All's Well (I.iii): Ellen Ternan (1839-1914) as the Countess Rousillion and Lewis Ball (1820-1905) as her Clown.

Both characters wear an approximation to Elizabethan clothing: a grande dame and her professional clown with ass-ears and bauble. Ball specialized in clown parts: Costard, Grumio, Touchstone, Pistol, and Fluellen (Ball was Welsh). Ellen Lawless Ternan was born in Rochester, Kent to parents who were both actors. Ternan made her stage debut in Sheffield, aged three, and she and her two sisters were "infant phenomena". Ternan worked in the provinces but in 1857 Charles Dickens saw her performing at London's Haymarket Theatre. He cast her, with her mother and a sister, in a performance of The Frozen Deep (by Wilkie Collins & Dickens) in Manchester. Dickens was forty-five when he met Ellen Ternan, and she was eighteen. He became passionately attached to her, but the relationship was kept secret from the public. Ternan left the stage in 1860, and was supported by Dickens from then on. Published by John Tallis & Co.,courtesy of Wikipedia, under GNU Free Document License.