“Where’s Tarleton?”: The Contentious Chaucerian Afterlife of Elizabeth’s Most Famous Clown

By all accounts, Richard Tarleton was an extraordinary presence on the English stage. A writer and performer of ballad medleys,¹ Tarleton was celebrated for his extemporal clowning in an era when audiences expected and playwrights explicitly invited clowns to improvise comical riffs.² Also a private jester to Queen Elizabeth, he was famously “that knave” whom Elizabeth required be escorted “away for having me laugh so excessively when he fought against my little dog Perrico de Faldas with his broadsword and cane.”³ Tarleton performed as a playing clown with the Queen’s Men beginning in March 1582/83, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men until his death on September 3, 1588.⁴ As it happens, however, Tarleton left his most enduring legacy on English literature by dying, for his death left abandoned the role of Martin Marprelate, a character that he had created to mock down the Disciplinary cause. So important was Richard Tarleton’s death that his vacant role prompted a revival of dramatic monologue written in the Chaucerian style. Some of these monologues entered into a politically charged conversation that, ridiculing Tarleton and his allies in the Episcopal hierarchy, centered seriously around the legal question as to what extent a claim of Chaucerian-style impersonation could serve as a defense against felony libel. Others employed the Chaucerian style to advance the more wittily phrased, polemically charged spiritual question “Where’s Tarleton?”—a conceit that asked of the answerer whether Tarleton’s satirically blasphemous challenge of the ecclesiastical government on the stage won the clown a place in heaven or hell.

The Tarletonian Origins of Martin Marprelate

The backstory to Tarleton’s literary afterlife begins with the challenge of the Disciplinary movement to the Episcopal structure of the Church of England. According to Richard Bancroft, the English Disciplinarian movement was a Genevan import by way of Scotland.⁵ On multiple occasions, the Disciplinarians pressed the English Parliament to pass legislation outlawing the episcopacy and the Lords Spiritual on the grounds that scripture authorized only four enduring offices in the Church: the elders to govern, the scholars to teach, the priests to administer sacraments, and the deacons to minister to the poor;⁶ and that, as a consequence, bishops, lords spiritual, or any other type of ecclesiastical magistracy was an Antichristian vestige of papistry⁷ that defied Christ’s division of Caesar’s kingdom and His own.⁸

Toward the end of implementing their agenda of eliminating the episcopacy from the English Church, the Disciplinarians took up residence in Oxford and Cambridge Universities to teach their doctrines,⁹ they organized synods so as to influence the more learned sort of men,¹⁰ and, to influence the commoners, they celebrated prophesyings—gatherings of parishioners who, under the leadership of a preacher of the cause, were led in the study of scripture and in devotional prayer.

Disciplinarians were imagined dangerous. Edward Sandys, Bishop of London, complained as early as August 5, 1573 that, within his diocese, the Queen’s proclamation against Thomas Cartwright’s book was of no effect and that a “conventicle” or “conspiracy” of Londoners had sworn to defend Cartwright’s book to the death.¹¹ Archbishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal (c. 1519–July 6, 1583) nonetheless allowed the prophesyings to thrive unmolested. In a letter dated May 8, 1577, Queen Elizabeth ordered Grindal to suppress prophesyings whereby persons deprived of their benefices often railed against the Church hierarchy.¹² Grindal defied the Queen and was consequently put under house arrest. With prophesyings eluding formal correction, Disciplinarians continued to meet unlawfully, their aim to effect change in church government. Among the peaceful means proposed was to deprive England of parish priests until Parliament instituted the Presbyterian reforms. In an assembly of some sixty ministers held in Essex on May 16, 1582 to determine what might be tolerated in the Book of Common Prayer, this “conspiracy or council,” to use Richard Bancroft’s language, declared that university men should not offer themselves to the ministry.¹³ Less peacefully, violent overthrow of church government and the magistrates...