Richard Tarlton (1530?-1588) was arguably the most famous as well as the most popular actor in the early days of Elizabethan professional theatre. He was a premiere member of the Queen's Men acting troupe from 1583 until his death, touring throughout the country in a series of plays that prefigured and influenced Shakespeare and the other early modern English playwrights. Tarlton's comic style was unique in that he not only performed outstandingly as a character in scripted plays, but was notorious for his "jests" - extratheatrical and often [adlibbed] pieces that followed the plays, in which the clown would step out of character and perform song-and-dance pieces based on "theams" shouted out by the audience. Tarlton acted these multivalent performances for a strikingly broad cross-section of English citizens, from the base groundlings to Queen Elizabeth herself.
AREAS OF RESEARCH
- Biography of Richard Tarlton
- Touring with the Queen's Men
- Tarlton's Jests
- Introduction
- Content
- Printed materials purported to be written by Tarlton
- Printed materials written about Tarlton
- Manuscript materials written about Tarlton
- About the Project
- Resources and Further Reading
The Tarlton Project is licensed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
