From the late-medieval period through to the seventeenth century, English theatrical clowns carried a weighty cultural significance, only to have it stripped from them, sometimes violently, by the close of the Renaissance when the famed `license' of...
more
From the late-medieval period through to the seventeenth century, English theatrical clowns carried a weighty cultural significance, only to have it stripped from them, sometimes violently, by the close of the Renaissance when the famed `license' of fooli
CONTENTS; LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; INTRODUCTION. Unearthing Yoricks: Literary Archeology and the Ideologies of Early English Clowning; 1. Folly as Proto-Racism: Blackface in the "Natural" Fool Tradition; 2. "Sports and Follies Against the Pope": Tudor Evangelical Lords of Misrule; 3. "Verie Devout Asses": Ignorant Puritan Clowns; 4. The Fool "by Art": The All-Licensed "Artificial" Fool in the King Lear Quarto; EPILOGUE. License Revoked: Ending an Era; BIBLIOGRAPHY; INDEX;