Talk:Robert Armin

==Original Research?=

It seems that the content added by User:Linza is original research. Despite looking like the user wrote it himself/herself (based on the information supplied), original research is not material for wikipedia. (See WP:NOR). Can anyone comment on that? Thanks.

--Poli 13:24, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC)

emendation and wikified content
The content of this article was pure scholarly research paper. Must have been cut and pasted by User:Linza from her own research paper. I made several changes so that this article could be wikified:

he was an idiot
 * I removed references to her name and the context of this writing
 * I removed the paragraph dealing with Elizabethan fools (not the subject here)
 * I removed the paragraph dealing with William Kemp (there's already an article about him in wikipedia)
 * I removed the paragraph dealing with Richard Tarleton (sic) and added it to the article about Richard Tarlton
 * I created subtitles
 * I removed specific references to the books quoted as sources for copyright reasons.

Hope it might get approval now.

The dating 1580-1612 can hardly be correct if he was apprenticed in 1581, and indeed it seems to be wrong; online Britannica dates him ca. 1568-1615, http://search.eb.com/shakespeare/micro/729/86.html

Revaluation, please
Foole upon Foole clearly establishes Armin as a major source - or indeed, the inventor - of intellectual humour, and in particular of the pun. It's called English humour on the Continent because it was only adopted there in the 20th Century - we find René Goscinny's Astérix texts of the 1970s succeeding for this reason, as he cut fresh ground almost unknown in France before then. I think you should use Armin's own work as justification for upgrading that aspect, not as original research, but as a statement of the agenda which he clearly worked out in the plays. The totally distinctive nature of his humour is one of the prime pieces of evidence that the Shakespeare folio was not uniquely the work of the Bard himself, for all that he can be traced into the main layout, but that it was rather exactly as it presented itself to be, the transcription of the pieces as performed at the time of publication, in other words as worked up by the company as a whole in performance over a number of years. That too should be mentioned.

Iago?
Harold Bloom, in his "Invention of the Human" book, makes the interesting speculation that Armin may have originated the role of Iago in OTHELLO. Like Touchstone, Feste, and the Fool, Iago is a servant who is more shrewd and articulate than his "betters", knows how to manipulate words and logic for effect, and in one scene of Act II even entertains the others with satirical songs, as Armin does in other plays. Bloom admits there is no proof of his hypothesis. CharlesTheBold (talk) 21:50, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Armin and The Tempest
This is OR, but substantiable, so I'm not adding it to the meme myself, but as a direction for you to follow.

When Armin died in 1615, he was nigh on impecunious, and so was buried by The Goldsmiths Company, in accordance with Guild practice for Members who had fallen on hard times. This indicates that he was a full member of the Guild, in other words that he was at least a passed Journeyman, if not a full Master. The reason he fell on hard tiems is also possibly relevant: he left The Kings Men in 1610 to work for Ben Jonson in The Alchemist, in other words leaving a pro-Alchemical work to join an anti-Alchemical one. It's not hard to see the hands of the Guild on his shoulders for that one. His replacement in The Tempest was Robert Johnson, who brought his party pieces with him: it's why Full Fathom Five and Where The Bee Sucks make no sense in context, they were simply Johnson's current repertoire, already registered with the Stationers' Company. The other gaps in the work were simply left unfilled. As a result, Armin was definitively persona non grata to the King's men, and forced to work where he could, often at The Red Bull, a company which was renowned for paying less than subsistence in wages.

The question of Alchemy was addressed by myself and Tony Rooley in the Guildhall Seminar in The Tempest in November 2011. Basically, this was the height of the furore started by Philip II of Spain in a successful transmutation in Brussels in 1560 (Prof Rene Taylor, Arquitctura y Magia (Consideraciones sobre el idea del escorial), Siruela c2002: the Annexe on Philip and Alchemy is a list of correspondence from the Simancas Royal Archives on this subject). It set the cat among the pigeons in the rival Courts, in England Elizabeth drove her chief scientific officer John Dee utterly insane trying to emulate the results, he was also involved in Rudolf II's Prague experiments, which were equally unproductive. Brussels hung onto its secrets, and in 1618 another one succeeded, undertaken by a local Paracelsian doctor, Jan van Helmont. This fundamentally subverted his belief in the four-element Paracelsian system, as it should have been impossible to go directly from cold wet Mercury to hot dry Gold. As a result, he decided to begin again using empirical observation, and that laid the foundations for Starkey and Boyle's work which would go on to be the first steps in modern chemistry. His son Franz Mercurius had a similar influence on Leibnitz. Although devoted to empiricism, van Helmont held to the end of his days that the transmutation actually worked.

Thus it was that in 1610, the subject was at the cutting edge of controversy. van Helmont's transmutation had yet to happen. The 1560 experiment had been replicated in 1568, the product being destined for the Flemish leaders, who were executed for heresy as a result. The money, 40 000 moutons d'or, was held in escrow by the Prince Bishop of Liege, and returned to the widows in 1600 (document in the French Regional archives in Lille). So controversial was it that like Galileo, van Helmont came under Inquisition pressure to recant, but unlike Galileo, he was sufficiently far from them, on the edge of the Protestant lowlands, to be so controllable.