discontinued in the time of Shakspeare, and we here see that he had abundant reason for his precept in Hamlet: "Let those that play your clowns, speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them, that will of themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered." This practice was undoubtedly coeval with the English stage; for we are told that Sir Thomas More, while he lived as a page with Archbishop Moreton, (about the year 1490,) as the Christmas plays were going on in the palace, would sometimes suddenly step upon the stage, " without studying for the matter," and exhibit a part of his own, which gave the audience much more entertainment than the whole performance besides.5 6 But the peculiar province of the Clown was to entertain the audience after the play was finished, at which time themes were sometimes given to him by some of the spectators, to descant upon; but more commonly the audience were entertained by a jig. A jig was a ludicrous metrical composition, often in rhyme, which was sung by the Clown, who likewise, I believe, occasionally danced, and 5 Roper's Life and Death of More, 8vo. 1716, p. 3. 6" I remember I was once at a play in the country, where, as Tarlton's use was, the play being done, every one so pleased to throw up his theame: amongst all the rest one was read to this effect, word by word: Tarlton, I am one of thy friends, and none of thy foes, &c. To this challenge Tarleton immediately replied in four lines of loose verse. Tarlton's Jeasts, 4to. 1611. In was always accompanied by a tabor and pipe." these jigs more persons than one were sometimes "Out upon them, [the players] they spoile our trade,—they open our crosse-biting, our conny-catching, our traines, our traps, our gins, our snares, our subtilties; for no sooner have we a tricke of deceipt, but they make it common, singing gigs, and making jeasts of us, that every boy can point out our houses as they passe by." Kind-Hartes Dreame, Signat. E 3. b. See also Pierce Pennilesse, &c. 1592: like the queint comedians of our time, "That when the play is done, do fall to rhime," &c. So, in A Strange Horse-race, by Thomas Decker, 1613: "Now as after the cleare stream hath glided away in his owne current, the bottom is muddy and troubled; and as I have often seen after the finishing of some worthy tragedy or catastrophe in the open theatres, that the sceane, after the epilogue, hath been more black, about a nasty bawdy jigge, then the most horrid scene in the play was; the stinkards speaking all things, yet no man understanding any thing; a mutiny being amongst them, yet none in danger; no tumult, and yet no quietness; no mischiefe begotten, and yet mischiefe borne; the swiftness of such a torrent, the more it overwhelms, breeding the more pleasure; so after these worthies and conquerors had left the field, another race was ready to begin, at which, though the persons in it were nothing equal to the former, yet the shoutes and noyse at these was as great, if not greater." The following lines in Hall's Satires, 1597, seem also to allude to the same custom : "One higher pitch'd, doth set his soaring thought "Then weeneth he his base drink-drowned spright "Graced with huff-cap termes and thund'ring threats, rr Big-sounding sentences, and words of state, introduced. The original of the entertainment which this buffoon afforded our ancestors between the acts and after the play, may be traced to the satyrical interludes of Greece, and the Attellans and Mimes of the Roman stage." The Exodiarii 8 "Faire patch me up his pure iambick verse, "Now least such frightful showes of fortunes fall, "And laughes, and grins, and frames his mimick face, "Then doth the theatre echo all aloud "With gladsome noyse of that applauding croud, "A goodly hoch-poch, when vile russetings "Are matcht with monarchs and with mighty kings!" &c. The entertainments here alluded to were probably "the fond and frivolous jestures," described in the Preface to Marlowe's Tamburlaine, 1590, which the printer says, he omitted, "as farre unmeete for the matter, though they have been of some vaine conceited fondlings greatly gaped at, what times they were shewed upon the stage in their graced deformities." It should seem, from D'Avenant's Prologue to The Wits, when acted at the Duke's theatre, in 1662, that this species of entertainment was not even then entirely disused : "So country jigs and farces, mixt among "Heroick scenes, make plays continue long." Blount, in his Glossographia, 1681, 5th edit. defines a farce, "A fond and dissolute play or comedy. Also the jig at the end of an interlude, wherein some pretty knavery is acted." Kempe's Jigg of the Kitchen-stuffe-woman, and Philips his Jigg of the Slyppers, were entered on the Stationers' books in 1595; but I know not whether they were printed. There is, I believe, no jig now extant in print. 8 "Carmine qui tragico vilem certavit ob hircum, HOR. De Arte Poetica. "Urbicus exodio risum movet Atellana and Emboliariæ of the Mimes are undoubtedly the "Exodiarius in fine ludorum apud veteres intrabat, quod ridiculus foret; ut quicquid lacrymarum atque tristitiæ coegissent ex tragicis affectibus, hujus spectaculi risus detergeret." Vet. Schol. "As an old commentator on Juvenal affirms, the Exodiarii, which were singers and dancers, entered to entertain the people with light songs and mimical gestures, that they might not go away oppressed with melancholy from these sacred pieces of the theatre." Dryden's Dedication to his translation of Juvenal. See also Liv. Lib. VII. c. ii. Others contend that the Exodia did not solely signify the songs, &c. at the conclusion of the play, but those also which were sung in the middle of the piece; and that they were so called, because they were introduced odins, that is, incidentally, and unconnected with the principal entertainment. Of this kind undoubtedly were the Euboxa or episodes, introduced between the acts, as the rodia were the songs sung at the opening of the play. The Atellan interludes were so called from Atella, a town in Italy, from which they were introduced to Rome: and in process of time they were acted sometimes in the middle, and sometimes at the end of more serious pieces. These, as we learn from one of Cicero's letters, gave way about the time of Julius Cæsar's death to the Mimes, which consisted of a grosser and more licentious pleasantry than the Atellan interludes. "Nunc venio," says Cicero, "ad jocationes tuas, cum tu secundúm Oenomaum Accii, non ut olim solebat, Atellanum, sed ut nunc fit, mimum introduxisti." Epist. ad Fam. IX. 16. The Atellan interludes, however, were not wholly disused after the introduction of the Mimes; as is ascertained by a passage in Suetonius's Life of Nero, c. xxxix. "Mirum et vel præcipue notabile inter hæc fuit, nihil eum patientius quam maledicta et convitia hominum tulisse; neque in ullos leniorem quam qui se dictis ante aut carminibus lacessissent, extitisse.—Transeuntem eum Isidorus Cynicus in publico clara voce corripuerat, quod Nauplii mala bene cantitaret, sua bona male disponeret. Et Datus Atellanarum histrio, in cantico quodam, υγίαινε πάτερ, υγιαίνε μῆτερ, ita demonstraverat, ut bie bentem natantemque faceret, exitum scilicet Claudii Agrippinæ. que significans; et in novissima clausula, Orcus vobis ducit pedes, senatum gestu notaret. Histrionem et philosophum Nero nihil amplius quam urbe Italiaque submovit, vel contemptu omnis infamiæ, vel ne fatendo dolorem irritaret ingenia." See also Galb. c. xiii. I do not find that the ancient French theatre had any exhibi remote progenitors of the Vice and Clown of our ancient dramas.1 No writer that I have met with, intimates that in the time of Shakspeare it was customary to exhibit more than a single dramatick piece on one tion exactly corresponding with this, for their SOTTIE rather resembled the Atellan farces, in their original state, when they were performed as a distinct exhibition, unmixed with any other interlude. An extract given by Mr. Warton from an old ART OF POETRY, published in 1548, furnishes us with this account of it: "The French farce contains nothing of the Latin comedy. It has neither acts nor scenes, which would serve only to introduce a tedious prolixity: for the true subject of the French farce or SOTTIE is every sort of foolery, which has a tendency to provoke laughter.The subject of the Greek and Latin comedy was totally different from every thing on the French stage; for it had more morality than drollery, and often as much truth as fiction. Our MORALITIES hold a place indifferently between tragedy and comedy, but our farces are really what the Romans called Mimes or Priapees, the intended end and effect of which was excessive laughter, and on that account they admitted all kinds of licentiousness, as our farces do at present. In the mean time their pleasantry does not derive much advantage from rhymes, however flowing, of eight syllables." HIST. OF ENG. POETRY, Vol. III. p. 350. Scaliger expressly mentions the two species of drama above described, as the popular entertainments of France in his time. "Sunto igitur duo genera, quæ etiam vicatim et oppidatim per universam Galliam mirificis artificibus, circumferuntur; MORALE, et RIDICULUM." Poetices, Lib. I. c. x. p. 17, edit, 1561. 'The exact conformity between our Clown and the Exodiarii and Emboliaria of the Roman stage is ascertained, not only by what I have stated in the text, but by our author's contemporary Philemon Holland, by whom that passage in Pliny which is referred to in a former page," Lucceïa mima centum annis in scena pronuntiavit. Galeria Copiola, emboliaria, reducta est in scenam, annum centessimum quartum agens,"-is thus translated: "Lucceia, a common VICE in a play, followed the stage, and acted thereupon 100 yeeres. Such another VICE, that plaied the foole, and made sporte betweene whiles in interludes, named Galeria Copiola, was brought to act on the stage,-when she was in the 104th yeere of her age." |