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The Shakespearean fool is a recurring character type in the works of William Shakespeare.
Shakespearean fools are usually clever peasants or commoners that use their wits to outdo people of higher social standing. In this sense, they are very similar to the real fools, clowns, and jesters of the time, but their characteristics are greatly heightened for theatrical effect. They are largely heterogeneous. The “groundlings” (theater-goers that were too poor to pay for seats and thus stood in the front by the stage) that frequented the Globe Theater were most likely particularly drawn to these Shakespearian fools or clowns. However they were also favoured by the nobility. Most notably, Queen Elizabeth I was a great admirer of the popular clown, Richard Tarlton. For the Bard himself, however, actor Robert Armin may have proved vital to the cultivation of his fools.
The fool was not a new character on stage.Indeed, a tradition of had long prevailed in aristocratic courts. The jester, however, was a dynamic and changing part of royal entertainment. Shakespeare both borrowed from the new motif of the jester and contributed to its rethinking. Whereas the jester of old often regaled his audience with forms of clowning – tumbling, juggling, stumbling, and the like – Shakespeare’s fool, in sync with Shakespeare’s revolutionary ideas about theatre, began to depart from a simple way of representation. Like other characters, the fool began to speak outside of the narrow confines of exemplary morality, to address themes of love, psychic turmoil, and all of the innumerable themes that arise in Shakespeare, and indeed, modern theater.
Perhaps central to the Bard’s redrawing of the fool was the actor Robert Armin:
… Shakespeare created a whole series of domestic fools for . greatest roles, Touchstone in “As You Like It,”(1599), Feste in “Twelfth Night,”(1600), and (the) fool in “King Lear,”(1605); helped Shakespeare resolve the tension between thematic material and the traditional entertainment role of the fool. Armin became a counter-point to the themes of the play and the power relationships between the theatre and the role of the fool—he manipulates the extra dimension between play and reality to interact with the audience all the while using the themes of the play as his source material. Shakespeare began to write well-developed sub-plots expressly for Armin’s talents. A balance between the order of the play and the carnevalized inversion factor of festive energy was achieved. Armin was a major intellectual influence on Shakespeare’s fools. He was attuned to the intellectual tradition of the Renaissance fool yet intellectual enough to understand the power of the medieval tradition. Armin’s fool is a stage presence rather than a solo artist. His major skills were mime and mimicry; even his improvisational material had to be reworked and rehearsed. His greatest asset was as a foil to the other stage actors. Armin offered the audience an idiosyncratic response to the idiosyncrasies of each spectator.
Richard Tarlton (died September 1588), an English actor, was the most famous clown of his era.
His birthplace is unknown, but reports of over a century later give it as Condover in Shropshire, with a later move to Ilford in Essex. Firm information on his early life is scarce; traditions maintain that he started out as either a London apprentice, or a swineherd in Ealing, or a water-carrier; and, it is not impossible that he was all three. By 1583, when he is mentioned as one of the original members of the Queen’s Men, he was already an experienced actor.
He was an early yet extraordinary influence on Elizabethan clowns. His epitaph says: “he of clowns to learn still sought/ But now they learn of him they taught.” Tarlton was the first to study natural fools and simpletons to add knowledge to his characters. His manner of performance combined the styles of the medieval Vice, the professional minstrel, and the amateur Lord of Misrule. During the play, he took it upon himself to police hecklers by delivering a devastating rhyme when necessary. He would spend time after the play in a battle of wits with the audience. He worked with Queen Elizabeth’s Men at the Curtain Theatre at the beginning of their career in 1583. The 1600 publication Tarlton’s Jests tells how Tarlton, upon his retirement, recommended Robert Armin take his place.
He was Elizabeth’s favorite clown, and his talent for impromptu doggerel on subjects suggested by his audience has given his name to that form of verse. To cash in on his popularity, a great number of songs and witticisms of the day were attributed to him, and after his death the text Tarlton’s Jests, containing many jokes in fact older than he was, made several volumes. Other books, and several ballads, coupled his name with their titles. Some have suggested that the evocation of Yorick in Hamlet’s soliloquy was composed in memory of Tarlton.
In addition to his other talents, Tarlton was a fencing master. He wrote at least one play, The Seven Deadly Sins (1592); though it was enormously popular in its day, no copy has survived. Besides ballads and a play, Tarlton wrote several pamphlets starting in the 1570s, one of which was A True report of this earthquake in London (1580). These were apparently genuine, though after his death a variety of other works were attributed to him as well. Gabriel Harvey refers to him as early as 1579, indicating that Tarlton had already begun to acquire the reputation that rose into fame in later years. That fame transcended the social limits that judged players to be little more than rogues.
Tarlton, according to one source (one of Tarlton’s sons), gambled away the family’s entire fortune. Tarlton lived in Hanwell and is rumoured to be buried in the grounds of the Drayton Manor House, where he and his family lived. However, now it is a school named after Tarlton’s family called Drayton Manor High School.