for their suits. The faculty which excited the highest enthusiasm among his hearers was his power of improvising doggerel verse on themes suggested by the audience. So famous was he in exhibitions of this nature that he gave his name to them; and Gabriel Harvey, speaking of Robert Greene in 1592, mentions ‘his piperly extemporisizing and Tarletonizing.’ William Kemp (fl. 1600) [q. v.] succeeded Tarlton in the field of comic improvisation. Tarlton was also noted for his jigs, metrical compositions sung by the clown to the accompaniment of tabor and pipe. The music of several is preserved among Dowland's collections in the university library at Cambridge (Halliwell, Cambridge Manuscript Rarities, p. 8). The words of one, ‘The jigge of the horse loade of Fools,’ are reputed to have been preserved. They were published by Halliwell in the preface to his edition of Tarlton's ‘Jests,’ ‘from a manuscript in the possession of John Payne Collier.’ The authority excites some suspicion of the genuineness of the composition.
Tarlton was also a skilled fencer, and on 23 Oct. 1587 was admitted to the highest degree, that of master of fence at the school of the science of defence in London. A part of the school register containing the entry of his admission is preserved at the British Museum (Sloane MS. 2530).
During the latter part of his life Tarlton dwelt in ‘Haliwel Stret,’ now known as High Street, Shoreditch. Tradition asserts that he led a dissipated life, and stories of his recantation and repentance were the favourite, though probably fabulous, themes of later ballads. In spite of royal patronage and popular appreciation he was poor, and his poverty gave occasion for more than one contemporary witticism. He died at Shoreditch, at the house of Emma Ball, a woman of bad reputation, on 5 Sept. 1588, and was buried in St. Leonard's Church on the same day. His wife Kate died before him. Anecdotes of her in the ‘Jests’ represent her as a loose character. By her he left an only child, Philip Tarlton, about six years of age, to whom, by a will dated 3 Sept., he bequeathed all his belongings. His mother, Katharine Tarlton, and two friends, Robert Adams and William Johnson, were appointed his son's guardians. Immediately after his death a dispute as to the disposition of the property arose between the boy's grandmother, Katharine Tarlton, and Adams. Katharine, who suspected Adams of fraudulent designs, appealed to Sir Christopher Hatton, and her memorial, with Adams's rejoinder, was privately printed by Halliwell in 1866.
Tarlton was the alleged author of several songs and ballads. But it is probable that they were from other pens, and that his name was attached to them with a view to attracting public attention to them. Several productions with which his name was associated are noticed in the registers of the Stationers' Company. These include three lost works, entitled respectively ‘Tarltons Toyes,’ 1576, which is alluded to by Nash in his ‘Terrors of the Night,’ 1594; ‘Tarltons Tragicall Treatises,’ 1578; ‘Tarlton's Devise upon the unlooked for great Snowe,’ 1579 (Arber, Transcript, ii. 306, 328, 346). According to both Gabriel Harvey and Nash, Tarlton was the contriver and arranger of the extempore play the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (cf. Nash, Strange Newes; Harvey, Foure Letters). The original ‘platt’ or programme of the second part is preserved in the library at Dulwich College.
The memory of Tarlton long endured. On the authority of an annotated copy of the 1611 edition of ‘Teares of the Muses,’ Tarlton has been identified with the ‘Pleasant Willy’ whose recent death and the gloom it spread among the lovers of the theatre Spenser commemorates in that poem. ‘Willy’ was used at the time as an appellation implying affectionate familiarity, and often bore no direct relation to the real christian name of the person addressed. The music of a song, ‘Tarltons Willy,’ is preserved in manuscript at Cambridge (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1887, i. 93). It has also been conjectured with great likelihood that in Hamlet's elegy on Yorick, Shakespeare embodied a regretful remembrance of the great jester (Cornhill Mag. 1879, ii. 731). After Tarlton's death there appeared the ballad ‘Tarltons Farewell,’ and in 1589–90 three other ballads were licensed, ‘Tarltons Recantacion,’ ‘Tarlton's Repentance,’ and ‘Tarlton's Ghost and Robyn Goodfellowe’ (Arber, Transcript of Stationers' Reg. iii. 500, 526, 531, 559). None of these ditties are extant. A Latin elegy was published by Charles Fitzgeffrey in his ‘Affaniæ,’ 1601; another, by Sir John Stradling, in his ‘Epigrammatum libri quatuor,’ 1607; while a third, in English, is in ‘Wits Bedlam,’ 1617. According to Gifford, ‘Tarlton's memory was cherished with fond delight by the vulgar to the period of the revolution,’ and as late as 1798 ‘his portrait with tabor and pipe still served as a sign to an alehouse in the Borough’ (Ellis, Hist. of Shoreditch, p. 209).
In 1590 was published ‘Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie. Onelye such a jest as his Jigge, fit for Gentlemen to laugh at an
