The Queen’s Men Editions: Richard Tarlton (d. 1588)

Richard Tarlton (d. 1588)

Joined the Queen’s company in 1583, after theatrical success in Sussex’s Men in the 1570s and some ballad-writing.

Biographers have noted the difficulty of separating the boozy, provocative, unpredictable figure of fictional accounts of the man (such as 1613’s Tarlton’s Jests, printed long after his death) and the authentic man, whose seems to have carefully cultivated relationships across various social levels.

The Queen’s Men’s play Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590) by Tarlton’s fellow Robert Wilson, suggests that, in his youth, Tarlton was water-carrier:

Will
… what was that Tarlton? I neuer knew him.

Simplicity
What was he: a prentice in his youth of this honorable city, God be with him: when he was yoong he was leaning to the trade that my wife vseth nowe, and I haue vsed, vide lice shirt, waterbearing. I-wis he hath toss’d a tankard in Cornhill ere now…

(C1v)

There may be a pun involved, given the public association of Tarlton throughout the 1580s with the world of taverns. In 1584, he became free of the Company of Vintners and was evidently keeper of the Saba (or Sheba) tavern in Gracechurch Street as well as an ordinary in Paternoster Row, London. Peter Thomson postulates that There is a strong probability that the transference of his tavern style to the public theatres was Tarlton’s peculiar innovation as an actor and the basis of his extraordinary popularity (Thomson).

Though contemporary illustrations such as John Scottowe’s MS drawing in the British Library (Harley MS 3885, fol. 19) point to a stocky, short-nosed tabor and pipe player, these have to some extent been discredited as likenesses. There is agreement however that Tarlton’s appearance was uniquely rough and that he capitalized on it in performance. A marginal notation in Stow’s/Howe’s Annals suggests that his face was familiar enough to be used to denote certain London establishments: Tarleton so beloued that men vse his picture for their signes (Stow 698).

In 1582, Sir Philip Sidney was named godfather to Tarlton’s son. Three years after Sidney’s death, Tarlton asked Sir Francis Walsingham (Sidney’s father-in-law) to watch over the boy. Such connections might support Gabriel Harvey’s claim that Tarlton had social pretensions (Thomson). The actor styled himself a gentleman and in his will, one of the Groome of the Queenes maiesties chamber (Honigmann and Brock 57). Some anecdotes speak of him as a favourite of the Queen, not just for his comic diversions but because he was a pleasant talker (qtd. in Nungezar 350). Conceivably, part of the appeal of his performing style was its juxtaposition of his clownish persona and overt, perhaps at times incompetent, pretensions to gentility. See for example Derick in The Famous Victories: Do Clownes go in silk apparell? (Sp62). Mumford, too, in King Leir could be an appropriate role in this respect. Andrew Gurr suggests the ability to straddle social fields was key to Tarlton’s universal appeal (Gurr 126–132).

He had expertise with a sword. Mr. Tarlton, ordenary grome off her majestes chamber was made Master of the Fence in October of 1587. A Norwich fighting bird was named after him, according to George Wilson’s Commendation of Cockes, and Cock-Fighting (1607): because he alwayes came to the fight like a drummer, making a thundering noyse with his winges … which cocke fought many battels, with mighty and fierce aduersaries. Peter Thomson points to the irony that despite a reputation for aggression, the most reliable account we have of Tarlton finds him attempting to break up the quarrel between playgoer Wynsdon and members of the company in Norwich in June 1583.

Stylistically, Tarlton was famous for extemporising, or Tarletonising as Gabriel Harvey put it (1592). Peter Thomson, in connecting him to the role of Derick in The Famous Victories, wonders if entrances and exits were not, in particular, handled artfully by the actor:

On the open stages of Elizabethan London it was impossible to enter or leave the platform unobtrusively. Actors coming on to open a scene had first to locate themselves in order to place the narrative; actors leaving had to have a reason to go. Either way, they had a distance to cover from or to the stage door. That distance was Tarlton’s playground, and The Famous Victories furnishes it richly. (Thomson)

Henry Peacham’s Truth of our Times (1638) appears to recall a first-hand encounter with Tarlton in performance:

I remember when I was a School-boy in London, Tarlton acted a third sons part, such a one as I now speake of: His father being a very rich man, and lying upon his death-bed, called his three sonnes about him, who with teares, and on their knees craved his blessing, and to the eldest sonne, said hee, you are mine heire, and my land must descend upon you, aud I pray God blesse you with it: The eldest sonne replyed, Father I trust in God you shall yet live to enjoy it your selfe. To the second sonne, (said he) you are a scholler, and what profession soever you take upon you, out of my land I allow you threescore pounds a yeare towards your maintenance, and three hundred pounds to buy you books, as his brother, he weeping answer’d, I trust father you shall live to enjoy your money your selfe, I desire it not, &c. To the third, which was Tarlton, (who came like a rogue in a foule shirt without a a band, and in a blew coat with one sleeve, his stockings out at the heeles, and his head full of straw and feathers) as for you sirrah, quoth he) you know how often I have fetched you out of Newgate and Bridewell, you have beene an ungracious villaine, I have nothing to bequeath to you but the gallowes and a rope: Tarlton weeping and sobbing upon his knees (as his brothers) said, O Father, I doe not desire it, I trust it God you shall live to enjoy it your selfe. There are many such sons of honest and carefull parents in England at this day. (F4r–F5r)

Peacham’s 94th Epigram in Thalia’s Banquet (1620) refers in particular to a form of entrance:

As Tarlton when his head was onely seene,

The Tire-house doore and Tapistrie betweene,

Set all the mulltitude in such a laughter,

They could not hold for scarse an houre after,

So (Sir) I set you (as I promis’d) forth,

That all the world may wonder at your worth.
(C8r)

And Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse confirms a similar practice with the curtain, in describing:

A tale of a wise Iustice. Amongst other cholericke wise Iustices, he was one, that hauing a play presented before him and his Towne-ship, by Tarlton and the rest of his fellowes her Maiesties seruants, and they were now entring into their first merriment (as they call it) the people began exceedingly to laugh, when Tarlton first peept out his head. Whereat the Iustice, not a little moued, and seeing with his beckes and nods hee could not make them cease, he went with his staffe, and beat them round about vnmercifully on the bare pates, in that they being but Farmers & poore countrey Hyndes, would presume to laugh at the Queenes men, and make no more account of her cloath in his presence. (D2v)

He was buried in St. Leonard’s Shoreditch in 1588.

Prosopography

Andrew Griffin

Andrew Griffin is an associate professor in the department of English and an affiliate professor in the department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is general editor (text) of Queen’s Men Editions. He studies early modern drama and early modern historiography while serving as the lead editor at the EMC Imprint. He has co-edited with Helen Ostovich and Holger Schott Syme Locating the Queen’s Men (2009) and has co-edited The Making of a Broadside Ballad (2016) with Patricia Fumerton and Carl Stahmer. His monograph, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, History, Catastrophe, was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2019. He is editor of the anonymous The Chronicle History of King Leir (Queen’s Men Editions, 2011). He can be contacted at griffin@english.ucsb.edu.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Peter Cockett

Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the iArts (Integrated Arts) program at McMaster University. He is the co-editor, with Melinda Gough, of Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond (University of Toronto Press, 2025) which publishes the findings of their 2018 Performance as Research (PaR) workshop at the Stratford Festival Lab. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor of Queen’s Men Editions. His PaR directing credits include King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006), Clyomon and Clamydes (2010), and Three Ladies of London (2015) for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM). The process behind the 2006 productions is documented in depth on the project website Performing the Queen’s Men. For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players, he has directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.

Bibliography

Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Harvey, Gabriel. Four Letters and Certain Sonnets, especially Touching Robert Greene, and other Parties, by Him Abused. London: John Wolfe, 1592. STC 12900. ESTC S103855.

Honigmann, E.A.J., and Susan Brock. Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Nashe, Thomas. Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil. London: Abel Jeffes, 1592.

Nungezar, Edwin. A Dictionary of Actors. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929.

Peacham, Henry. Thalia’s banquet: furnished with an hundred and odde dishes of newly deuised epigrammes, whereunto (beside many worthy friends) are inuited all that loue in offensiue mirth, and the Muses. London: Printed by Nicholas Okes for Francis Constable, 1620. STC 19515. ESTC S110329.

Peacham, Henry. The truth of our times: revealed out of one mans experience, by way of essay. London: Printed by Nicholas Okes for James Becket, 1638. STC 19517. ESTC S114189.

Stow, John. The Annals of England. London, 1592. STC 23334. ESTC S117874.

Tarlton, Richard. Tarlton’s Jests. London, Thomas Snodam for John Budge, 1613. STC 23683.3. ESTC S106896.

Thomson, Peter. Richard Tarlton. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Wilson, George. The commendation of cockes, and cock-fighting. Wherein is shewed, that cocke-fighting was before the comming of Christ. London: Printed by Thomas Purfoot for Henrie Thomas, 1607. STC 25768. ESTC S111808.

Wilson, Robert. The pleasant and Stately Morall, of the three Lordes and three Ladies of London. With the great loy and Pompe, Solempnized at their Mariages: Commically interlaced with much honest Mirth, for pleasure and recreation, among many Morall obseruations and other important matters of due Regard. London. 1590. STC 25783. DEEP 128. ESTC S111813.

Orgography

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Metadata

Authority title	Richard Tarlton (d. 1588)
Type of text	About
Publisher	University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series	Queen’s Men Editions
Source	Content written by Andrew Griffin for Performing the Queen’s Men. Encoded by the LEMDO Team for publication in the QME 2.0 anthology on the LEMDO platform.
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Edition	Released with Queen’s Men Editions 2.0
Sponsor(s)	Queen’s Men Editions The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text; until 2026); and Janelle Jenstad, General Editor (Text; 2026–)
Encoding description	Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status	published
Funder(s)	Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada McMaster University Poculi Ludique Societas University of Waterloo University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies University of Victoria Friends of the ISE
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