Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Unearthing Yoricks: Literary Archeology and the Ideologies of Early English Clowning
- 1 Folly as Proto-Racism: Blackface in the “Natural” Fool Tradition
- 2 “Sports and Follies Against the Pope”: Tudor Evangelical Lords of Misrule
- 3 “Verie Devout Asses”: Ignorant Puritan Clowns
- 4 The Fool “by Art”: The All-Licensed “Artificial” Fool in the King Lear Quarto
- Epilogue: License Revoked: Ending an Era
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Epilogue: License Revoked: Ending an Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Unearthing Yoricks: Literary Archeology and the Ideologies of Early English Clowning
- 1 Folly as Proto-Racism: Blackface in the “Natural” Fool Tradition
- 2 “Sports and Follies Against the Pope”: Tudor Evangelical Lords of Misrule
- 3 “Verie Devout Asses”: Ignorant Puritan Clowns
- 4 The Fool “by Art”: The All-Licensed “Artificial” Fool in the King Lear Quarto
- Epilogue: License Revoked: Ending an Era
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
IF CENSORSHIP of the Fool is debatable in King Lear's Folio revision, its effects on clowns are all too apparent by the close of the Renaissance. Even before the oppressive censorship of the Interregnum, aesthetic censoriousness had already singled out the clown in the Stuart era. In fact, Armin's retirement from the King's Men in 1613 marked a dramatic turning-point in stage clowning; he is the last specialist in witty fools that I have been able to uncover. Making a related claim, Peter Thomson likewise observes that “In an often-forgotten sense, indeed, the clown outlasted the fool as the Jack Pudding of seventeenth-century [fare].” Thomson identifies a major shift away from fools toward dishonest “knaves” like DeFlores in The Changeling (1622), signaling “a downgrading of the philosophical significance of folly in Stuart London,” so that any foolishness, whether artificial or no, “bec[a]me shameful, and the [Stuart] comedian [had to] accommodate himself to satire” – or, rather, outside of the citizen playhouse, a new mode of satire that no longer privileged the clown.
Except at the plebian Fortune and the Red Bull, the comedian increasingly had to accommodate himself to neoclassical ideals. Indeed, when Fletcher announced, in the opening line of the Prologue to Henry VIII(1613), that the King's Men “c[a]me no more to make you laugh” (l. 1), he evidently meant it, at least in so far as the company would be less inclined to tolerate the supposedly low laughter of “merry, bawdy” clowns (l. 14).
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- The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare , pp. 183 - 204Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009