The True Physiognomy of a Man: Richard Tarlton and His Legend

THE TRUE PHYSIOGNOMY OF A MAN: RICHARD TARLTON AND HIS LEGEND The figure of Richard Tarlton, in book-designer's oval frame, decorates th front cover of the 1979 paperback re-issue of Muriel Bradbrook's The Rise of the Common Player} It is taken from the sepia wash drawing in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. W e do not know when and h o w the drawing came into Pepys's possession. It is a sanitised reworking of John Scottowe's resourceful miniature, set inside a capital 'T' to accompany some indifferent memorial verses.2 The cast in the eye is less prominent, the squashed nose straightened, the face and body slimmed down. Most significant, though, is the minute adjustment of the mouth. Scottowe's Tarlton, standing on the flimsy whorls at the foot of his circular 'T' and penned in from behind and above by a trellis and a triffid, contrives nonetheless to exult in his one-man-band virtuosity. The drumstick is firmly held, the gaze compels the viewer's attention and the lips are slightly pursed around the pipe that he is nonchalantly playing. Fleetingly (the impression varies as I contemplate the comedian imprisoned in his letter), Scottowe has captured the powerful presence of a m a n w h o does not so much invite as command laughter. Pepys's copyist has given Tarlton a looser hold on the drumstick and allowed the pipe to hang from smiling lips like the neglected cheroot of a chain-smoker. There is no puff in this mouth. It is as if this alternative Tarlton is watching us rather than demanding that w e watch him. The smile is so kindly, the whole demeanour so gentle. The bullneck has gone and the right shoulder sunk, taking the barrel-chest with them. Compared with Scottowe's, this Tarlton is almost a stooge. It is not as a stooge that Tarlton has descended from contemporary anecdotes into the adjudications of twentieth-century scholars, but his status and his impact remain matters of controversy. M y supposition is that Tarlton is most familiar to students of Shakespeare worldwide as an editorial footnote to Yorick's skull, 'a fellow of infinite jest', the archetypal entertainer w h o 1 1 am referring here to the 1979 republication by Cambridge University Press for the bookfirstpublished by Chatto and Windus in 1962. 2 Harley M S 3885, fol.19, British Library. P A R E R G O N ns 14.2 (January 1997) 30 Peter Thomson could always 'set the table on a roar'.3 There is a natural extension from that comfortable stereotype: Yorick's skull as memento mori translates into Tarlton as tragic clown. 'He was nobody out of his mirths', wrote Sir Roger Williams within two years of Tarlton's death.4 That is to say that the composite literary sketch, for those whose concern for performative values is marginal, might be of a funny man whose public humour camouflaged private melancholy and whose time, however regrettably, has passed. Yorick, then, is Shakespeare's affectionate requiem to a jester who no longer matters. It is an incidental concern of this essay to counter so partial a view. M y primary intention is threefold:firstly,to summarise four recent assessments of Tarlton, secondly, to re-examine his legend as it is preserved in the published book of Tarlton's Jests, and thirdly, to investigate afresh Shakespeare's representation of the clown w h o died when Shakespeare was twenty-four years old. Bradbrook's Tarlton, though certainly not a stooge, is, like the Magdalene College drawing, comparatively benign. She records his drunken act, 'a stock item with all clowns', but not his drunkenness. She stresses his physical agility in popular 'feates of activity' and as a Master of Fence, but singles out an occasion (not wholly characteristic) when, at Norwich in June 1583, he intervened to dissipate a dangerous quarrel. The chivalric model for such intervention between drawn swords is Romeo, but Bradbrook averts her gaze from the Tybalt in Tarlton. Most insistently, she presents him as a metropolitan 'Common Player of uncommon brilliance',7 whose impact was such as...