the life, death and afterlife of richard tarlton

THE LIFE, DEATH AND AFTERLIFE OF

RICHARD TARLTON

by katherine duncan-jones

An examination of the career, performance practices and prolonged afterlife of the

clown Richard Tarlton (d. 1588) drawing on a variety of sources, both printed and

manuscript.(Tarlton’s career with the Queen’s Men, and in particular his likely

authorship of the ‘ballad of willie and peggie’, a tribute to his lately slain colleague

William Knell, is the subject of a previous article by the same writer: Katherine

Duncan-Jones, ‘MS Rawl. Poet. 185: Richard Tarlton and Edmund Spenser’s

‘Pleasant Willy’, The Bodleian Library Record, 20 (1–2) (April/October 2007),

76–101.) It concludes with a newly strengthened case for Shakespeare’s ‘Yorick’

as an allusion to dead Tarlton. Transcripts of two of the most significant documents

pertaining to Tarlton’s career are included as appendices.

Elizabethan fools deployed various skills: acting, dancing, singing, composing im-

promptu verses, quips and ripostes. Above all, they were celebrated for making

audiences laugh, sometimes provoking laughter that was so loud and prolonged

that it was hard to resume the play proper. An anecdote in Tarlton’s Jests, ‘How

Tarlton and one in the Gallerie fell out’, describes the buzz of excitement when:

. . . after long expectation for Tarlton, (being long expected of the people) he at length

came forth.1

Whether or not this anecdote is correct in its entirety, the phenomenon that it

reflects is well supported in the structural positioning of ‘clown’ scenes. If a grave

and substantial piece was to be performed—a tragedy or tragical history—its

dominant narratives needed to be securely established as the focus of audience

attention before some much-loved fool appeared on stage. In Hamlet—a play of

which more will be said in conclusion—the two Clowns don’t appear until Act 5

Scene 1. In Macbeth the single clown scene—that of the Porter—is placed after

that of the murder of Duncan. Some plays that appear to lack clown scenes may

have had them in performance in the form of comic afterpieces or ‘jigs’, of which

texts have not survived.2

In what follows, I re-examine both the career and the remarkably prolonged

afterlife of Richard Tarlton. I shall combine analysis of various accounts that may

1 Anon, Tarltons Jests (London, 1613), sig. B2v. No copies survive of the earliest, 1600,edition, with its then-topical allusion to Robert Armin currently performing at the newly-rected Globe Playhouse.

2 For a comprehensive study of the genre, see C.R. Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig andRelated Song Drama (Chicago, 1929).

The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 268� The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press 2013; all rights reserveddoi:10.1093/res/hgs145 Advance Access published on 13 June 2013

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or may not be reliable, such as ‘Tarlton . . . and one in the Gallerie’, with a fresh

examination of documentary records. A scrappy account of one of his solo per-

formances before the Queen survives in the National Archives, filed alongside

items that relate to the last day of Tarlton’s life. This account has often been

cited, but has been both mis-transcribed and misunderstood. On the basis of a full

and accurate transcript the performance to which it relates can now be precisely

dated and located. These notes provide an illuminating record of Tarlton’s per-

formance practices during his heyday as a court entertainer. Meanwhile, adjacent

items in the State Papers provide an almost hour-by-hour record of the last day of

Tarlton’s life.

Recovering laughter triggered by gesture, costume and movement, rather than

by words, may seem impossible. Why did audiences explode with laughter at the

mere sight of Richard Tarlton’s face suddenly peeping out from the tiring-house

or tapestry? Thomas Nashe, who knew him, is among those who testified to this

effect: ‘ . . . the people began exceedingly to laugh, when Tarlton first peept out his

head.’3 More than 30 years after Tarlton’s death this effect was commemorated yet

again in an epigram by Henry Peacham the Younger:

As Tarlton when his head was onely seene

The Tire-house doore and Tapistrie betweene,

Set all the multitude in such a laughter,

They could not hold for scarse an houre after4

Born in 1578, Peacham can have been no more than 9 or 10 if he personally

witnessed Tarlton’s head-peeping trick—as he may well have done.5 Though

we can’t see Tarlton’s stunt now, it is notable that the late Eric Morecambe is

remembered for prompting roars of laughter with versions of the same rather

simple device.

It is clear that some of Tarlton’s comic turns were much more complex. A stray

half-sheet of miscellaneous notes in the National Archives includes an account of

one such.6 Here, Tarlton appeared at the end of ‘a play of the Gods’ in which the

players impersonated classical deities. Tarlton entered costumed as the familiar

and friendly household god ‘Lar’, ‘with a flitch of bacon at his back’.7 Judging by

other, unconnected, items, the notes were penned at least 20 years after the

3 Thomas Nashe, Pierce Pennilesse (London, 1592), sig. D1v; in R. B. McKerrow ed.,Works of Thomas Nashe, rev. F. P. Wilson, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1966), 186.

4 Henry Peacham, Thalia’s Banquet (London, 1620), sig. C8r.

5 For evidence that Peacham was an active and attentive playgoer, see KatherineDuncan-Jones, Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan 1592-1623 (London, 2011),55–72.

6 NA SP 12/215, fol. 175 r.

7 Hitherto, this name has always been quoted (nonsensically) as ‘the god Luz’, since this ishow it appears in the inaccurate precis in the Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1581-90(London, 1865), 541.

LIFE, DEATH AND AFTERLIFE OF RICHARD TARLTON 19

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post-play foolery that they describe. Tarlton’s performance was, it seems, almost

too successful:

The Queene . . . bid them take away the knave for making her laugh so excessively for

togging8 against her litle dogge perrico de faldas with his sword and longstaffe [and] bid

the Queene take off her mastie (= mastiff)9

One can easily imagine the comic effect of witnessing Tarlton—a muscular,

broad-backed man—engaging in a mock duel with a small dog (‘perrico’), and

pretending to be out-mastered by him. The miniature spaniel’s Spanish name—

‘de faldas’, literally ‘of the skirt-folds’—must have added to the fun. Tarlton was

taking up arms—unsuccessfully— against one of the Queen of England’s foes.

The performance is described further by the note-maker. Tarlton capped a

verse reprimand delivered extempore by the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain,

Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, when the latter attempted to execute the

Queen’s command to ‘take away the knave’. To Sussex’s warning:

Tarlton, Tarlton though yow be so brave

I feare me you’l prove but a sawcie knave

Tarlton responded, still in character as the god Lar:

Oh Thomas Thomas with your white rod

Be not so sawcie to correct a God.

As he almost always did, Tarlton came out on top.

Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, had been appointed as Elizabeth’s Lord

Chamberlain in 1572. He was in failing health during 1582 and died in June

1583.10 Martin Wiggins has generously given me access to material from a forth-

coming volume of his magnificent 10-volume catalogue of British Drama

1533-1642, drawing my attention to a ‘play of the Gods’ written by William

Goldingham and performed before the Queen during Sussex’s

Chamberlainship.This performance took place ‘after supper’ towards the end of

Elizabeth’s six-day visit to Norwich in 1578. A text is included in Bernard Garter’s

printed account of The Joyfull Receyving of the Queenes most excellent Majestie into

hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich.11 After five days of civic junketings Thursday, 21

August, was the Queen’s rest day. She remained in her lodgings in the Bishop’s

8 OED tug v. 2 a. To contend, strive in opposition; cf. Mucedorus Epil. 28, ‘Let us tugge,till one the mastrie winne’. Now rare.

9 NA SP 12/215, fol. 175 r; for a full text, see Appendix 1; mastie: mastiff, a large fightingdog.

10 ODNB, Wallace T.MacCaffrey,‘Thomas Radcliffe, Third Earl of Sussex (1526/7-1583)lord lieutenant of Ireland and courtier’. This anecdote challenges McCaffrey’s claim thatthough ‘He patronized a company of players . . . [he] showed no interest in theirproductions’.

11 Bernard Garter, The Joyfull Receyving of the Queenes most excellent Majestie into hirHighnesse Citie of NORWICH: The things done in the time of her abode there: and the dolor ofthe Citie at hir departing (London, 1578), sigs. E1r-E3v.

20 KATHERINE DUNCAN-JONES

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Palace. A ‘Princely Maske’ was performed for her ‘after supper’ in the ‘privie

chamber’. The masque was ‘of Gods & Goddesses, both strangely and richly

apparelled’— a title well summed up in the note-maker’s phrase ‘ a play of the

Gods’. It required 10 performers: first Mercury, as prologue; then four pairs of

deities, Jupiter and Juno, Mars and Venus, Apollo and Pallas (Athena), Neptune

and Diana, and finally another singleton, Cupid, who handed his golden arrow to

Elizabeth to enable her to shoot ‘at King or Caesar’ should she see fit. The pres-

ence of numerous torch-bearers indicates that the entertainment took place after

dark. Following two stanzas of eulogy, deities presented the Queen with various

gifts, such as an embroidered purse; a set of small knives; a white dove—alive, but

very well behaved; a musical instrument ‘called a Bandonet’. If, as seems likely,

Tarlton’s homely ‘flitch of bacon’ was also a gift to the Queen, it was not the only

substantial food item, for Neptune’s gift was ‘a noble Pike’ ejected from the mouth

of ‘a great Artificiall Fishe’.12

Garter does not mention any post-masque foolery. But if this was the occasion

of Tarlton’s mock-battle with the Queen’s spaniel, it is unlikely to have formed

part of Master Goldingham’s script. Like many of his performances, it will have

been improvised, and no doubt also planned, by Tarlton himself. It belonged

broadly to the category of ‘jig’ mentioned above—post-play foolery that was es-

pecially popular with Elizabethan audiences. Perhaps it found its way into oral

tradition, to be recorded many years later by the unidentified note-writer; or

perhaps the note-taker himself witnessed it, and felt that it needed to be remem-

bered. According to Garter’s closing summary, the evening’s indoor entertainment

in Norwich left the monarch in excellent spirits: ‘this delightfull night passed, to

the joy of all which sawe her Grace in so pleasant plight’.

Tarlton was if possible even more celebrated in death than in life. His sudden

death, on 3 September 1588, left a yawning gap in English culture. The posthu-

mously published Tarltons Jests (entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1600, but

probably in circulation some years earlier) chronicles his exploits in three different

locations: at court, in the City of London, and in the country. Following Sussex’s

death in 1583, Tarlton’s company had been the Queen’s Men, of which he was the

most celebrated member, and the monarch herself was technically his patron. Sir

Francis Walsingham, to whom Tarlton was to turn for help on the last day of his

life, played a key role in this company’s formation. Since it was chiefly a touring

group, which travelled as far West as Plymouth and as far North as Edinburgh,13

Tarlton’s unique comic gifts had been encountered by people living hundreds of

miles from London. His death was felt as a loss to the whole nation, and continued

to resonate both on the page and on the stage for many years.

12 Ibid., sig. E3r.

13 For a useful analysis of the dates and places of company’s performances outside Londonand Westminster, see Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and theirPlays (Cambridge, 1998), 175–88.


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To surviving consumers and creators of comedy, an afterlife that housed that

irreplaceable comic genius Richard Tarlton sounded distinctly attractive. Their

response resembled that of the bibulous old soldier Bardolph to the death of Sir

John Falstaff: ‘Would I were with him, wheresome’re he is, either in heaven or in

hell.’14 Writers alluded to Tarlton as if he were not really dead at all, just hiding

behind the arras before peeping out in his accustomed manner. Thomas Nashe, for

instance, dedicated the anti-Marprelate tract An Almond for a Parrat (1590) jointly

to the living jester Will Kempe and to:

The soule of Dick Tarlton, who, I know, will entertaine it with thankes, imitating herein

that meryman Rablays, who dedicated most of his workes to the soule of the old Queen

of Navarre many yeares after her death.15

The notion that Tarlton was not dead, just temporarily out of reach, was de-

veloped further by other writers. Tarltons newes out of Purgatorie (1590), was

probably written by Tarlton’s chosen successor, Robert Armin (1563–1615).

The unnamed narrator has given up playgoing, because he is still

. . . sorrowing, as most men doe for the death of Richard Tarlton, in that his particular

losse was a generall lament to all that coveted, either to satisfie their eyes with his

Clownish gesture, or their eares with his witty jests.16

Wandering away from the city and its playhouses, the narrator falls asleep in

Hoxton, ‘by dame Anne of Cleves well’, beneath the shade of a tree, where the

highly recognizable figure of Tarlton appears to him in a dream:

attired in russet with a buttond cap on his head, a great bagge by his side, and a strong

bat in his hand.

Apart from being ‘pale and wan’, he looks just as Tarlton did when on stage. He

reassures the dreamer, frightened by what he takes to be a ghost, that:

I am but Dick Tarlton that could quaint it in the court, and clowne it on the stage: that

had a quart of wine for my friend, and a sword for my foe: who hurt none being alive,

and will not prejudice any being dead: for although thou see me here in the likenes of a

spirite, yet think mee to be one of those Familiares Lares, that were rather pleasantly

disposed then indued with any hatefull influence, as Hob thrust, Robin

Goodfellow . . . famozed in everie good wives Chronicle for their mad merry pranckes.17

Tarlton’s reassuring ‘news’ is that the suitably Reformed Purgatory where he now

resides is an institution firmly opposed to Papal authority. It is a place of enter-

tainment, strongly reminiscent of indoor venues in which Tarlton himself had

performed when alive. We may note also his self-identication as ‘one of those

Familiares Lares’, confirming the authenticity of the note-taker’s account of his

impersonation of ‘the god Lar’.

14 Shakespeare, Henry V, 2.3.7–8. 15 McKerrow (ed.), Works of Nashe, iii.341.

16 Anon., Tarltons newes out of Purgatorie (London, 1590), sig. B1r.

17 Ibid., sig. B1v.


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A decade later, some university graduates dreamed of finding congenial em-

ployment with the dead Tarlton, since none was forthcoming among the living. In

the Cambridge comedy The First Part of the Return from Parnassus (1599/1600)

the witty Ingenioso, closely modelled on Nashe, laments the collapse of literary

patronage:

O fustie worlde, were there any commendable passage to Styx and Acheron, I would goe

live with Tarleton, and never more bless this dull age with a good line.18

‘Going to Tarlton’ had become a catchphrase describing the deaths of penurious

writers. For instance, in 1592 Gabriel Harvey received news that Robert Greene,

‘king of the paper stage’, ‘had played his last part, & was gone to Tarleton’.19

Rather less affectionate was Harvey’s coinage of the term ‘Tarltonizing’, for play-

ing the fool, or clowning around. But no other fool was so celebrated as to generate

a verb. And David Wiles has drawn attention to John Davies of Hereford’s image

of a Jacobean Tarlton ‘still laughing’ in his grave, perpetuating the notion of

Tarlton inhabiting a comic afterlife.20

Theatre audiences found it very hard to accept the notion that Tarlton would

never again be seen on a public stage. The player-poet Robert Wilson, writing for

the Queen’s Men in the immediate aftermath of Tarlton’s death, reminded audi-

ences both of the dead fool’s many gifts and of his physical appearance. His play

The pleasant and Stately Morall, of the three Lordes and three Ladies of London

(printed 1590) belongs to the aftermath of the dispersal of the Spanish Armada and

the death of Richard Tarlton—both events having occurred in the late summer of

1588. The play concludes with the London Ladies seeing off their arrogant

Spanish suitors, preferring to match with London Lords. In Wilson’s previous

play, The Three Ladies of London (printed 1584) Tarlton himself had performed

the substantial role of the impoverished and gullible fool ‘Simplicity’. This time,

Wilson himself may have taken the role of ‘Simplicity’, again presented as very

poor. He is reduced to the not very profitable trade of selling printed ballads,

which he attempts to promote by singing them. His singing voice is not appre-

ciated by two potential customers, saucy young boys called ‘Wit’ and Will’. But

Simplicity has something more exciting in his capacious pedlar’s pack, corres-

ponding with the ‘great bagge’ mentioned in Tarltons News as one of Tarlton’s

signature props:

If thou cannot read, Ile tel thee, this is Tarltons picture: didst thou never know Tarlton?

Keeping the picture on display as a visual aid, Simplicity delivers a memoir of the

late Richard Tarlton. In his early youth Tarlton had been a London apprentice.

18 J. B.Leishman (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (London, 1949), 148.

19 Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters and certaine sonnets especially touching Robert Greene(London, 1592), 9.

20 John Davies of Hereford, Wits Bedlam (1617); quoted in David Wiles, Shakespeare’sClown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge, 1987), 11–12.


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He worked as a water-bearer, already perhaps playfully disposed—‘I wis he hath

tost a Tankard in Cornehil ere now’. The fictionalized ‘Simplicity’ also practised

Tarlton’s original trade of water-bearing, before inheriting Tarlton’s stage role as a

fool. His wife ‘Penurie’ soon enters ‘attired like a water-bearing woman with her

Tankard’: she has taken over the family trade.

A recent history of London’s water-bearers sheds much light on the trade of

water-bearing.21 It was one of the most necessary yet least well-rewarded of the

many trades and skills that kept life going in the congested City of London.

Water-bearers needed strong arms and shoulders and great stamina. They spent

long hours carrying large ‘tankards’ on their backs—stoppered wooden containers

holding six or more gallons of water drawn from one of the city’s public con-

duits—and delivering water to households. Their status was low. As Flaxman and

Jackson record in their book, Sweet and Wholesome Water (2004), ‘Their trade was

primarily manual, involving strength rather than skill, and they never aspired to a

coat of arms.’22 Some, like Dame Penurie, were women, and none earned much

money. One penny seems to have been the rate paid by a householder for delivery

of a full tankard of water. Flaxman and Jackson assemble a list of water-bearers’

Wills. The few that itemize chattels suggest wretchedly limited means. In 1590, for

instance:

Thomas Harrison left a kettle and a quart pewter pot, together with two debts of 9s 4d

and 9s respectively.23

Even the most hard-working water-bearer was unlikely to earn more than the bare

minimum required to stave off destitution. It’s clear that Tarlton made an excellent

career move when he abandoned water-bearing and began to play the fool for a

living.

The place and date of Tarlton’s birth are unknown, but the day of his death, in

Shoreditch, on 3 September 1588, is remarkably well documented. We have his

Will, dictated early that morning,24 and his heart-rending final letter to Sir Francis

Walsingham, dictated while he lay ‘upon his daungerous and last bed, as he

thinkes’. Tarlton himself signed the letter three times, in an increasingly faltering

hand, in the presence of two witnesses, John Robonson [sic] and John Callwaye.

One of these men may also have been the letter’s scribe. Tarlton was acutely

anxious about the welfare of his six-year-old son, Philip. The boy’s godfather,

Sir Philip Sidney, had died of wounds in Arnhem in October 1586, so Tarlton

turned to his old patron Sir Francis Walsingham, who was Sidney’s father-in-law,

for the child’s support: ‘upon my knees I geve hime unto your honnor to live your

bedes man for ever.’ His burial, at St. Leonard’s Shoreditch, on 3 September, as

21 Ted Flaxman and Ted Jackson, Sweet and Wholesome Water: Five Centuries of history ofWater-bearers in the City of London (Cottisford, 2004).

22 Ibid., 17. 23 Ibid., 86.

24 Included in E.A.J. Honigmann and Susan Brock’s edition of Playhouse wills 1558-1642(Manchester, 1993), 57–8; see also Appendix 2.


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‘Richard Torrelton’, took place that afternoon.25 Tarlton’s belief that he was dying,

combined with the speed with which he was interred, suggests that he died of

plague.

Much of Tarlton’s cash, and all of his legal documents, leases and the like, were

in the hands of an attorney called Robert Adams, whom Tarlton had come to see as

‘A sly fellow, being more fuller of law then vertew’. A self-justifying letter from

Adams to Walsingham written a couple of days after Tarlton’s death, 5 September

1588, also survives among the State Papers.26 Early on the morning of his last day

alive Tarlton had appointed Adams, together with a fellow actor, William Johnson,

and his own 80-year-old mother, Katherine Tarlton, as the boy’s three joint

guardians. Warned by two friends, however, he quickly decided that trusting

Adams had been a dreadful mistake, and he appears to have been right. Six

weeks after the comedian’s death, on 23 October, his aged mother filed a bill of

complaint with the Lord Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton. She alleged that

Adams had failed to return to Tarlton’s bedside when summoned urgently to do so

for the purpose of adding ‘certaine notes’ to his Will—in effect, a codicil.

Subsequently, according to Katherine Tarlton’s testimony, Adams has retained

possession of all the dead man’s ‘leases, goodes and chattells’, leaving ‘the said

poore orratrixe and her . . . graund childe . . . without all remedye’. On 31 October

1588 Adams lodged his response with the Court of Chancery. He challenged

claims made about the value of Tarlton’s estate, and engaged in some extremely

unpleasant character assassination, with the clear aim of invalidating the old

woman’s testimony.

Unfortunately, these comments by a manifestly hostile witness have become

part of the ‘myth’ of Tarlton’s life, and have been incorporated, with embellish-

ments, in both the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography and its 2006

revision.27 According to the hostile Adams, the celebrated performer had died

in the house of one Em. Ball in Shordiche . . . she being a woman of a very badde

reputacion.

However, it seems quite likely that Em. Ball—her name expanded, rightly or

wrongly, to ‘Emma’ in the old DNB—was simply the landlady of the

Shoreditch tavern in which Tarlton died, a property probably owned by

Tarlton himself. As Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly would be the first to point

out, the office of ‘hostess’ did not necessarily carry a (deservedly) bad reputation.

Since the performer’s death, Adams claims to have been pestered by one of

Tarlton’s brothers in law,

25 London Guildhall Library, MS 7499/1.

26 NA SP 12/216, fol. 9.

27 Edward Irving Carlyle, entry on Tarlton in the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 19(1898-9); Peter Thomson, ‘Tarlton, Richard (d.1588) actor and clown’, Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography (2004-6).


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one Thomas Lee a butcher . . . a man of small credytt trowblesome and of very rude and

bad behaviour.

Needless to say, he is utterly dismissive of the testimony of Tarlton’s mother, since

she:

. . . is very aged and a meane woman both of capacytie and habylytie28 wherby she is very

unfit (yf there weare none other choyse) to take upon her eyther the tuycion and

government of the said Philippe Tarleton her graund chylde or of such porcion of

goodes as are left unto him by . . . his father.

In contrast, Adams boasts shamelessly of the high economic and educational status

of various fellow-lawyers with whose potent assistance he believes himself fully

entitled to take both Tarlton’s estate and the guardianship of his little son into his

own hands. He is supported in this intention by a close friend and colleague,

one Thomas Adam of Duxforde in the countye of Cambridge gentleman being a man

well knowen and reputed in the said Courte [of Chancery].29

Tarlton’s clearly expressed desire that his child should be cared for by close family

members and personal friends, who were to receive sufficient means to do so, was

thus entirely disregarded by Adams. Nor, so far as we know, had Sir Francis

Walsingham taken the boy into his household as an infant ‘bedes man’—if he had,

he might perhaps have intervened in this painful dispute. Eventually, however, the

Tarlton family achieved some sort of vindication. On 21 February 1589, Adams’s

administration of Tarlton’s Will was revoked, being granted, instead, to Helen

Barnard, nee Tarlton, one of the dead man’s sisters.30 Nothing further has come to

light about the subsequent life of Tarlton’s little son, and lawyers’ fees may have

depleted the value of his father’s estate. Well-founded anxiety about his child’s

future had caused Tarlton to die in a state of great emotional distress.

However, considered from a wider perspective than the wretched one of his

death-bed and the ensuing legal shenanigans, Tarlton reached the end of his life as

a man of substance and lofty connexions. His estate was initially valued at £700.31

As a leading member of the Queen’s Men—which made him a ‘groom of the

chamber’—he was both a gentleman and a court servant. In the last few years of

his life he took steps to advance his social standing in other ways. On 7 October

1584 he became a Freeman of the Vintners’ Company, and in 1587 he was

28 The phrase implies that she is both foolish and poverty-stricken: ‘ability’, OED sense 5obs. is defined as ‘Personal wealth, estate, means; pecuniary power.’

29 All the above quotations are taken from transcripts of Katherine Tarlton’s and RobertAdams’s bills included in J.O.Halliwell’s privately printed pamphlet Papers RespectingDisputes which arose from incidents at the death-bed of Richard Tarlton, the actor, in theYear 1588 (London, 1866).

30 Cf. Honigmann, Playhouse Wills, 58.

31 Contrast this with the claim made in ODNB that ‘In spite of royal patronage andpopular appreciation [Tarlton] was poor, and his poverty gave occasion to more than onecontemporary witticism’.


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recognized as a fully qualified ‘Master of Fence’, that is, an expert practitioner of

sword-play.32 These two qualifications were extremely apt for the man later re-

membered as having ‘a quart of wine for my friend, and a sword for my foe’.

Indeed, Robert Armin-if it was he who wrote Tarltons newes—was probably allud-

ing to these honours.

I have mentioned that a picture of Tarlton was shown on stage in Robert

Wilson’s Three Lords. Members of the Queen’s Men who later became Lord

Chamberlain’s Men may have retained such a picture as a stage prop, displayed

regularly to remind audiences of that man of unsurpassed comic gifts. Evidence for

such a practice appears in Robert Armin’s Quips upon Questions. Or, A Clownes

conceit. This was written and published in the liminal year 1600, when Armin

turned to the stationers for profit during a period when public playing was

‘restrained’. This seems to date the book’s composition to late June 1600. On

22 June the Privy Council directed the Lord Mayor and other city officials to

reduce the congestion and licentiousness allegedly caused by the multiplicity of

performances of ‘common stage-playes’ in London.33 The upshot appears to have

been that the Curtain Theatre—with which Armin had been closely connected—

was closed altogether to players, while ‘the Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe were

restricted to playing twice a week’.34 However, like many such orders, these

restrictions seem to have fallen into disuse after a few weeks.

Armin remarks on the title-page that his book was:

Clapt up by a Clowne of the towne in this last restraint, having little else to do.

Quips incorporates a wide variety of ‘questions’ thrown out by audience members

during the dancing and interactive foolery that regularly followed performance of a

play. Its 43 items range from the quasi-philosophical or scientific—‘What’s

light?’, ‘Who is happy?’—to the jokily trivial—‘Whats a clocke?’, ‘Are you

there with your Beares?’. One that occurs late on is ‘Wher’s Tarleton?’. This

is initially dismissed as a silly question, which only a fool would pose. As in most of

Armin’s Quips, the debate takes the form of a verse dialogue between two

speakers, the first being Armin himself. It has been suggested that Armin carried

on debates with his own comic club, to which, under the name of ‘Sir Timothy

Trunchion’, he dedicated the printed Quips.35 Such a performance method may

well have been adopted for some of the shorter and simpler Quips, but it is hard to

believe that ventriloquism could be sustained through such a long and complex

piece as Wher’s Tarleton?—55 lines in all. This item seems more like a battle of

wits between two stage fools, with Armin’s as the dominant voice. Here are the

opening stanzas, to which (for reasons that will become clear) I have added the

32 Cf. Vintners’ Archives, GL MS 15211/1, fol. 171 r; BL MS Sloane 2580, fol.6.

33 E.K.Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1923), 329-32.

34 Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 138.

35 Martin Butler, ‘Armin, Robert (1563-1615), actor and comic writer’, ODNB.


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speech headings ‘CLOWN’ for the first speaker and ‘2’ for the secondary clown,

or stooge. I have also modernized the text:

CLOWN: One asks where Tarlton is, yet knows he’s dead.

2: Fool! (says the other) Who can tell thee that?

CLOWN: Ass! (quoth the first) I can! Bow down thy head,

Lend but an ear, and listen. 2. Sir, to what?

CLOWN: Is’t come to ‘Sir’? (quoth he) Even now, ’twas ‘fool’;

One ass can with another bear much rule.

2: Well, ass or fool - (the second says) -: go on:

I say, he’s dead.

CLOWN: Aye, true, and so say I;

And yet he lives, too, though some say he’s gone.

2: Till you approve36 this, I must say you lie.

CLOWN: Lie! (quoth the first) The stab with that must go.

2: I do not say you lie; I say I must say so.

Speaker 1, whom I have designated ‘CLOWN’, supports his claim that Tarlton

‘lives’ by narrating an anecdote about a simple man who came to see a play with the

sole purpose of setting eyes on Tarlton, whom he firmly believed, ‘from the squint

of his eye’, to be immortal. Eventually, a picture of Tarlton is brought on stage,

and the naive playgoer is satisfied:

The simple man was quiet, and departed,

And having seen his picture, was glad hearted.

On the basis of this anecdote, the speaker designated ‘CLOWN’ argues in con-

clusion that Tarlton is truly present ‘here’, in the playhouse, the place where his

name and fame still live:

CLOWN: You say not, ‘where’s his body, that did die?’

But ‘Where is Tarlton?’ Where’s his name alone?

His name is here: ’tis true, I credit it.

His body’s dead; few clowns will have his wit.

There is a much better-known text in which we encounter the slightly tiresome

style of contentious, chop-logic, quibbling that characterizes Quips. This tragedy

by Armin’s best-known colleague, William Shakespeare, may have been in the

process of composition only a year or so after the appearance of Armin’s book.

I quote from the 1603 Q1 version of Hamlet, which I believe to derive from an

early authorial version, though with many confusions and imperfections.37 The

scene that modern editors designate Act 5, Scene 1 opens with a heated dispute

between two men described in all three of the early texts as ‘Clowns’:

enter Clowne and an other.

Clowne I say no, she ought not to be buried

36 approve: prove, demonstrate conclusively.

37 For a full discussion of this much-debated text see Ann Thompson and Neil Tayloreds., Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623 (London, 2006).


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In Christian burial.

2: Why sir?

Clowne Mary because she’s drownd.

2: But she did not drowne her selfe.

Clowne No, that’s certaine, the water drown’d her.

2: Yea but it was against her will.

Clowne No, I deny that, for looke you sir, I stand here.

If the water come to me, I drowne not my selfe:,

But if I goe to the water, and am there drown’d,

Ergo, I am guiltie of my owne death:

Y’are gone, goe y’are gone sir.

The senior Clown then poses a fresh question -:

who builds strongest,

Of a Mason, a Shipwright, or a Carpenter?

Clown 2 attempts to solve the riddle, but is finally trumped and put down with a

triumphant punch-line. The answer is:

A Grave-maker, for the houses he builds

last till Doomes-day.

The procedure here is closely analogous to that of Armin in his published Quips.

There is every reason to suppose that Robert Armin, who joined the Lord

Chamberlain’s Men some time in 1599, was the original performer of

‘Goodman Delver’, alias Clown 1. As the Chamberlain’s Men’s leading clown

he appears to have succeeded William Kemp, who left the company to embark

on a period of performing independently both at home and abroad. Armin also

played Dogberry to a secondary clown’s Verges in Much Ado about Nothing, a play

which—like Hamlet—was taken on tour to Oxford and Cambridge. Armin men-

tions this in the preface to his 1608 book A Nest of Ninnies. In Oxford, he says, he

‘was admitted’ both to Christ Church and All Souls, ‘and might have Commenst

like an Asse as I was’38— alluding to the passage at the end of Act 4 Scene 2 of

Much Ado, in which Dogberry is obsessively insistent upon being ‘writ down an

ass’.

Clown 2 is dismissed to fetch a ‘stoup of beer’ for Clown 1, so that when Hamlet

and Horatio arrive they encounter only Clown 1, singing lustily as he digs up

skulls. He proceeds to quibble and quip with Hamlet, freshly returned from

England, that celebrated land of madmen, in exactly the same manner as he did

with his clownish sidekick. The disguised Prince is much taken with his quick wit,

calling him ‘An excellent fellow’. From quipping and chop-logic, they turn to

reminiscence. In what is possibly the most celebrated moment in the whole of

Shakespeare’s works, Hamlet seizes and gazes on the skull of a dead court fool:

38 A Nest of Ninnies (London, 1608), sig. A2r; repr. in John P. Feather (ed.), The CollectedWorks of Robert Armin, vol. 1 (New York, 1972). The editor’s introductions to each workare unpaginated.


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Ham. Whose scull was this?

Clowne. This, a plague on him, a madde rogues it was. He powred once a whole flagon of

Rhenish of my head. Why do you not know him? This was one Yorickes scull.

Ham. Was this? I prethee let me see it, alas poore Yoricke I knew him Horatio, A fellow

of infinite mirth, he hath carried me twenty times upon his backe, here hung those lippes

that I have Kissed a hundred times, and to see, now they abhorre me: Wheres your jests

now Yoricke? Your flashes of merriment: now go to my Ladies chamber, and bid her

paint her selfe an inch thicke, to this she must come Yoricke.

I have quoted the Q1 text because the name ‘Yorick’ is here repeated four times,

whereas in the Q2 and First Folio texts it is spoken only twice. I suggest that in

early performances Hamlet’s four-fold repetition of this highly unusual name,

underlined further through the internal rhyme of ‘thicke’ and ‘Yoricke’, served

to prompt even the dimmest member of the audience to work out which celebrated

dead fool is being spoken of here, his head once again popping out from an

unexpected theatrical location. This time, his head suddenly appears from

‘below’: once more highly visible to a theatre audience, but sadly fleshless. The

skull which brings the Clown and the Prince together in a moment of great

intimacy, as they exchange vivid recollections of boyhood, is to be imagined by

the audience as being that of a man whose name was familiar to all present: ‘Your

Rick’, also known as ‘Dick’, or ‘Richard’, Tarlton.

As a man who traded in liquids, first water, then wine, ‘Your Rick (Tarlton)’ is

remembered by the Clown for his slapstick parody of infant baptism –: ‘He

powred once a whole flagon of Rhenish of my head’. This could also be a rite

of passage for one clown ‘anointing’ another as his successor. Hamlet’s memories

are more intimate and physical. As a boy, the prince had been playfully carried

‘twenty times’— that is, very frequently—on broad shoulders that formerly trans-

ported heavy tankards of water, and later, a side of bacon. Yorick/Tarlton’s phys-

ical sportiveness, lit up with ‘flashes of merriment’, is imagined as lending

moments of delight to his boyhood, the recollection of which briefly obscures

more recent experiences of bereavement, melancholy, blighted love, exile and

vengeful rage.

The notion that ‘Yorick’ alludes to Tarlton is not new. In fact, so far as I am

aware, every scholar who has raised the question of whether ‘Yorick’ alludes to a

‘real’ dead fool has fingered Tarlton as the prime suspect. But I think some of the

material discussed here further strengthens the conventional identification of the

dead jester ‘Yorick’ with Richard Tarlton, as well as the less-discussed probability

that the ‘Clowne’—whom most modern editors call a Gravedigger—was per-

formed by Robert Armin. As David Wiles has observed:

. . . when the grave-digging ‘clown’ gives Hamlet the skull of the King’s jester, the actor

Armin is able to pay a vicarious tribute to his mentor Tarlton.39

39 Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 151.


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This celebrated moment seems also to allude to salient episodes in Tarlton’s

career: his distinctive head-peeping stunt, so well remembered by many viewers;

the man’s powerful load-bearing shoulders; his status both as a royal servant, a

tavern-landlord, and a freeman of the Vintners’ Company; and finally, that com-

forting myth, that was to continue for so many years, of Richard Tarlton as still in

some sense accessible to the living, still able to make people laugh. Shakespeare

here makes his own brilliantly economical contribution to a continuing flow of

literary commemorations of Richard Tarlton.

University of Oxford

Appendix 1: Notes on Tarlton’s performance before the

Queen on 21st August 1578

Ta<rl>ton in a play of the Gods playing the God Lar with a flitch of bacon at his

back. Thomas Earle of Sussex the Lord Chamberlaine sayd vnto him

Tarlton, Tarlton though yow be so braue

I feare me you’l proue but a sawcie Knaue

This he spoke because the Queene having bid them take away the knaue for

making her to laugh so excessively for togging against her litle dogge perrico de

faldas with his sword & longstaffe, & had bid the Queene take off her mastie. & she

calling to the Lord Chamberlane to doe his office to bring a chardger40 and to take

hym away Tarlton replyed

O Thomas Thomas with your whyt rod

Be not so sawcie to correct a God

London, National Archives, SP 12/215, fol. 175 recto.

Appendix 2: Tarlton’s last letter

To the right honnorable sir frauncis walsingham her maiesties cheff secretary and

one of her most honnorable prevy counsel humbly clompaneth [sic] vnto yowr

honnor. that wheras your honnors pore Follower tarelton, now liuing upon his

daungerous and last bed, as he thinkes, A sly fellow \on Addames/ being more

fuller of law then vertew, and seing me in that great extremyty provoked me to put

him in som trust for my child and my mother with all the goodes lanndes and

cattell that I haue and I in that extremytie I set my hand vnto it, with other pore

men that greved much to se it, he oweth me further that he hath in his handes thre

scor powndes, which is the remayner of to Cli fortie pounes which he receved of

master Aymes esquier of essex and yet he hath had xxli for his paines in law and

followed it but one terme/ and for that Right honorable my sonne was godsonne to

sir Phillip Sidney and cares his name and that I never estemed any so honorable a

40 Presumably a large platter for carrying away the ‘flitch of bacon’.


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frind as your honnor no<w> vpon my knees I geve hime vnto your honnor to live

your bedes man for ever, thus I besiche your honnor to tech such unconssiable

men how they seek the vtter vndoing by fraudelat meanes of a sille old widow of

forscore years of age and a pore Infant of the age of six yeares, not dowting your

honor able care I leve all my derection holly vnto your handes beseching god you

may be blest with all the felicites of this trobelsom yearth and after death the hiest

seat in glory

Rychard tarlton

Rychard tarlton

<BLOT>chard <BLOT> ton41

By me Jhon Robonson } wyttnesethe that this is the

} laste marke that he wrott

By me John Callwaye } cravinge yowr honowrs assistance

In thes behalffe

[endorsed in italic hand:] 1588 A lettere to Sir Francis Walsingham expressing his

will the same day he dyed.

London, The National Archives, SP 12/215, fol.177recto

41 Three shaky signatures in Tarlton’s own hand, the third one especially so.


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the life, death and afterlife of richard tarlton

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