Robert Armin

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Armin stepped onto the Globe stage in August 1600, and nothing about the clown in English theatre was ever quite the same again. He was, on paper, the replacement for Will Kempe, who had just left the Lord Chamberlain's Men under circumstances that remain unexplained to this day. But what Armin brought to that stage was something fundamentally different from what Kempe had offered. The questions that follow from this moment are rich ones. How does a goldsmith's apprentice from King's Lynn end up reshaping the fool in the greatest plays ever written? What did Shakespeare find in Armin that he could not find in anyone before him? And what exactly is the difference between a fool natural and a fool artificial?

• 2. From Lynn to London

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  John Armyn II of King's Lynn was a tailor, and the trade seemed like a natural inheritance for his son Robert, born around 1568. Instead, John Armyn apprenticed his boy to a goldsmith named John Lonyson, a family friend in the same Norfolk town. Lonyson held the position of Master of Works at the Royal Mint in the Tower of London, a post of considerable authority, and the apprenticeship pulled the young Armin out of a craftsman's world and into a different social orbit entirely. Lonyson died in 1582, just a year after Armin began, and the apprenticeship was transferred to another master. The years that followed stretched Armin's ambitions in unexpected directions. By 1590, his name appeared in the preface of a religious tract called A Brief Resolution of the Right Religion. By 1592, when his formal apprenticeship ended, both Thomas Nashe in Strange News and Gabriel Harvey in Pierce's Supererogation were already mentioning him as a writer of ballads, though none of those ballads are known to have survived. A story preserved in Tarlton's Jests claims that the Queen's own jester, Richard Tarlton, once noticed verses Armin had chalked on a wall in frustration at a non-paying lodger, found them clever, and wrote back expressing a wish to take the young man as his own apprentice. The tale is unconfirmed, but it hints at something real: well before Armin ever joined a company of players, he was already circling the world of professional wit.

• 3. The Chandos Years

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  Sometime in the 1590s, Armin joined a company of players under the patronage of William Brydges, 4th Baron Chandos. The troupe is obscure, and most of what can be said about Armin's work for them must be inferred from the surviving text of his own play, The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke, written around 1597. The preface to its 1609 quarto shows that Armin played Blue John, a clown in the tradition of Tarlton and Kempe, and probably doubled in the role of Tutch, a character of sharper wit, the kind of philosophical jester he would later refine in London. A dedication he wrote to his patron's widow in 1604 suggests some personal warmth toward the Brydges family. Around the turn of the century, while still associated with Chandos's Men, Armin published two revealing books. Fool Upon Fool, which first appeared in 1600, gathered portraits of natural fools, some of whom he had met personally. In the same year he published Quips upon Questions, a collection of dialogues with his marotte, which he named Signor Truncheon. The contrast with Tarlton's style is telling: where Tarlton traded jokes with his audience in a direct battle of wits, Armin developed multiple personas, drew on improvised song, and offered commentary rather than combat. He reported in that book that on either Tuesday the 25th of December 1599 or Tuesday the 1st of January 1600, he would travel to Hackney to attend his "right honourable good lord," who may have been Baron Chandos or, perhaps more likely, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who lived there.

• 4. Shakespeare's Fool

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  Armin is credited with originating most of the great comic roles Shakespeare wrote after 1600: Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, the Fool in King Lear, Lavatch in All's Well That Ends Well, and possibly Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, the Porter in Macbeth, and the Fool in Timon of Athens. Among these, Touchstone has drawn the sharpest critical disagreement. Harold Bloom called him "rancidly vicious," arguing that this quality serves as a touchstone should, testing the gold of Rosalind's spirit. John Palmer pushed back, insisting that a true cynic does not belong in the Forest of Arden, and that Touchstone must be, at heart, a thoroughly good fellow affecting a malcontented front. Feste in Twelfth Night was, by most accounts, written directly for Armin's particular gifts: he was scholar, singer, and wit. Lear's Fool, though, operates differently from either. Where Touchstone and Feste are philosopher-fools, Lear's Fool is the natural fool Armin had studied and written about. He delivers the play's prophecy lines to a king who barely listens, stays loyal throughout, and then disappears from the play entirely. A minority of scholars have also proposed that Armin created Iago in Othello, pointing out that Iago sings two drinking songs and that Othello is the only play in the sequence from As You Like It to Timon of Athens that has no fool or clown for Armin to play. An alternative view assigns Iago to John Lowin, with Armin taking the smaller role of Othello's servant. Outside Shakespeare's works, Armin appears in the cast list for Ben Jonson's The Alchemist and may have played Drugger; he probably played Pasarello in John Marston's The Malcontent, a part Marston may have added specifically with him in mind.

• 5. The Fool Transformed

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  Leslie Hotson, writing in Shakespeare's Motley, offered what became a defining assessment: "If any player breathed who could explore with Shakespeare the shadows and fitful flashes of the borderland of insanity, that player was Armin." The shift Armin brought is sometimes described as the "taming of the clown." Where the older comedy tradition had relied on a rustic servingman who played the buffoon, Armin created a new figure: the high-comic domestic wit, someone whose wisdom and wordplay were indistinguishable from each other. His arrival in the Chamberlain's Men is said to have pushed Shakespeare toward the "world-wisely fool," the kind of figure who has a place everywhere but belongs nowhere. Armin articulated the underlying theory himself. In A Nest of Ninnies, reissued in 1608, he drew a distinction between the fool natural and the fool artificial. The natural fool never drops the act even to save himself, never tries to be anything but his own unruly self. The artificial fool is always trying to please, always the lackey. Ken Kesey, in an interview, reached for this distinction when talking about Shakespeare's fools, paraphrasing Armin's framework, though he mistakenly attributed the role of Falstaff to Armin rather than to Will Kempe. The characters Armin both wrote and played were designed to do something specific: to point out absurdity from within it, never from outside. His burial is recorded in the registers of St Botolph's Aldgate on the 30th of November 1615, and his friend Augustine Phillips of the King's Men had already bequeathed him twenty shillings as a "fellow." His collected works were published in 1880 under the title The Works of Robert Armin, Actor, 1605-1609, edited by A.B. Grosart.