The “memory” that held “a seat / In this distracted globe” (Hamlet, 1.5.96–7) clearly included the recollection of the Morality stage. For one thing, Shakespeare's plays remembered the morality tradition through the latter's most theatrical figuration: the “old Vice” (Twelfth Night, 4.2.124). As highly performative equivocator, the Vice drew on two divergent modes of authorizing the uses of dramatic language and theatrical space. Central to this divergence in discursive practice was a formal incongruity between the serious and the comic which, though deeply embedded in the earlier history of medieval drama, continued to provide a semantic underside to the morality context. Combining sinfulness and sport, the Vice – a strange gallimaufry of types and roles – appealed to a divided authority in signification. Through the performative thrust of his own lop-sided inclination, this farcical agent pointedly upset symmetries in the allegorical order of things. Disturbing the homiletic bifurcations between good and evil, the Vice championed all sorts of confusions between serious sinfulness and comic theatricality.

In English Renaissance drama the Vice is perhaps best remembered in the traces he left, via Richard Tarlton and Will Kemp, in the Shakespearean clown. More broadly, his legacy helped Renaissance dramatists straddle the divide between the comic and the tragic, and gave them a powerful model for, among other “playwright” figures in dramatic texts, the darkly humorous plotters of revenge tragedy.

When Shakespeare began to write for the London stage, Marlowe's plays were sharply redefining the aims of representation in the Elizabethan theatre. As the prologues to Tamburlaine suggested, the dramatist felt authorized to “lead” the theatre to a new horizon of legitimation, one against which the hero could more nearly be viewed as a self-coherent “picture.” This at least is how the prologue to The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great projected innovative uses of “this tragic glass” from the earlier play's introduction:

Such processing of page and stage, the intricate conjuncture of verbal and visual signs, drew on and transformed – even confounded – traditional modes of response. The cultural impact of print helped the protagonist “unfold,” for readers and audience members beholding the scene “at large,” various new shifting, wavering meanings from dramatic fiction.

So it was with good reason that the play's printer, Richard Jones, assumed in his preface to the Octavo and Quarto editions of 1590 that these “tragical discourses” would appeal “To the Gentlemen Readers and others that take pleasure in reading Histories.” Moving from pen to stage and then back to printed page for privileged “reading,” these eminently perusable representations recommended themselves in terms of what “worthiness” the “eloquence of the author” could profitably deliver to a gentle preoccupation with “serious affairs and studies.”

To move from a late moral play to Shakespeare's first tetralogy is to encounter a puzzling hiatus. This hiatus divides the moral interludes and related dramatic medleys of the 1560s and 1570s from the new and startling impetus coming from Kyd and Marlowe in the second half of the 1580s. Never sufficiently accounted for, the space between these types of plays, and between their dates of composition, bears significantly on the emergent Elizabethan relations of page and stage. Grappling with the terra incognita of these years, theatre historians, particularly in the wake of Janet Loengard's work on the Red Lion theatre, have encountered a marked “disparity between theatrical activity and printed texts,” where the extremely small number of extant texts sits uneasily with widespread flourishing of performance practices. As we know, regular stagings of amphitheatrical shows for large audiences occurred not only after the opening of the Theatre (1576) and the Curtain (1577) but even a decade earlier, with the setting up of the Red Lion (1567). Recent work in theatre history has given us a cultural landscape that, even when tantalizingly obscured, prompts new and pertinent questions.

Up to a certain time, the history of dramatic literature (the work of such authors as, for example, Nicholas Udall, Richard Edwards, George Whetstone, and George Gascoigne) was largely discontinuous with itinerant and nonacademic shows. These shows clearly proliferated prior to the Shakespearean stage.

The Tudor Vice was not, of course, the only inherited agent through which the Elizabethan theatre adapted “matter of worthiness” to public performance. Next to the Renaissance descendant of the allegory of evil, and certainly related to him, stood the clown and, at a further remove, the fool. Despite their obvious dissimilarities, an element of kinship joined these sinister and comic agents of contrariety. They shared the open, playhouse-conscious, and quickening space of the early modern stage, especially when addressing the spectators, anticipating their responses, and insinuating their complicity. Far from contenting themselves with representing verbally prescribed meanings, they could both play upon and “mistake the word.” Such was indeed their “old vice still” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 3.1.284). Given this punning on topsy-turvy verbal action, Elizabethans must have recognized the similar play on words when Thomas Nashe referred to Will Kemp as “jest-monger and Vice-gerent general to the ghost of Dick Tarlton.” No doubt the kinship of Clown and Vice was marked by much flux and instability. We need only recall The Book of Sir Thomas More and the manner by which speech headings for Inclination – the Vice and leading player in the drama's interlude – were transformed into, simply, “clo.” for Clown.

Owing to its complexity, the “Clown's ancestry in the Tudor ‘Vice’” cannot be addressed here in anything like the manner it deserves.

As we move from personation to characterization, it is paramount to dismiss the idea of any firm boundary between these two modes of dramatic figuration. To be sure, what has come to be thought of as “deep” characterization made itself most clearly manifest in early modern drama from the late 1590s onward. Here, as is well known, such characters as Brutus, Rosalind, and Hamlet helped inaugurate fascinating displays of “that within” (Hamlet, 1.2.85). Such displays accompanied a linguistic and behavioral self-consciousness that would, in the ensuing years, distinguish figures such as Lear, Cleopatra, the Duchess of Malfi, and Beatrice-Joanna, to name only these. To this limited extent, then, personation and characterization may be defined in relation to their respective chronologies, according to which, for a brief period, character emerged as a more comprehending image of subjectivity in the theatre. It was a vulnerable mode of selfhood because the groping for a new depth within was inseparable from presenting a worldly without. Between the two arose a relationship that, wanting precedent as well as precept, was beset by an unexplored, untested measure of both engagement and discrepancy. In such characterization any “secret close” (Richard III, 1.1.158) design of passion and desire could be made interactive with a rich, imaginary set of public objects and options, challenges, and charges.

In this way characterization goes beyond personation in the dramatic fashioning of subjectivity.

In the preceding chapter we explored how the conjuncture of bodily performance and literary language helped constitute the agencies of clowns and fools. We now move from the study of doubly encoded agencies to the comically delivered forms and functions of clownish performance in both presentation and representation. For the preeminence of a presentational purpose, we will turn to what arguably is the most articulate jester in the Elizabethan period, the non-Shakespearean player/clown in Thomas Nashe's Summers Last Will and Testament (1592). Along with the more (re)presentational Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we shall then glance at the shape and purpose of several role-playing clowns in Shakespeare's plays after the watershed year of 1594.

The entirely pragmatic distinction made here between clowns and fools bypasses their complex genealogy. Reaching back to late ritual practices such as the men's ceremonial, “fool” actually antedates modern theatrical forms of clowning. As far as their etymology provides a clue, the word “clown” is, according to the OED, “of later introduction” and retains a rural connotation, such as a “mere rustic, a boor,” or “a clout,” with only a late sixteenth-century theatrical adaptation. In contrast, “fool” derives from Old French via Middle English sources. In Shakespeare's theatre the transition from clowning to fooling is not as clear-cut as the departure of clownish Will Kemp and the subsequent playing and singing of Robert Armin have led some critics to assume.

This book concludes a larger project on authority and representation in early modern discourse and theatre. Having previously discussed the conjuncture of playing and writing on Elizabethan stages, and in prologues delivered on them, we now shift focus to Shakespeare's plays themselves. Here we approach them through the confederation and dissension of the two media, dramatic language and performing bodies. Just as language in Shakespeare's theatre was used in myriad ways, so also did performing assume and extend multiple modes, styles, and functions – especially in the apparently impromptu range of its interaction with language. Still, there remained a gap even in the interdependence of the two media. Drawing on two different forms of cultural production, the plays in performance sought to overcome and yet allude to and use the rift between them. Shakespeare's achievement cannot be separated from his astonishing readiness not only to acknowledge but also to play with the difference between the meaning of words and the practice of their delivery. The gap between language and the body afforded the playwright a new reach, cogency, and mobility in the uses of embodied signs.

This gap and the ways to accommodate and exploit it were marked by highly particular circumstances. The latter arose as the late Renaissance culture of literacy and the new technology of print began to affect and to intermingle with traditional ways of delivering oral or nonverbal feats and skills.

King Lear sets into motion before us a dynamic compendium of modes of playing in the early modern theatre. These modes range from Lear's madness, Edgar's excessive role-playing, Kent's threadbare disguise, and the “all-licensed Fool” to the lower, more earthy “new pranks” (Goneril's phrases [King Lear, 1.4.201, 238]) that recur so frequently in the tragedy. To an unsurpassed, even staggering extent, a thick performative mingles, but only partially coalesces, with a representation of Albion's division. Between them, and over a residual gap, the play is saturated with insights as unsanctioned as its wild assemblage of performance tricks and practices. The rendering of characters alone includes a full, bewildering assortment of acting styles and affects of the personal, from allegorical figuration and iconographic portraiture to the improvised personation and “deep” characterization we have examined in the preceding chapters. Far from narrowing the cultural scope that certain historicist readings have discerned in it, King Lear's astonishing array of dramaturgies enhances that scope. When “the realm of Albion” is “Come to great confusion” (3.2.85–6), for instance, it is the body-centered, diversionary practices of the mad Lear, the lawless Edgar, the proverbial fool, which seek to set it right. In its turn, the topsy-turvy thrust in bodies and discourses is itself subjected to a kind of reversal: “contrariety” is used to heal and to reveal, to turn a false order of things crossways, upside-down or inside-out.

During Shakespeare's lifetime, a vitalized print culture affected London's theatrical scene greatly. Making broad headway into the still strong culture of orality and storytelling, the “paper-sea” that John Florio noticed with some amazement left lasting marks on dramatic output and form. That print did so even as it drew energy from the regular performances at the purpose-built playhouses testifies to the close relationship the two media shared. While we are used to thinking of stage and page in fairly linear ways – printed sources, for example, leading to theatrical narratives that in turn form the basis for printed dramatic texts – there is good reason, as Barbara Mowat has argued, for understanding the “relationships among performance, playscript, and printed text” as “more fluid, more disturbed, than scholars have tended to imagine and describe them.” From such examples as the complicated material life of the Pericles story, 1607, and the testimony of Sir Richard Cholmeley's Players, in 1611, that they had performed only what was available in “the printed booke,” to the evidence, in the later Douai Shakespeare manuscripts, of “playtexts that have transmigrated from printed texts annotated for performance into manuscript playbooks,” it is clear that the connections between stage and page were dynamic, and resist univocal pronouncements concerning the directions or duration of agency.

We have already seen how the striking physical ensemble of a clowning, “self-misformed lout” had migrated from the boards of the stage to Joseph Hall's satirical page in 1597's Virgidemiarum (see above, pp. 111–12).

During the past three decades, the subject of cross-dressing in Shakespeare's theatre has been greatly advanced by feminist criticism. Noting that sartorial displays both on stage and off routinely appealed to a society conscious of the power inherent in clothing (a power that rendered costumes a primary element in the theatres' montage of attractions), critics have productively explored both the boy actor's donning of female costume and female characters' strategic adoption of male garb. Studies by Jean Howard, Laura Levine, Sue-Ellen Case, Lisa Jardine, Karen Newman, and Peter Stallybrass, among others, have broadened the conventional portrait of cross-dressing generated, in Stephen Orgel's words, by “three centuries of theatre historians, who have treated it as a minor point, of interest primarily for its effect on disguise plots.” Coinciding with the field's heightened interest in the construction and representation of gender and sexuality, recent investigations have opened up vistas on both the practice and the implications of cross-dressing, inside and outside the walls of the early modern playhouses. If a primary aim of criticism attuned to feminist interests is, as Lisa Jardine writes in the preface to her landmark study, Still Harping on Daughters, “to retrieve agency for the female subject in history” and to do so “at the intersection of systems of behaviour, customs, beliefs,” few studies have done more to meet this goal than those which have shed light on the performance of female roles by young male actors in London's theatres.

To reopen the question of character here is to contextualize, between page and stage, the various forms and functionings of Shakespeare's dramatis personae. Once we have begun, in Paul Yachnin's words, “to understand that Shakespearean characterization is an artful response to the situation of the theatre,” we can better come to grips historically with the complexities of this response. To do so we must examine how a distinctly literary product unfolded within a culturally innovative and socially divergent institution. Here it seems difficult to do justice to a rich variety of interactions between two major communicative modes of articulation without taking account of a highly varied set of effects. In view of an extremely wide and changeful range of performance practices, we propose to look at the two media in a radically contingent relationship.

In this relationship the respective weight and potency of the one inflects the workings of the other. Put simply, the making of Shakespeare's dramatis personae can be traced on a wide spectrum bracketed by two extreme ways of figuration. One is where writing, in shaping dramatic speech and action of imaginary agents, provides given, more or less authoritative contours for staging images of artificial persons. The other sees the strength of the performative, the material act of staged counterfeiting, as pervasive enough to assert itself in its own right and to affect by its own authority the imaginary figuration of a person even before it comes to be staged.