Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre by Richard Preiss (review)

Given the shortage of new studies on Renaissance English stage clowns, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre invites considerable interest. In five chapters aiming to redefine "what audiences did" (chapter 1) and clowns' origins and function (chapter 2), with applications to three noted clowns (chapters 3–5), Richard Preiss proposes a provocative theory that the stage clown must be understood as a theatrical function engaged in an improvisatory battle with an antagonistic audience to control the playing space, first prefiguring an owning author, then disappearing into the actor after "installing a hierarchy of text over performance" (10). This study therefore applies modern theoretical assumptions (e.g., stage/page tensions and an author function) and long-standing neoclassical ones to form a synthetic theory of the clown. This work demands notice, then. But reading it requires caution. Extreme assumptions and gambits with evidence reveal the limits of its deductive approach.

The argument indeed rests on deduction, including drawing upon lingering anticlown biases. Preiss redeploys the disputed critical chestnut that the neoclassicist Hamlet rebukes Will Kemp while speaking for Shakespeare, adding "after mucking his way through the play, [Kemp's] jig could now subvert" it (146). Agreeing with overstated neoclassical prejudices against clowns as "thrust in" to drama, he actually discounts plays in his interpretations: "Whenever a clown began to exist on paper, he began to exist onstage a little less" (17). Deductive habits appear not just in a writer's tic of "If … then" structures but also in the universalizing assumption in chapter 1 of a competitive audience and hence the claim that "the clown's theatrical function" was "to check the agonistic energies of the audience by giving them an individual opponent" (9). Preiss rejects evidence that audiences enjoyed "participation" and "responding" (24) in order to surmise instead that "what better describes the relation between theatre and audience" is "competition" (27). Aware that his "sensational examples" (30) of audience behavior "tend toward hyperbole" (30), he foresees that "it will seem, no doubt, that in pressuring this claim as far as possible, I have overstated its case: that all this evidence of audience participation remains exceptional to the rule" (47). Having set out to prove that transgressive competition, not participation, was "the only norm of playhouse behavior" (43), he necessarily fails. As a result, so does his dependent clown function.

Applying this theory to disqualify contradictory evidence in chapter 2, Preiss deduces that the clown originated in Jack-a-Lent, "an anthropomorphized scapegoat" (67) who, he believes, prefigured Dick Tarlton. He here discounts such alternate influences as the morality play Vice, believing the Vice was "too specific to itinerancy" (66) and had to encourage audiences at "provincial venues" (66) to participate, whereas the clown's "urban audience" (81) for resident London companies needed no prompting. But much of Preiss's own evidence is provincial clowning, since touring did not end, especially for Tarlton's clown-centric Queen's Men. Volumes demonstrating clowns' relation to the Vice are thus replaced here, on mistaken grounds, with scant evidence on Jack-a-Lent (67–69). Preiss then limits clowning to Tarlton's extradramatic exchanges with occasional hecklers (it is "only [through] him … that we can reconstruct early clowning practice" [73]). Regrettably, doing so ignores the lack of evidence that other clowns improvised in this way and excludes most of Tarlton's own clowning. Insult was a fraction of what he did onstage, not the sum of it. Preiss, however, incautiously reads a posthumous jest-book's apocryphal, extratheatrical stories figuring this clown as the conventional malicious jestbook prankster so as to confirm Tarlton's "deep antisocial hostility," as "an urban terrorist, a rogue insult comic whose medium was cruelty" (79). Absent myriad clowning practices, then, "the sum of the clown's utterance" becomes the remainder "I am here; this is mine; come and get me" (88).

Such reductive presuppositions conform to author theory, prompting three clowns in search...