DescriptionImitating Difference studies theatrical aesthetics as they intersect with personhood and identity. It examines the ethical stakes of formal theatrical technologies by looking at the role of imitation in English popular culture. Studies have examined popular culture in relation to the commercial drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but little attention has been paid to the equally popular forms of puppetry, clowning, and animal performance that rivalled and outlasted it. As emblems of popular culture writ large, these forms illustrate how popular culture, imitation, and marginalized identities share a socially subordinate position in early modern rhetoric. As the project unfolds, liturgical puppets of Christ that bleed wine confuse imitation and idolatry in reformist attacks on religious difference. Liminal performers—puppet theater Interpreters in Ben Jonson and clowns in Shakespeare—demonstrate how imitation is a hierarchizing process that enforces social difference. As clown actors like Robert Armin appropriate disabled bodies and animal performers emblematize bodily difference, they reveal the stakes of slippage between “speaking as” and “speaking for” as central to popular entertainment. As I consider how representational technologies encode power structures, I aim to both widen our definition of Renaissance theatricality and examine the cultural stakes of imitation in everyday life.