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COPYRIGHT 2007 Associated University Presses
ONE of the jolly little tales told in the second part of Tarltons Jests (entered in the Stationers' Register in 1600) is "How Tarlton made Armin his adopted sonne to succeed him" (C2r, 1638 edition). Apocryphal as this short anecdote may be--the young Robert Armin, visiting a tavern owned by Tarlton to collect a debt owed to his master, composes four lines of comic verse, and Tarlton matches them with his own--it does not lie outside the limits of possibility. (1) Armin was certainly apprenticed to a goldsmith with a shop in Lombard Street, as the book says he was, from later 1582 onward; if he completed his indenture, as he is likely to have done, since he subsequently took his freedom as a goldsmith, he was there until 1591. Tarlton became a freeman of the Vintners' Company in 1584, and he may have begun his tavern enterprises before that date, as a freeman (of the Haberdashers) and citizen since 1576. (2) The terminus for the waggish encounter, evidently, is Tarlton's death in September 1588. Given that the story tells us that following the meeting Armin "so loved Tarlton after, that regarding him with more respect, he used to his Playes, and fell in a league with his humour" (Jests, C2r), we might choose the middle of the six-year span possible for the meeting as a likely date: 1585. In that year Armin was probably in his middle teens and Tarlton in his midthirties, and though a famous entertainer and leading member of the Queen's Men at a time of life when competing talent in the young can be regarded with more equanimity, even by actors. If Armin did indeed become a fan of Tarlton, he would have remembered the older man's performances vividly for the rest of his life. In a theatrical period we know very little about, the art of the mature Shakespearean clown had its fundamental inspiration. If we want to stretch the succession further, we can imagine that another goldsmith's apprentice, Andrew Cane, in London from 1602 and about fifteen years old in 1604, became a follower of Armin "where, at the Globe on the Banks side men may see him" (Jests, C2r). Neater still would be the story of the actual apprenticeship of Cane under Armin as goldsmith, but the older man had not taken his freedom by the time Cane began his training (with his older brother as his master). (3) Neither Armin nor Cane served their formal apprenticeships under actors--nor had Tarlton. History refuses, in such instances, to be the handmaid of romance. The story of sots (not counting Kemp, of whose origins and early life we still know very little) is that they all began as provincials from nontheatrical families (like their most renowned contemporary in the profession), becoming London apprentices in nontheatrical trades, and all of them continuing enterprises in other areas after becoming famous on stage. (4) Perhaps their humor livened up the shops where they worked, as in The Shoemakers' Holiday, but they were not so idle, or uninterested, as not to serve the term of their indentures and take their freedom.
The actual history of Tarlton's encounter with Armin, assuming there is one, has both a temporal framework and a topography. While he was an apprentice Armin's (second) master was John Kettlewood, a prominent goldsmith (liveryman and Fourth Warden of the company in 1575-76) who since 1566 had leased a shop owned by the Goldsmiths' Company in Lombard Street. Kettlewood regarded himself a parishioner of St. Mary Woolnoth, where his children were baptized between 1549 and 1563, where he was churchwarden in 1563-64, where his wife Mary was buried in April 1583, and where the young Armin no doubt accompanied him to divine service as a member of the household. (5) Probably his shop lay at the far western end of Lombard Street, on the south side, and hence across the neighboring ward and parish boundaries which marked off the very end of the street. In the 1582 Lay Subsidy, a general civic tax, John Kettlewood was assessed as a resident of Walbrook Ward, rather than of Langbourn Ward, in which most of Lombard Street lay, and of the parish of St. Mary Woolchurch. (6) His contribution, of three pounds, indicates a fairly modest economic standing. Yet both Lombard Street and the church of St. Mary Woolnoth, which stood nearer the middle of its south side than in the modern layout (these days the postfire, postblitz church marks the junction with King William Street), were prosperous sites, frequented by the civic elite: Sir Martin Bowes, alderman, sheriff, Lord Mayor (in 1545), and chief Tudor benefactor of the Goldsmiths, was buried at the church (as was the historical Simon Eyre), which the wardens of the company visited annually to hear a sermon in his memory. Bowes had kept his shop at the sign of the White Lion in Lombard Street; the Vyners, prominent goldsmiths, lived in the street in the...
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