Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre

To early modern audiences, the 'clown' was much more than a minor play character. A celebrity performer, he was a one-man sideshow whose interactive entertainments - face-pulling, farce interludes, jigs, rhyming contests with the crowd - were the main event. Clowning epitomized a theatre that was heterogeneous, improvised, participatory, and irreducible to dramatic texts. How, then, did those texts emerge? Why did playgoers buy books that deleted not only the clown, but them as well? Challenging the narrative that clowns were 'banished' by playwrights like Shakespeare and Jonson, Richard Preiss argues that clowns such as Richard Tarlton, Will Kemp, and Robert Armin actually made playwrights possible - bridging, through the publication of their routines, the experience of 'live' and scripted performance. Clowning and Authorship tells the story of how, as the clown's presence decayed into print, he bequeathed the new categories around which theatre would organize: the author, and the actor.

• Examines a species of performer who played a vital role in the shape of early modern playhouse entertainment, expanding our knowledge of how audiences and performance functioned relative to one another
• Looks beyond printed plays as sources of evidence of theatrical practice, enabling a more composite understanding of early modern theatrical production
• Presents new readings of non-canonical texts written by stage clowns, using these to provide new analysis of canonical plays by Shakespeare, Jonson and others