In "Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage, " Cynthia Lowenthal explores identityespecially masculinity and femininity, English and foreign, middle-class and aristocraticas it is enacted, idealized, deployed, and redefined on the late-seventeenth-century British stage. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways the theatre contributed to new and often shifting early modern definitions of the boundaries of nation, status, and gender.The first portion of the book focuses on the playwrights presentations of idealized men and the comic ridicule of male bodies and behaviors that fall short...