In the contemporary theatre, the dominant figure is of course the director. Before the twentieth century, artistic decision-making lay in other hands. What sort of play should be staged? How should it be staged? These were not decisions for a ‘director’ but (chiefly) for the actor and for the writer. The historical relationship between the actor and the writer is inevitably elusive. The writer's work survives, the actor's work can only be inferred. It is all too easy to assume, in retrospect, that the actor was the servant or interpreter of the writer: to forget that the writer was, in no less real a sense, the servant or interpreter of the actor. This is the paradox that I shall explore in this book, in relation to the Elizabethan theatre. My subject is the role of the clown, and my particular focus is the relationship between two particular artists - the clown William Kemp and the writer William Shakespeare.

The actor's view of the writer is, as usual, lost. The writer's view of the actor is, or seems, easier to excavate. Shakespeare's commentary upon the clown's art in Hamlet is an obvious point at which to begin: