struck him. Hence Hamlet's advice to the players: "Let those who play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them: for there be of them, that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: that's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it."

There is no name among the old players more famous than that of Dick Tarleton. "For a wondrous, pleasant extemporal wit, he was the wonder of his tyme! He was so beloved that men use his picture for their signs," says Howes. Another old author tells us: "For the clown's part he never had his equal." Even Ben Jonson, who never misses an opportunity of a fling at actors, could not refrain from applauding Tarleton. "The self-same words spoken by another would hardly move a man to smile, which uttered by him would force a sad soul to laughter." He is said to have been brought to London from Shropshire by one of Lord Leicester's servants, who found him in the fields tending his father's swine, and was so astonished by the readiness of his answers and the quickness of his intellect, that he proposed he should enter my lord's service-a proposal Dick was willing enough to accept. In a little while he was enrolled among the twelve players who formed the Queen's company, and became a sort of court-jester. "When the queen was serious," says Fuller, "I dare not say sullen, Tarleton could undumpish her at his pleasure. He told her more of her faults than most of her chaplains, and cured her of her melancholy better than all her physicians." He fell into disgrace at last, however, and was dismissed from Court for scurrilous reflections upon

Leicester and Raleigh. He appears to have chiefly played at the Red Bull; in his later years he kept a tavern in Paternoster Row, and afterward the Tabor in Gracechurch Street. He died in 1588, and was buried in St. Leonard's Shoreditch. "He wrote," says Dibdin ("History of the Stage "), "one dramatic piece called 'The Seven Deadly Sins; and this appears to have been when, tired of his debaucheries, he, like Green and Nash, pretended to repent of his irregularities, at which time his wit seems to have dwindled into mere scurrility, for as he grew debilitated with his excesses, he became sour and sarcastic. None escaped his virulence, not even Leicester and Raleigh, till, being discarded from Court, and growing every day more contemptible in the world's opinion, he died like Voltaire, a mixture of imbecility, folly, and irresolution." On the frontispiece of a jest-book, which bears his name, there is a picture of him which answers Chettle's description. "The next, by his suit of russet, his buttoned cap, his taber, his standing on his toe, and other tricks, I know either to be the body or the resemblance of Richard Tarleton, who living, for his pleasant conceits, was of all men liked, and dying, for mirth left not his like." There are many strange stories recorded of his wit and his rogueries, but most of them have been applied to other celebrated jesters. Here is one that much savors of a tale told by Rabelais. Having run up a long score at an inn at Sandwich, and not being able or not feeling disposed to pay, he made his boy accuse him of being a seminary priest. When the officers came they found him upon his knees crossing himself most diligently; they paid his reckoning, made him prisoner, and carried him off to London. He was taken before Recorder Fleet

ner.

wood, who knew him well, and, laughing heartily at the trick, not only discharged but invited him home to dinAnother anecdote illustrates what I have before said of the license allowed to the clowns. In a performance of "Henry V.," not Shakespeare's, but an older play of that name, Tarleton had to double the Chief Justice with clown, and the actor who personated Prince Hal gave him a ringing slap upon the face. Soon after the exit of the Justice, Tarleton reëntered in his proper character. "Hadst thou been here then," said one of the actors, "thou wouldst have seen Prince Henry hit the Judge a terrible box on the ear." What, strike a judge?" exclaimed the clown; "then it must be very terrible to the judge, since the very report so terrifies me that my cheek burns again with it."

Come we now to the original actors of Shakespeare's plays. Here is the list as it stands in the first folio.

"The names of the principal actors in all these plays."

Of the first, and mightiest, name in the list, it comes not within the scope of this article to write, since it would be useless to enter into a discussion upon Shakespeare's merits as an actor; his contemporaries are silent upon the subject, and we are therefore without any means of judging. That he thoroughly understood the art is proved by his address to the players of Hamlet; but that is no proof of his own excellence, since there are many men who, although they are admirable judges of acting and excellent stage managers, are very inferior performWe know that he played the Ghost in his own "Hamlet," that he was the original Know'ell in "Every Man In His Humor," and that he was in the first cast of "Sejanus"-and that is all.

ers.

The Burbadges are believed to have sprung from a good Warwickshire family. James Burbadge has already been noticed in these pages as an actor and the builder of the Blackfriars Theatre. The date of Richard's birth is unknown; Payne Collier surmises that he was Shakespeare's junior. He probably went upon the stage when quite a boy as a performer of female characters; and we find him holding a prominent position in his profession previous to 1588. An agreement is still extant between Richard Burbadge and a certain carpenter for the construction of the Globe Theatre. Of the lives of these old actors nothing is known; there were no anecdote-mongers in those days to pry into the domesticities of celebrated men, and to make notes of every green-room scandal or tattle, or to write their reminiscences, and take posthumous vengeance upon friends and enemies alike Pleasant it would be for us if there had been, for ther we should have known Shakespeare the man as well a Shakespeare the dramatist. But literature and art we

such recent creations that people had not yet learned to comprehend their value, and, feeling little interest themselves in the private affairs of their professors, thought posterity would feel less, or none at all. Probably the lives of these players were uneventful enough; most of them appear to have been highly respectable citizens, whose days were absorbed in the study and exercise of their art; their nights, in the company of gay gallants who eagerly sought their society, were perhaps a little wild; but it was an age of life and vigor, when men's veins were filled with hot blood, and not the red stagnant fluid that now does service for it. Burbadge was the first of that noble line of great tragic actors which ended with Macready-forever, it would seem-and must have been, according to contemporary testimony, a most consummate master, second to none. All that is known of his biography may be contained in a few words. He was born, and lived and died, in Holywell Street, Shoreditch, or Halliwell Street, as it was then called. According to one of his epitaphs, "On the death of that great master in his art and quality, painting and playing," he was doubly an artist; and Payne Collier conjectures that Martin Droeshout's engraving of Shakespeare, in the first folio, was taken from a likeness painted by Burbadge. There is no evidence to support such a supposition, but it is not an unlikely one. "For honor, who of more repute than Dick Burbadge and Will Kempe-he is not accounted a gentleman who does not know Dick Burbadge and Will Kempe." ("Return from Parnassus," 1606.) He was universally acknowledged to stand at the head of his profession, and to be above rivalry. Wagers were frequently made in those days upon the merits of favorite actors, who were pitted one