethinking Shakespearean Disguises" Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 307.
The actors were certainly working from a text, which Sir Henry Herbert had presumably passed for performance; he was to be questioned about it, as was 'the [unnamed] poet who made the play.' The fragments quoted in the enquiry documents include some dialogue: whereas one of the speakers is identified as 'one
personating a justice of the peace' his interlocutor is simply called 'Cain,' as if actor and character were one.
Personating himself as the great Latin poet Horace, Jonson administers to these two hacks what he regards as a well-deserved comeuppance (5.3.213-565).
