Armin "was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk, the son of a tailor and grandson of a fletcher" (qtd. in Aspinall 42). In the 1580s he was a goldsmith's apprentice and, in that capacity, he "unwittingly bequeathed an important clue for understanding the profound comic change attributed to his 1599 London stage emergence" (Aspinall 41). He entered Richard (Dick) Tarlton's tavern as a collector of his master's money. When Charles, the debtor, could not pay, Armin scribbled the following verse across a wall:
O world, why wilt thou lye?The insult's "easy musical rhyme, uncanny improvisational quality, and churlish flavour [...] could have sprung just as easily from Tarlton or [...] Will Kemp [but the] intelligence and tone [...] would later be [Armin's] distinguishing characteristic" (Aspinall 41), paving the way for his promising career.
Is this Charles the great! that I deny.
Indeed Charles the great before,
But now Charles the lesse, being poore. (qtd. in Aspinall 41)
The 1580s saw the budding of Armin's acting career when he joined the Lord Chandos' Men, "a successful yet unaccomplished troupe that toured the provinces, [...] and possibly later played at the Curtain until William Brydges' death in 1602" (qtd. in Aspinall 43). Armin joined Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1599-1600 and brought with him a new way of depicting comic characters. It is believed that Shakespeare developed a new line of 'wise fools'-probably Feste and Touchstone-due to Armin's creative tendencies (Somerset 68). In 1599 Armin played Touchstone, the fool in Shakespeare's As You Like It. This character was specifically designed for Armin's abilities (Aspinall 44).
As a leading player in Shakespeare's company in 1599, replacing William Kemp, Armin declined to wear the clown suit worn by Tarlton. This courageous step initiated his departure from the Tarltonesque clown who often encompassed the "rustic 'uplandish man'" (Hotson 85). Robert Armin instead donned the "fool's coat, [...] the idiot's long coat of motley" (Hotson 86) (see figure 8). Shakespeare's literary shift from low-comedy clowning to high-comedy fooling is believed to have started with Armin's emergence on the theatrical scene. As the reference in Hamlet suggests, it required much labour to wean the audience from what had "long been the undisputed monopoly of the Clown" (Hotson 84) and develop a taste for the Fool's wit.
Armin is credited with innovatively performing several Shakespearian characters, including Dogberry (Much Ado About Nothing), Feste (Twelfth Night), Lear's Fool (King Lear), and Lavatch (All's Well That Ends Well) (Aspinall 48; Hotson 87-90). Prior to Armin, "clowns usually remained separate from the main plot, only peripherally undermining serious, ritualised aristocratic manifestations" (Aspinall 45). Armin transformed the role of the clown or fool:
As his association with noble patrons grew and affiliations with the less transient Lord Chamberlain's Men commenced, he [...] expanded the clown figure's importance by abandoning the folk-humour-immersed clown for a more subservient, more properly situated fool figure. Armin combined two historic personages, the idiot or 'natural' [fool] and the court jester, both figures accustomed to and comfortable with aristocratic attendance. (Aspinall 46)Armin also became an author. In 1590 his preface to A Briefe Resolution of a Right Religion was published. He later wrote Quips upon questions, or a clownes conceite on occasion offered (1600) and other titles (Aspinall 42-43). In Quips upon questions, Armin "distance[s] himself from Tarlton, whose comic turns, phrases, and dances appealed more readily to the less empowered theatre audience members" (Aspinall 43). He also wrote a play, The Two Maids of Moreclacke (1608-09), for a company of boy players at the Whitefriars theatre.
Robert Armin died on November 30, 1615 (Aspinall 42) having left an important legacy. He helped Shakespeare transform fools' roles on the London stage and documented his ideas about the necessary evolution of fools for the future.
According to Robert Weimann (qtd. in Bednarz 278), one can view "Kemp's and Armin's performances as part of a continued development of Elizabethan and, later, Jacobean popular culture. Still, the prime difference was that Armin's approach incorporated the self-conscious skepticism of Erasmus' The Praise of Folly [1509]." While Kemp was a clown who owed his performance ability to his physical antics, Armin, attempting to redefine humour on the Renaissance stage, found it more fruitful to analyse and anticipate audience reaction to his verbal wit.
-- Victoria Abboud, 2001