Pickleherring: An Early Modern Clown Persona and His Music
Pickleherring: An Early Modern Clown Persona and His Music

Summary/Abstract: Attempting to reconstruct a stage persona from the past is a daunting task and not one that can be accomplished to any level of satisfaction by a single scholar or discipline. In the past three decades, as more and more archival records have been published, theatre and music historians, along with philologists, have been able to shed more light on the early modern figure of the pickleherring who enjoyed immense popularity both in street performances as well as on the German and Dutch stages of the seventeenth century. The integration of insights from the various disciplines will show not only how significant music was in the variety show offered by this multi-talented persona, but also the distinctive English origins of the airs themselves. Most of the pieces written and/or performed in the German and Dutch-speaking areas throughout the seventeenth century reveal themselves to be variations of Richard Farnaby’s ‘Nobodyes Gigue’, itself a variant of the Morris tune; and Thomas Robinson’s ‘Walking in a countrie town’, a melody that retained its popularity in the Netherlands until at least 1720. The music has, whenever possible, been linked to an extant dramatic text with the intention of further promoting our understanding of this complex clown figure.

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