Robert Armin - Early Life

Early Life

"…the clown is wise because he plays the fool for money, while others have to pay for the same privilege." – Leslie Hotson in Shakespeare’s Motley

Armin was one of three children born to John Armyn II of King's Lynn, a successful tailor and friend to John Lonyson, a goldsmith of the same place. His brother, John Armyn III, was a merchant tailor in London. Armin did not take up his father’s craft; instead, his father apprenticed him to Lonyson in the Goldsmiths' Company in 1581. Lonyson was the Master of Works at the Royal Mint in the Tower of London, a position of great responsibility. The arrangement moved Armin to a life and a social circle quite different from what he might have expected as a Norfolk tailor. Lonyson died in 1582, and the apprenticeship was transferred to another master. According to a tale preserved in Tarlton's Jests, Armin came to the attention of the Queen's famous jester Richard Tarlton. In the course of his duties, the story contends, Armin was sent to collect money from a lodger at Tarlton's inn. Frustrated by the man's refusal to pay, Armin wrote verses in chalk on the wall; Tarlton noticed and, approving their wit, wrote an answer in which he expressed a desire to take Armin as his apprentice. Though not corroborated, this anecdote is far from the least plausible in Tarlton's Jests. Influenced by Tarlton or not, Armin already had a literary reputation before he finished his apprenticeship in 1592. In 1590, his name is affixed to the preface of a religious tract, A Brief Resolution of the Right Religion. Two years later, both Thomas Nashe (in Strange News) and Gabriel Harvey (in Pierce's Supererogation) mention him as a writer of ballads; none of his work in this vein, however, is known to have survived.