In the first of four articles about Elizabethan actor, comedian and musician Richard Tarleton, we saw that he played the fool as a member of the royal acting troupe, The Queen’s Players, who performed at court and on tour, and that Tarleton’s stage costume was not the stereotypical jester with ass ears, bells and baubles, but a country clown with pipe and tabor, russet coat, slops and startups.
In this second article, we explore the 16th and 17th century accounts of Tarleton’s stage clowning, his extempore physical and verbal wit which delighted mass audiences. So well-loved was his foolery that in contemporaneous and posthumous accounts it overshadowed the pathos of his serious acting, also accounted for here. Similarly neglected in modern accounts is Tarleton the serious and successful playwright, writing in the tradition of the morality play, so this article includes an evidenced reconstruction of one of his lost scripts, The Secound parte of the Seven Deadlie Sinns.
A third article explores Richard Tarleton the musician, and the fourth article reunites, for the first time in 400 years, the words and music of a 16th century ballad written in posthumous tribute.