Richard Tarlton

He helped to turn Elizabethan theatre into a form of mass entertainment paving the way for the Shakespearean stage.

His birthplace is also unknown, although more than a century after Tarlton's death Thomas Fuller said that he was born at Condover in Shropshire, where his father was a pig farmer, and that the family later moved to Ilford in Essex.

[1] Tradition claims that Tarlton started his career in London as either an apprentice, a swineherd in Ealing, or a water-carrier; it is not impossible that he was all three.

His manner of performance combined the styles of the medieval Vice, the professional minstrel, and the amateur Lord of Misrule.

[5] To cash in on his popularity, a great number of songs and witticisms of the day were attributed to him, and after his death the text Tarlton's Jests, containing many jokes in fact older than he was, made several volumes.

Gabriel Harvey refers to him as early as 1579, indicating that Tarlton had already begun to acquire the reputation that rose into fame in later years.

[6] He died on 5 September, at the home of Emma Ball, a "woman of bad reputation" and was buried the same day at St Leonard's, Shoreditch.