Since Francis Douce's pioneering study of the ‘clowns and fools’ of the Elizabethan stage, a good deal of scholarly scrutiny and critical interpretation has been directed towards Shakespeare's use of his inheritance from popular drama in general and from traditions of fooling in particular. But compared with the detailed studies that have been devoted to the serious dramatic functions that Shakespeare developed for the solo-turn exemplified by Launce's monologues in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the porter scene in Macbeth, that other familiar routine of popular comedy – the double-act – has been somewhat neglected. William Willeford traces the origins of the ‘knockabout fool pair’ to the interplay between the Devil and the Vice in the Tudor moralities; and Austin Gray identifies the comic personalities of the actors Will Kemp and Dick Cowley behind the long line of Shakespearian double-acts, from Launce and Speed to the grave-diggers in Hamlet, offering this account of the relationship between the stooge and the lead comedian:

The fullest account of the nature and function of the double-act is by J. A. B. Somerset who, in the course of tracing the history and significance of the comic turn in Renaissance English drama, spends some time on ‘the “vaudeville” interchange in which the master acts the role of straight-man to the fooling of his servant or jester, while realizing that he is doing so’.