Basochiens
Society of Parisian law clerks devoted to comic performance. In 1442 the Basochiens entered into a cooperative arrangement with the Confrérie de la Passion that continued to the end of ...
clown
In Elizabethan days a composite comic character, who might be a simpleton, a knave, or a Court Jester. Shakespeare provides examples of all three with Costard in Love's Labour's Lost ...
Court Fool
Member of the Royal Household, also known as the King's Jester, not to be confused with the humbler Fool of the folk festivals. His origin has been variously traced to ...
English Comedians
Itinerant English theatre companies which toured Germany from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries. In many ways similar to the commedia dell'arte troupes, the Englische Komödianten ...
Feast of Fools
Generic name for the New Year revels in European cathedrals and collegiate churches, when the minor clergy usurped the functions of their superiors and burlesqued the services of the Church. ...
fool Reference library
The Companion to Theatre and Performance
A comic entertainer, sometimes physically deformed, whose behaviour is the product of real or pretended mental deficiency. An Egyptian record of about ...
fool Reference library
Ronald W. Vince
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance
A comic entertainer, sometimes physically deformed, whose behaviour is the product of real or pretended mental deficiency. An Egyptian record of about ...
Fool Reference library
The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre (2 ed.)
licensed buffoon of the medieval Feast of Fools, later an important member of the sociétés joyeuses of medieval France, not to be confused with the ...
freak show
Public exhibition of the extraordinary body for pleasure and profit. Since the medieval period, the ‘othered’ body has been displayed, particularly at carnival occasions such as London's Bartholomew ...
Michel de Ghelderode
(b. Ixelles, Belgium, 3 April 1898; d. Schaerbeek, Belgium, 1 April 1962)Prolific avant-garde playwright and story writer. Although Ghelderode was the driving force in Belgian theatre during the ...
Narr
German equivalent of the early English Fool, who appears in the 16th-century Fastnachtsspiel or Carnival Play. Though not originally a comic character (the fools in Sebastian Brant's poem Das ...
puppet
Inanimate figure controlled by human agency, which can be larger than life or only a few inches high. It is probably as old as the theatre itself, and it is ...
Richard Tarlton
(d.1588)English actor. From 1583 to his death, Tarlton acted with the Queen's Men, playing at the Curtain, at London inns, and on company tours. Whatever the play, Tarlton inhabited ...
Wolfenbüttel
Capital city of the Duchy of Brunswick, one of whose dukes, Heinrich Julius (1564–1613), was a patron of the English Comedians. They visited him some time in the 1580s and ...
