Shakespeare's clown : actor and text in the Elizabethan playhouse
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Shakespeare's clown : actor and text in the Elizabethan playhouse
UT Back-in-Print Service, c1987]
Related Bibliography 1 items
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. 214-218
Includes index
Reprint. Original published: Cambridge ; New York, N. Y. : Cambridge University Press , 1987
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book argues that a professional Elizabethan theatre company always contained one actor known as 'the clown'. Its focus is Will Kemp, clown to the Chamberlain's Men from 1594 to 1599 and famed for his solo dance from London to Norwich in 1600. David Wiles combines textual, theatrical and biographical lines of research in order to map out Kemp's career. He shows how Shakespeare and other dramatists made use of Kemp's talents and wrote specific roles as vehicles for him. He discerns a perpetual and productive tension between the ambitions of a progressive writer and the aspirations of a traditional actor whose art was rooted in improvisation. The book also describes the clown tradition in general, dealing with Kemp's inheritance from medieval theatre, with the work of Richard Tarlton, the great comic actor of the 1570s and 1580s, and with Kemp's successor, Robert Armin, who created the 'fool' parts in Shakespeare.
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note
- 1. The Vice: from Mankind to Merchant of Venice
- 2. Tarlton: the first 'clown'
- 3. Kemp: a biography
- 4. Kemp's jigs
- 5. 'The clown' in playhouse terminology
- 6. The roles of Kemp 'the clown'
- 7. The genesis of the text: two explorations
- 8. The conventions governing Kemp's scripted roles
- 9. Falstaff
- 10. Robert Armin
- 11. William Kemp and Harry Hunks: play as game, actor as sign - a theoretical conclusion
- Appendix
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index.
by "Nielsen BookData"