Chapter 4 - Personal Identity, Impersonation, and Charles Mathews

Summary

Throughout the 1820s, actor Charles Mathews performed popular evenings of character impersonations that he called “At Homes.” Exemplifying the fascination with personal identity, Mathews’s performances show how the identity of individuals and character-types could be made both recognizable and reproducible through the iteration of markers such as facial expression, accessories, voice, accent, and tag lines. His identity-bending performances are typical of their age in the way they reproduce philosophical ideas about personal identity derived from the Enlightenment in an embodied and experiential form that highlights the performative and commodified nature of identity. Mathews structured his performances around his own stabilizing personality as host and narrator and, in later years, modelled them on the print genre of the literary annual. Nevertheless, he also practised impersonations beyond the stage in private life. The proliferating identities he created on and off the stage were so credible as to make eyewitnesses believe he actually became the people he personified and thus to raise disturbing questions about the stability of identity.