The most popular performer on the Elizabethan stage was Richard Tarlton of the Queen’s Men, a clown with an extraordinary talent for improvisation and expertise in fencing, dancing, and music. He was culturally influential. His antics are repeated and lauded in the popular literature of his day, he was the mentor of the Shakespearean clown, Robert Armin, and he is the probable source of inspiration behind Shakespeare’s Yorick in Hamlet. Taking the versatility and enduring legacy of Tarlton’s performance skills as its starting point, this course will examine the non-verbal ways in which meaning was created by all early modern players for first audiences of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The course proposes that the skills of improvisation, physical co-ordination, timing, balance, and ‘reading’ people are integral to the dramatic success of players and the storytelling of the playhouse stage. We will explore historical sources that offer insight into the behind-the-scenes work of players, actors’ physical condition, the energy, feel, and sound of a play in performance, and the competence of the audience to ‘read’ the various kinds of embodied communication that transformed or deepened meaning-making in the plays. We will engage with theatre history, cultural history, and performance studies scholarship on stage direction, the provincial and European travels of players, and ancient folk customs which brought communities together through dancing, singing, acting, and fighting. Our purpose here will be to arrive at an informed understanding of the central place of movement arts in Shakespeare’s and other playwrights’ works. Finally, we will turn to a range of plays to interrogate how our reading practices have been broadened and strengthened by our contextual discoveries.
