William Kempe

William Kempe (right) from Nine Days Wonder (1600)

See Will Kempe (actor) for the contemporary television actor

William Kempe (died 1603), also spelled Kemp, was an English actor and dancer specializing in comic roles and best known for having been one of the original players in early dramas by William Shakespeare. Roles associated with his name may include the great comic creation, Falstaff, and his contemporaries considered him the successor to the great clown of the previous generation Richard Tarlton.

Kempe's success and influence was such that in December 1598 he was one of a core of five actor-shareholders in the Lord Chamberlain's Men alongside Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, but in a short time (possibly after a rupture) he parted company with the group. Despite his fame as a performer and subsequent intent to continue his career, he appears to have died unregarded and in penury in around 1603.

Wood carving of Kempe in Chapelfield Gardens, Norwich

Life

Of Kempe's birth and origins nothing is known. He first enters the historical record as a performer with Leicester's Men at Leicester House in May 1585 and continued in this service after Leicester's departure for the Low Countries to take part in the Eighty Years' War. Leicester's nephew, Philip Sidney, sent letters home by way of a man he called "Will, my Lord of Lester's jesting player" and it is now generally accepted this was Kempe. Sidney complained in a letter to Francis Walsingham that "Will" had delivered the letters to Lady Leicester rather than Sidney's wife, Frances Walsingham. After a brief return to England, Kempe accompanied two other future Lord Chamberlain's Men, George Bryan and Thomas Pope, to Elsinore where he entertained Frederick II of Denmark.

Kempe's whereabouts in the later 1580s are not known, but that his fame as a performer was growing during this period is indicated by Thomas Nashe's An Almond for a Parrot (1590). Nashe dedicated this work to Kempe, calling him "vicegerent general to the ghost of Dick Tarlton." Similarly, the title-page of the quarto of A Knack to Know a Knave advertises Kempe's "merriments". (Because title-pages were a means to draw attention to a book, the mention of Kempe suggests that he had become an attraction in his own right.) Critics have generally viewed the scene in which Kempe performs as rather flat (Collier, 97) and it is assumed that the scene provided a framework within which Kempe could improvise. Entries in the Stationers' Register indicate that three jigs (short comic plays) perhaps written by Kempe were published between 1591 and 1595. Two of these have survived.

By 1592 Kempe was one of Lord Strange's Men, listed in the Privy Council authorization for that troupe to play seven miles out of London. In 1594, upon the dissolution of Strange's Men, Kempe, along with Burbage and Shakespeare, joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men and remained with that company until early 1599, when a still-unclear sequence of events removed him from the company. Although he had been a sharer in the plans to construct the Globe Theatre, he appeared in no productions in the new theatre, which was open by mid-1599, and evidence from Shakespeare's Henry V, in which there is no promised continued role for Falstaff, and Hamlet, containing its famous complaint at improvisational clowning (Act 3, Scene 2), indicates some of the circumstances in which Kempe may have been dropped.

Final years

After his departure from the Chamberlain's Men in early 1599, Kempe continued to pursue his career as a performer. In February and March 1600, he undertook what he would later call his "Nine Days Wonder", in which he morris danced from London to Norwich (a distance of over a hundred miles) in a journey which took him nine days spread over several weeks, often amid cheering crowds. Later that year he published a description of the event in order to prove to doubters that it was true. However, his activities after this famous stunt are as obscure as his origins. On evidence from The Travels of the Three English Brothers, he is assumed to have made another European tour, perhaps reaching Italy, but by 1601 he was borrowing money from Philip Henslowe and had joined Worcester's Men. The last undoubted mention of him occurs in Henslowe's diary in late 1602.

Parish records record the death of "Kempe, a man" in St. Saviour, Southwark, late in 1603. While this is not clearly the comedian, the record fits his departure from the documentary record.

Performance style

In his time, Kempe was as famous for his stage jigs as for his acting in regular drama. The jig, a kind of rustic cousin to commedia dell'arte, featured as many as five performers in a partially improvised song-and-dance routine. Jigs had plots, often bawdy, but the emphasis was on dancing and physical comedy. Two of Kempe's jigs survive in English, and two more in German. Examples of the jigs may be seen in the manuscript collection of John Dowland (now in the Cambridge University library). A famous 17th Century jig called Kemp's Jig was named after Will Kempe and was published in the first book of John Playford's The English Dancing Master of 1651.

As an actor, Kempe is certainly associated with two roles: Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Peter in Romeo and Juliet. (In the quarto text of the latter, and in both quarto and First Folio text of the former, he is identified in speech prefixes and stage directions.) From these hints, a list of Kempe's parts has been deduced which, if conjectural, is not improbable: Costard in Love's Labours Lost, Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, and Cob in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour. Falstaff is a more ambiguous case. Though Falstaff presents some features of an Elizabethan dramatic clown, his character is higher in class and more complex than the other roles with which Kempe is associated.

Kempe in modern fiction

Film and TV

• In the 1998 John Madden film Shakespeare in Love, Kempe is played by veteran character actor Patrick Barlow.
• In 2005's TV-film A Waste of Shame he is portrayed by John Voce
• In the 2007 Doctor Who episode "The Shakespeare Code", Kempe is played by David Westhead.

Literature

• Kempe appears as a character in The Return from Parnassus, or The Scourge of Simony, possibly written during his lifetime or very shortly after his death. In it he praises Shakespeare for outdoing university educated playwrights.
• In Harry Turtledove's alternate history novel Ruled Britannia Kempe is one of the main characters. His antics provide much of the novel's humour, and the book includes references to his "Nine Days Wonder".
• William Gibson depicts Kempe as a moody tragedian in his 1968 play A Cry of Players, a significant departure from Kempe's actual performance style.
• In Ann Young's novel for young adults The Nine Days Wonder (2002) published by East Hall Press.
• In Neil Gaiman's graphic novel The Sandman: Dream Country, Will Kempe is depicted in the issue A Midsummer Night's Dream, a short story about Shakespeare's first performance of the play.
• In J.B. Cheaney's novel The True Prince along with more of the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

Bibliography

• Records of Early English Drama - Norwich 1540-1642, 1984, 114-115 [Norwich Mayors' Court Books XIII p. 418] - Record of payment to Kemp for his jig
• Bald, R. C. "Leicester's Men in the Low Countries." Review of English Studies 19 (1943), 395-7.
• Collier, J. P.. Lives of the Original Actors in Shakespeare's Plays. London: Shakespeare Society, 1853.
• Nielsen, James. "Kempe at the Globe." Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993), 466-468.
• Nunzeger, Edwin. A Dictionary of Actors and of Other Persons Associated With the Public Presentation of Plays in England Before 1642. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929.

Shapiro, James. 1599, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, "Prologue" and Chapter 1, "A Battle of Wills". (2005), 1-49.

• Wright, Louis. "Will Kemp and Commedia dell'Arte." Modern Language Notes 41 (1926), 516-520.

External links

• Text of Kempe's Nine Days Wonder

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.