In this pacily written, highly individual work, Hyland insists on the differences, both in intent and performance, between physical disguise – substituting one persona for another in order to deceive – and other types of temporary concealment of oneself – perhaps the self-conscious mantle of honesty assumed by Iago or the madness feigned by Hamlet (though Hyland does not use these specific characters to emphasize his point). Hyland limits his discussion to the theatricality involved in changing one's physical appearance, and he attempts to discover how an audience might react to the disguise device and to its widespread use, particularly in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century theatre. Disguise is something the audience witnesses and Hyland emphasizes the physicality of disguise by affirming that the spectator will depend on ‘visual signals provided by a change in costume, perhaps supported by changes in posture and gesture by the actor’ (p. 30). Disguise, he argues, involved either minor changes to appearance and performance or more elaborate changes of costume and make-up, movement, and voice. Hyland demonstrates a keen sense of the practicalities of disguising, suggesting that changes were often achieved simply, especially at a time when formal clothing was elaborate and the interval between donning a disguise and reappearing on stage might be very short. Hence the transformation from boy to woman may at times have been managed by doing no more than removing a cap and loosening the hair.

He acknowledges that the extent of the changes to appearance and the response to visual (and aural) signals is difficult to gauge because playtexts on which we mostly depend to indicate the early modern audience's exposure to disguise mostly provide the barest of clues, even offering such scant indications as ‘Enter xxx disguised’. He contends, moreover, that the device of the ‘girl page’ or transvestite disguise should not be discussed solely in terms of the sexual politics of performance, or ambushed by feminist or queer theory, but rather needs to be seen in the context of wider concerns about identity and representation. Hyland pays attention to the many uses of disguise in various theatrical genres and his argument is particularly persuasive when he shows a historical character taking on a disguise, for the sake of a particular play's plot, and becoming thereby ‘a figure of theatre rather than of history’ (p. 82). Hyland's contention is that we can treat an apparent ‘history’ play, to which a fictional layer of disguises added, seriously ‘as a play of which the primary concerns are theatrical’ (p. 83).

The book consistently argues that physical disguise goes beyond being a simple stage device; it has a metatheatrical heft and disguise often demonstrates anxiety about the loss of one's own identity in assuming a different persona (he is particularly persuasive in his examination of the possible loss of one's own sense of self when disguised, using Vindice in The Revenger's Tragedy, and other characters such as Christopher Sly and Albano in Marston's What You Will to bolster his argument (pp. 132–40)).

Throughout the text Hyland treats seriously the play aspect of playing and persuasively summarizes that we ‘need to pay the same kind of attention to theatrical elements as we pay to literary elements’ (p. 151). This work will appeal to a variety of readers, but especially to theatre practitioners as well as to scholars in the field of performance studies.