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John Shank


John Shank (also spelled Shanke or Shanks) (died January 1636) was an actor in English Renaissance theatre, a leading comedian in the King's Men during the 1620s and 1630s.

By his own testimony, Shank began his stage career with Pembroke's Men and Queen Elizabeth's Men. "Presumably the Pembroke's company in question was that of 1597–1600, and the Queen Elizabeth's Men the travelling company of the latter years of the reign" — that is to say, the later years of Elizabeth I.

Shank was with Prince Henry's Men by 1610, and was a sharer in the company (that is, a partner who shared in the profits rather than a hired man) by 1613. Shank seems to have fulfilled the function that clowns had filled at least since the time of Richard Tarleton: he was a "jigging clown" who sang and danced the jig that concluded each performance.

In the controversy surrounding the Prince's Men's production of The Roaring Girl in 1611, Shank seems to have temporarily lost his jigging function when "lewd jigs, songs and dances" were suppressed by the Middlesex justices in 1612.

Sometime between 1613 and 1619, Shank joined the King's Men; he is listed as a sharer in the company in 1619, and is present in the records of that company till his death. He was noted for playing the Curate in their 1624 revival of Beaumont and Fletcher's The Scornful Lady. His role as Hilario in the King's Men's 1629 production of Massinger's The Picture shows that Shank played comic "thin-man" roles for the company — what his own era called the "lean fool."

This was a standard part of the King's Men's style of theatre; in the previous generation of Shakespeare and Burbage, hired man John Sinkler played thin-man roles like Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and Shadow in Henry IV, Part 2. Shank seems to have been cast in the same dramatic function within the company as Sinkler. Shank may have joined the King's Men as early as 1613; the company was licensed to perform something called Shank's Ordinary, probably a jig, on 16 March 1614.


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