Shadows of Yorick

The article is centred on the figures of Richard Tarlton and his understudy, Robert Armin. It focuses on the social function of the fool in the Renaissance period and the liminality of the interchangeable social role of jesters and kings, as the jester becomes a carnivalesque king. The documentation sources are centred around Armin’s chronicle of the so to speak court fools of his times, Nest of Ninnies (1608) and Tarlton’s Jests (1611) filtered through Bakhtin’s motif of laughter as a conquering force against fear, and regeneration or rebirth through laughter. I intend to prove that Armin’s personal documentation combined with Tarlton’s legacy was crucial for the shaping of such deep characters as King Lear’s Fool, the Clowns from Hamlet, Touchstone from As You Like It and Feste from Twelfth Night. Also, the study will try to provide a full account of the carnival motifs of regeneration that can be find throughout Armin’s chronicle and Tarlton’s Jests, such as violence, sex, death and regeneration – as common features that link as a red thread the jests of fools depicted in these pages. The double act that follows the fool’s `lively act` of inversion, the king’s fool/ the fool’s king and the dialectics of substance and shadow, order and chaos will try to pin-point the general traits of the fool’s social function, a process made harder by the fact that the fool normally resits these characterisations, since he is the ultimate disturber of apparent designs and/ or orderly structures. It might be tempting to limit the study to the political aspect of the discussion upon the fools’ social function, yet this would be a completely different article in its own right, since the fool – viewed as a social figure – served a wide range of political purposes. Rather, for now at least, I will focus my study to the artistic merits of Armin’s Nest of Ninnies and Tarlton’s Jests and the cultural context in which they belong and also the sources and influences that spawned them and of course, their off-springs.