Comic actor and dancer, who was famous in the Elizabethan theatre, and a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the time they decided to build the Globe theatre (15989). In 1594 he was summoned, together with Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare, to act before Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich. The original Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, he spent the latter part of his life abroad. For some unknown reason he left London and morris-danced his way to Norwich, publishing an account of his feat in Nine Daies Wonder (1600).
William Kempe (also spelled Kemp) (fl.
Life
Of Kempe's early life, nothing is known. Kempe continued in that service after Leicester left for the Low Countries to command English forces in the Eighty Years' War. In a letter to Francis Walsingham, Sidney complained that Kemp had delivered these letters to Lady Leicester rather than Sidney's wife.
After a brief return to England, Kempe accompanied two other future Lord Chamberlain's Men, George Bryan and Thomas Pope, to Elsinore, Denmark, where he entertained Frederick II.
That his fame was growing during this period is indicated by Thomas Nashe's An Almond for a Parrot (1590), which Nashe dedicates to Kempe, calling him "vice-gerent general to the ghost of Dick Tarlton." 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. Entries in the Stationers' Register indicate that three jigs perhaps written by Kempe were published between 1591 and 1595;
By 1592, and perhaps earlier, Kempe was one of Lord Strange's Men; In 1594, upon the dissolution of Strange's Men, Kempe, along with Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare, joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
In February and March of 1600, Kempe 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. That Kemp's jig took place in 1600 (New Style) is established by a record of the payment of his prize money by the Norwich Town Council.)
Kemp's activities after this famous stunt are as obscure as his origins. On evidence from The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Kemp is assumed to have made another European tour, perhaps reaching Italy; Parish records record the death of "Kempe, a man" in St. Savior, Southwark, late in 1603;
Work
In his time, Kempe was as famous for his jigs as for his acting in regular drama. Two of Kemp's jigs survive in English, and two more in German. 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, Kemp 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. 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.
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