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Oxford DNB article: Tarlton, Richard
Tarlton, Richard (d. 1588), actor and clown
by Peter Thomson
© Oxford University Press 2004–11 All rights reserved
Tarlton, Richard (d. 1588), actor and clown, became a legend in his own lifetime
and was constantly reinvented for two decades after his death. As a result, fictions
about his life have become inextricably tangled with its facts. Thomas Fuller, who
was at some pains to verify the facts that informed his History of the Worthies of
England, says that he was born at Condover in Shropshire, where his father was a pig
farmer, but Fuller was making his enquiries over a century after Tarlton's birth (The
History of the Worthies was published in 1662, a year after Fuller's death), and the
authenticity of his claim cannot be guaranteed. We know from Tarlton's will, proved
on 6 September 1588, that his mother was called Katherine, and, from subsequent
litigation, that he had a married sister called Helen.
Fuller's claim that Tarlton's father moved from Shropshire to Ilford is credible, not
least because his contemporaries associated him with the county of Essex, but there is
a decidedly fictional air about his further assertion that, while still in Condover,
Tarlton:
was in the field, keeping his Father's Swine, when a servant of Robert
Earl of Leicester … was so pleased with his happy unhappy answers,
that he brought him to Court, where he became the most famous Jester
to Queen Elizabeth. (Fuller, 2.311)
There is greater likelihood in the story casually told by Simplicity in Robert Wilson's
play The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, that Tarlton in his youth was a
water-carrier. Wilson was, after all, a close colleague of Tarlton's during their years
with the Queen's Men.
What is not in dispute is that Tarlton arrived in London as a provincial immigrant. It
was as a rustic clown, dressed in a russet suit and buttoned cap, that he stamped his
enduring image on the city. The role enabled him to speak to and for the uprooted
countrymen struggling to come to terms with urban living, and the effectiveness of his
comic improvisations owed much to his natural ability to observe the customs of the
city from the outside.
Tarlton was either still alive, or very recently dead, when Wilson's play was first
performed (The Three Lords is variously dated between 1584 and 1589). Even so, we
should be wary of trusting too far the authenticity of the water-carrier story. By the
1580s Tarlton's association with ale, beer, and taverns was so well established that
the suggestion that he once made money out of water may have been intended to excite
hilarity in the playhouse. He was a freeman of the Company of Vintners, gaining his
freedom by redemption in late 1584. He bound his first and only apprentice ten days
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later. There are references to his keeping an inn in Colchester, the Saba tavern in
Gracechurch Street, and an ordinary in Paternoster Row. It must have been in such
places, before his formal entry into the theatrical profession, that he inaugurated his
‘themes’, those extemporized (often rhymed) responses to subjects suggested by
drinkers to challenge his ingenuity that first brought him to public attention. Robert
Wilson was the only contemporary to rival Tarlton as an improvising comedian, but
Wilson was neither as abrasive nor as obscenely outspoken as Tarlton. There is a
strong probability that the transference of his tavern style to the public theatres was
Tarlton's peculiar innovation as an actor and the basis of his extraordinary
popularity.
The likelihood is that Tarlton joined the acting company of Thomas Radcliffe, third
earl of Sussex and the queen's lord chamberlain, in the latter half of the 1570s. In the
surviving fragment of Tarleton's Tragical Treatises (1578) he describes himself as
‘Servaunt to the right Honourable the Lorde Chamberlaine Earle of Sussex’, and the
dedication is to Lady Frances Mildmay, Radcliffe's sister. By 1583 he was prominent
enough to be appointed a founder member of the revived Queen's Men, and he
remained with the company until his death, thus earning the right to describe himself
in his will as ‘one of the Groomes of the Queenes maiesties chamber’ (Honigmann
and Brock, 57). The only part that can be confidently assigned to him is that of
Dericke in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. The role was one in which what
was done must generally have had greater impact on the audience than what was
said, but what also characterizes this raw text is the parade of opportunities it offers to
Tarlton as Dericke to indulge his metatheatrical talent as a maker of exits and
entrances. On the open stages of Elizabethan London it was impossible to enter or
leave the platform unobtrusively. Actors coming on to open a scene had first to locate
themselves in order to place the narrative; actors leaving had to have a reason to go.
Either way, they had a distance to cover from or to the stage door. That distance was
Tarlton's playground, and The Famous Victories furnishes it richly.
It was in the interest of playwrights to the Queen's Men to provide suitable
opportunities for the leading clown, but Tarlton's real chance to shine came more
consistently in the post-play jigs. These jigs, though they included music and
dancing, were essentially vehicles for clowns. A handful of jigs, though none of
Tarlton's, survive in manuscript. They rely on song and allow for patterned dancing,
but they were essentially raucous afterpieces: framed as short farces, they feature
sexual misdemeanour and cross-dressing, and can easily accommodate the
defamatory mockery characteristic of Elizabethan libels. Tarlton was the master
clown of the jig. He had successors, of whom William Kemp is the best known, but
never a superior. Almost certainly he wrote some, if not all, of the jigs in which he
starred. Like many comedians through history, he made capital out of his own
peculiar appearance. Claims that surviving images of Tarlton, even the muchreproduced drawing by John Scottowe, have any status as likenesses have been
largely discredited, but we can accept verbal accounts of his rough ugliness. The
impression is insistently plebeian—Robert Weimann has called Tarlton ‘the first
plebeian artist to achieve national recognition in England’ (Weimann, 186). It may
have been curiosity value that endeared him to the queen and her courtiers.
The historical Tarlton can no longer be distinguished from the hero of the
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posthumously published jest book. Tarlton's Jests was first published in full in 1611,
but the first part at least was in circulation during the 1590s, and the second part was
entered in the Stationers' register in 1600. All three parts belong to a literary
subgenre, and the anecdotes (few of them jests in a modern sense) of which they
consist admit a limited responsibility to historical truth. Even so, Tarlton was too
recently dead for the unknown compiler to risk utter falsification. The character
recorded, or created, in the Jests is a prodigious plebeian, hard-drinking, provocative,
often forced to improvise himself out of ignominy, outstandingly short-tempered, a
misogynist, an adversary of radical protestantism, anti-Catholic too, inclined to draw
attention to the functions and appurtenances of the human body's lower half, verbally
as well as physically agile, not infrequently violent, and almost always combative.
The arrival of this Tarlton, whether in a room, a tavern, a street, or onto the stage, put
the timid on their guard and the assertive on their mettle. People in search of a
reputation for wit sought to outface him, only to end up outfaced. This is a persuasive
aspect of the jest-book portrait, not least because it hints at a comic style subsequently
exploited by Elizabethan playwrights and by later generations of stand-up comedians:
threatened with what looks like inevitable humiliation, the fool/clown suddenly turns
the tables on his humiliators. It may be that there are echoes of Tarlton in
Shakespeare's Falstaff.
The image of the strong-bodied clown, emanating aggression and provocation,
lingered after Tarlton's death. George Wilson, in his Commendation of Cockes, and
Cock-Fighting (1607), alludes to a Norwich cock called Tarlton ‘because he alwayes
came to the fight like a drummer, making a thundering noyse with his winges …
which cocke fought many battels, with mighty and fierce aduersaries’ (Nungezer,
356). The historical Tarlton was certainly capable of looking after himself. He was
sufficiently skilled as a swordsman to be awarded the accolade of master of fence in
1587. In one of the few authenticated anecdotes, however, he appeared in the role of
peacemaker. The occasion was a visit of the Queen's Men to Norwich in June 1583. A
scuffle broke out when a Norwich citizen called Wynsdon tried to get in to see the play
without paying, and Tarlton was one of the three members of the company to rush to
the scene. When Wynsdon ran away, Tarlton tried to prevent the actor John Bentley
from following him, but Bentley escaped his clutches and may have inflicted on
Wynsdon the sword wound from which he later died.
Any attempt to reconstruct Tarlton's life is bedevilled by contradiction, partly because
no other Elizabethan actor was so much spoken and written about after his death. In
the minds of many Elizabethans he represented more than the theatre. In the mind of
the compiler of Tarlton's Jests he represented sturdy individualism opposed to petty
authority, and he did so from the standpoint of the common man.
The separate titles of the three parts of the Jests indicate the range of Tarlton's appeal:
his ‘Court Witty Jests’ display him among aristocrats and their ladies, and carry him
into the company of the queen herself; his ‘Sound City Jests’ take him out and about in
London; his ‘Country Pretty Jests’ suggest the kind of impact he made during the
provincial tours of the Queen's Men. He earned, or had thrust upon him, privileged
access to the masses as well as to their masters. Whatever his private preferences may
have been, the masses claimed him as theirs. There is an indicative marginal entry in
John Stow's Annales: ‘Tarleton so beloued that men vse his picture for their signes’
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(Stow, 698). The reference is to the use of his familiar face to advertise alehouses.
According to the historian of Shoreditch, ‘His portrait, with tabor and pipe, still serves
as a sign to an alehouse in the Borough’ in 1798 (Ellis, 209). There is also a
possibility, gratifying to those who look to Tarlton for carnival scurrility, that his
portrait sometimes adorned the doors of privies.
There is nothing new about the commercial exploitation of popular heroes. Publishers
and printers made use not of his face but simply of his name in the effort to increase
sales, and this makes it difficult to determine what Tarlton actually wrote. His jigs, if
they were ever printed, have been lost. So has the text of the two-part comedy The
Seven Deadly Sins, which he wrote for the Queen's Men about 1585. What has
survived from that play, a precious but enigmatic document in theatre history
preserved in the Dulwich College collection, is ‘The Platt of the Secound Parte of The
Seven Deadlie Sins’. It is, in effect, a synopsis of the twenty-four scenes of an episodic
moral narrative containing three separate stories, each bearing on a single sin. The
story of Gorboduc illustrates envy, of Sardanapalus sloth, and of Tereus and Philomel
lechery. It is possible to recover from the ‘platt’ (plot) the bare outline of the action, but
the real interest of the document is in the information it provides about the
distribution of parts to named actors. Beyond that, the actual purpose originally served
by the ‘platt’ remains unclear.
Tarlton's name first appears in print at the end of a ballad, written in 1570, lamenting
the havoc wreaked in Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire by the October floods. It is an
undistinguished piece of the kind Autolycus purveys in The Winter's Tale. Since his
was not yet a household name, Tarlton might well have been the author. None of the
other publications ascribed to him is certainly his, and their contribution to the
Tarlton legend is unreliable. Tarlton belonged primarily to an oral tradition, and it is
in the interplay of orality and literature in street ballads and prose pamphlets that his
literary influence is preserved. Tarlton's contemporary Gabriel Harvey went so far as
to accuse the gifted pamphleteer Thomas Nashe of plagiarizing Tarlton when he
wrote accusingly that Nashe's ideas were ‘right-formally conueied, according to the
stile and tenour of Tarltons president, his famous play of the seauen Deadly sinnes …
now pleasantlie interlaced with diuers new-founde phrases of the Tauerne’
(Weimann, 207). Few people were better equipped than Tarlton to redirect the dialect
of the tavern into satirical channels, and Harvey was not the only Elizabethan who
heard the voice of Tarlton when reading the pamphlet literature of controversy.
If the details of Tarlton's public life are overlaid by legend, the details of his private life
remain obscure. The Sarah who married Abraham Rogers, son of the archdeacon of
Chester, may have been a second sister, and, if we accept the possibility that he
preferred to identify himself by his trade rather than his profession, ‘Thamsyn the wief
of Richard Tarlton vintener’, who was buried at St Martin Ludgate on 23 December
1585, may have been Tarlton's partner. There is a record of a marriage between
Richard Tarlton and Thomasyn Dann in Chelmsford, Essex, on 11 February 1577, and
the known association between Tarlton and Lady Frances Mildmay, whose home was
in Chelmsford, lends plausibility to the identification. The quarrelsome, abused wife
mentioned in the Jests is there called Kate, but that is probably a transference from
the known name of the mother who survived him.
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Legend has it that Tarlton's will was written in the house of Emma Ball, a Shoreditch
prostitute, where the destitute clown had taken refuge, but the image of poverty is
contradicted by the dispute over £700 in property between two of the executors,
Tarlton's mother and a lawyer called Robert Adams. It is to be hoped that the
bitterness of the altercation did not lead them to neglect the care of Tarlton's six-yearold son, Philip. The boy had been named after his godfather Sir Philip Sidney, and the
extraordinary stretch of Tarlton's life is nicely exemplified by the distance between
this elegant nobleman and Emma Ball. Tarlton died in Shoreditch on 3 or 5 September
1588, and was buried, evidently on the same day, in St Leonard, Shoreditch. Nothing
is known of the life of the son whose future welfare is the exclusive concern of
Tarlton's will.
PETER THOMSON
Sources E. Nungezer, A dictionary of actors (1929) · E. A. J. Honigmann and S. Brock, eds.,
Playhouse wills, 1558–1642: an edition of wills by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the
London theatre (1993) · Fuller, Worthies (1811) · R. Weimann, Shakespeare and the popular
tradition in the theatre (1978) · J. Stow and E. Howes, Annales, or, A generall chronicle of England
… unto the end of this present yeere, 1631 (1631) · H. Ellis, The history and antiquities of the parish
of St Leonard, Shoreditch, and liberty of Norton Folgate (1798) · D. Wiles, Shakespeare's clown
(1987) · Tarlton's jests, ed. J. O. Halliwell (1844) · C. J. Sisson, Lost plays of Shakespeare's age
(1936) · J. H. Astington, ‘Illustrations of the English stage’, Shakespeare Survey, 50 (1997) · J. H.
Astington, ‘Tarlton and the sanguine temperament’, Theatre Notebook, 53 (1999), 2–7 · M. Eccles,
‘Elizabethan actors, IV: S to end’, N&Q, 238 (1993), 165–76 · DNB · parish register, Chelmsford,
Essex, 11 Feb 1577 [marriage]
Likenesses J. Scottowe, manuscript drawing, BL, Harley MS 3885, fol. 19 [see illus.] · line
engraving (facsimile of woodcut), BM; repro. in Tarlton's jests (1611) · portrait, Magd. Cam.
Wealth at death approx. £700 in property: Nungezer, Dictionary of actors
© Oxford University Press 2004–11 All rights reserved
Peter Thomson, ‘Tarlton, Richard (d. 1588)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26971, accessed 12
Nov 2011]
Richard Tarlton (d. 1588): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26971
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