Armin/Shakespeare Collab: “you must allow vox”

Abstract

Like Fred Astaire waltzing with an anthropomorphized broom, Robert Armin, in his dedication to Quips Upon Questions,¹ performs a tour de force duet, in which he personifies his jester’s stick and solicits its favor as a poet would his patron. First, he salutes “the crab-tree countenance” of Sir Timothie Truncheon (alias Bastinado), making a “low congee” in imitation of courtly etiquette. Then, presenting himself as an unemployed performer (“unkindly thrust out of [his] lodging” at the Curtain Theatre, forced to hit the road as an itinerant player), he begs Sir Timothie’s protection from a spiteful world: “Guard me through the Spittle fieldes, I beseech yee, least some one in ambush endanger my braynes with a Brickbat unsight or unseen” (Sig. A2). We should imagine that, in actual performance, Armin carried, not a standard jester’s wand, but an ordinary, featureless club, such as the one described here.