In recent years criticism that uses a theory of the persona to analyze eighteenth-century texts has been attacked, defended, and chronicled, and refuses to enter geriatric decline. Briefly, the theory holds that literature, particularly eighteenth-century satire, should not be read as an expression of the real author's real values. The work's main speaker, like its other actors, is assigned a mask or persona in a dramatic fiction whose players may believe something other than the words uttered through their masks. Indeed, the author's own beliefs are irrelevant in any case, since, for example, “Pope” as rhetorician and poet not Pope as man speaks to us. Other critics have challenged this view. They argue that masking is not peculiar to literature, that the author expects us to see through any disguise he might assume, that he appeals to verifiable historical data in his attack upon known enemies in public life, and that the work indicates, even if indirectly, what the author actually believes. Practically speaking, there is no intermediary or mask between us and the real author.

Two dominant schools have developed in response to this debate: discussion of a work from one point of view, and combining of each. So far, however, the argument remains at the level of competing modern hypotheses without an historical anchor. We need to ask whether the concept of the persona actually was known and used during the eighteenth century.