Embracing Disruption: Clowning, Improvisation, and the Unscripted in Early Shakespearean Performance

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Stephen Wisker

Embracing Disruption

Clowning, Improvisation, and the Unscripted in Early Shakespearean Performance

Stephen Wisker

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English

Routledge
23 July 2025

Performance art; Theatre Studies; Shakespeare plays

Series: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This volume celebrates the centrality of clowning to Shakespeare’s conception of theatre and how he purposefully invites the clown’s anarchic energy into the heart of his dramaturgy.

Having evoked his comic inheritance in the person and practice of the great clown Dick Tarlton, the book examines Shakespeare’s innovative deployment of his company clown Will Kemp alongside leading man Richard Burbage. In chapters on Romeo and Juliet and Henry IV, the book explores the enormously generative, unstable, and compelling relationship between these two actors, Burbage and Kemp—the hero and the clown—and how this extraordinary dynamic between them was experienced by the audience in performance. Subsequent chapters show the ghosts of both Tarlton and Kemp informing Burbage’s performance as Hamlet and then Kemp’s successor Robert Armin continuing this dynamic as the Fool alongside Burbage in King Lear. In each instance, the presence of the clown (or Hamlet’s own clown-like behavior) radically informs the audience’s understanding of the hero. Furthermore, the clown’s increasingly sophisticated deployment and absorption into Shakespeare’s plays comments on and resists the transformation of the Elizabethan theatre.

This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in Performance studies and Shakespeare studies.

By: Stephen Wisker
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 138mm,
ISBN: 9781032740799
ISBN 10: 1032740795
Series: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
Pages: 168
Publication Date: 23 July 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Stephen Wisker is an Assistant Professor of Theatre in The School of Fine Arts at Wesleyan College.

Reviews for Embracing Disruption: Clowning, Improvisation, and the Unscripted in Early Shakespearean Performance

''Embracing Disruption brilliantly fuses historical reconstruction and clown practice to demonstrate how Shakespeare preserved and exploited the disruptive nature of the clown in the face of growing constraints on clowning and improvisation. An essential text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Shakespeare.'' Professor Robert Knopf, Professor Emeritus, Department of Theatre nad Dance, University at Buffalo