The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to by Robert Hornback
By Robert Hornback
From the late-medieval interval via to the 17th century, English theatrical clowns carried a weighty cultural importance, in basic terms to have it stripped from them, occasionally violently, by means of the shut of the Renaissance while the famed "license" of fooling was once successfully revoked. This groundbreaking survey of clown traditions within the interval seems to be either at their historical past, and divulges their hidden cultural contexts and legacies; it has far-reaching implications not just for our common figuring out of English clown varieties, but in addition their huge function in defining social, spiritual and racial obstacles. It starts with an exploration of formerly un-noted early representations of blackness in medieval psalters, cycle performs, and Tudor interludes, arguing that they're emblematic of folly and lack of knowledge instead of of evil. next chapters convey how protestants at Cambridge and at courtroom, through the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward, patronised a clownish, iconoclastic Lord of Misrule; examine the Elizabethan puritan degree clown; and circulate directly to a provocative reconsideration of the idiot in King Lear, drawing thoroughly clean conclusions. eventually, the epilogue issues to the satirical clowning which came about surreptitiously within the Interregnum, and the (sometimes violent) finish of "licensed" folly.
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Additional resources for The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare
Sample text
Yet, it is 35 36 37 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford, 1923), 4: 214. Peter Thomson, “Clowns, Fools and Knaves: Stages in the Evolution of Acting,” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre: vol. 1, Origins to 1660, ed. Jane Milling and Peter Thomson (Cambridge, 2004), 407–23; 411. Peter Thomson, “Tarlton, Richard (d. com/view/article/26971. ”39 Many critics have recently attempted to recover the authority of performance, but few have done justice to the clown’s authority.
129). Therefore, while it is partly true, as Vaughan believes, that “the visual code of the cycle plays was a simple binary: salvation versus damnation,”19 that binary was far more subtle than simply good versus evil. Blackness in these mystery plays was instead associated less with evil (at least as we know it) than with folly, madness, and an absence of that divine gift, the “light” of reason. The overtly foolish Devil of the mystery play tradition contained, then, what was surely a significant development in the history of racism; here was not simply a black Devil’s fall into the depths of hell but, more importantly, a depiction of his descent into the degradations of folly via blackness.
James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips (London, 1860), 164. Southworth, Fools and Jesters, 37. Ahuva Belkin, “Antichrist as the Embodiment of the Insipiens in ThirteenthCentury French Psalters,” Florilegium 10 (1988–91): 65–77; here quoting 71–2. See the excellent facsimile edition, Der Stuttgarter Bilderpsalter Bibl. Fol. 23 Wurrtembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart (Stuttgart, 1965), vol. 1, of 2, sig. 15r. The insipiens is on the upper right. Russell, Lucifer, 133. Russell makes no reference to the black insipiens.