Abstract:
Richard Tarlton's recorded habit of sticking his face through the arras to announce his entrance is an instance.2 Records of other regular bits have largely disappeared, but it seems highly likely they were part of the repertory of performance and the skill set of the comic player. Roman comic actors, on the other foot, wore the soccus, a lowheeled or loose-fitting slipper, which presumably also defined a gait, with ease and nimbleness of movement compared to the slower-and more precarious-stalk of the cothurnus.5 For the early modern stage, the nearest we can come to a similar vocabulary of gait for clowns is the not-surprising term ''jig,'' associated at once with verse movement and physical movement in Marlowe's dismissal of his predecessors for their ''jigging veins of rhyming mother wit/ And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,'' in contrast to ''the stately tent of war'' containing Alleyn's Tamburlaine, famous for his tragic stalking.