Embracing Disruption

This volume celebrates the centrality of clowning to Shakespeares conception of theatre and how he purposefully invites the clowns anarchic energy into the heart of his dramaturgy. Having evoked his comic inheritance in the person and practice of the great clown Dick Tarlton, the book examines Shakespeares innovative deployment of his company clown Will Kemp alongside leading man Richard Burbage. In chapters on Romeo and Juliet and Henry IV, the book explores the enormously generative, unstable, and compelling relationship between these two actors, Burbage and Kempthe hero and the clownand how this extraordinary dynamic between them was experienced by the audience in performance. Subsequent chapters show the ghosts of both Tarlton and Kemp informing Burbages performance as Hamlet and then Kemps successor Robert Armin continuing this dynamic as the Fool alongside Burbage in King Lear. In each instance, the presence of the clown (or Hamlets own clown-like behavior) radically informs the audiences understanding of the hero. Furthermore, the clowns increasingly sophisticated deployment and absorption into Shakespeares plays comments on and resists the transformation of the Elizabethan theatre. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in Performance studies and Shakespeare studies.