For poets like Sir Philip Sidney, the numerous incongruities found in Elizabethan drama fly in the face of Aristotelian theory. London audiences in 1580-1600 would have been hard pressed to recognize the time and place of the action represented on stage from one scene to the next. By comparing Greek theory and Elizabethan practice, this paper highlights the epistemological and hermeneutic issues posed by “recognition scenes”. In so doing, it also underlines the differences between plays and genres from 1580 to 1620 in England, as recognition scenes in The Spanish Tragedy or Richard III differ from those found in The Tempest or The Winter’s Tale… Using Stanley Cavell’s treatment of the notion of acknowledgment in Shakespeare’s plays, this paper finally discusses the interplay between knowledge, acknowledgment, disowning and confession in recognition scenes.