| William Kempe | |
| Birth Date: | 1560 |
| Birth Place: | Possibly Kent, England |
| Death Date: | 1603 (aged about 43) |
| Death Place: | Southwark, London, England |
| Occupation: | actor |
| Years Active: | 1585 or earlier–1603 |
| Known For: | Playing comic roles in William Shakespeare's plays |
William Kempe (1560 – 1603), commonly referred to as Will Kemp, was an English actor and dancer who specialised in comic roles. He was best known as one of the original stage actors in early dramas by William Shakespeare, and roles associated with his name may have included the comic creation Falstaff. His contemporaries considered him to be a 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. He left the company shortly afterwards, and despite his fame as a performer and his intention to continue his career, he appears to have died unregarded and in poverty circa 1603.
Kempe is usually given an approximate birth year of 1560.[1] [2] [3] He first entered the historical record as a performer with Leicester's Men at Leicester House in May 1585[4] 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. His growing fame as a performer during this period is indicated by Thomas Nashe's An Almond for a Parrot (1590), which Nashe dedicated to Kempe, calling him "vicegerent general to the ghost of Dick Tarlton."[5] The title-page of the quarto of A Knack to Know a Knave advertises Kempe's "merriments". Title-pages were a means to draw attention to a book, and the mention of Kempe suggests that he had become an attraction. 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) possibly written by Kempe were published between 1591 and 1595. Two of these have survived.
By 1592 Kempe was one of Lord Strange's Men. He was listed in the Privy Council authorisation 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 them until early 1599, when events which are still unclear caused him to depart. Kemp had shared in the plans to construct the Globe Theatre but he appeared in no productions in the Globe, which was open by mid-1599. Evidence from Shakespeare's Henry V, in which there is no promised continuation of a role for Falstaff, and from Hamlet, with its complaint about improvised clowning (Act 3, Scene 2), may suggest the circumstances in which Kempe was dropped.[6] He played his last role for Shakespeare in 1598.[7]
In a 1615 lawsuit brought by Thomasina (née Heminges) Ostler, widow of William Ostler, against her father, John Heminges, the recently deceased actor William Kempe was referred to as a gentleman (Willelmo Kempe nuper de Londonia generoso defuncto).[8] It has been suggested that either he was a member of the Kempe family of Olantigh, a property 1miles north of Wye in Kent, or pretended a connection.
Kemp's parentage is unknown, though it has been conjectured that, despite his plebeian performance persona, he was linked in some way to the Kempes of Ollantighe, near Ashford in Kent, who were a wealthy Catholic dynasty. Sir Thomas Kempe (1517–1591) did indeed have a son named William;[9] however, the claim that this William Kempe was the actor cannot be correct, since he was buried at Wye church on 27 March 1597 (Honneyman, 125–9; Bannerman, 3; private information, A. Findlay) . Nonetheless, this putative connection might help explain the otherwise surprising story—dramatized in the play The Travailes of the Three English Brothers (1607) by Day, Rowley, and Wilkins—that when William Kemp the actor was in Italy in 1601 he had an encounter with the celebrated traveller Sir Anthony Shirley: for Sir Anthony and his two equally famous brothers were related to the Ollantighe Kempes through their mother, who was Sir Thomas Kempe's daughter. Possibly, then, the actor had some tie of kinship to Ollantighe, at an outlying point on the family tree; or perhaps in recommending himself to Shirley he was just opportunistically taking advantage of the name he shared with Shirley's mother.[10]
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 about 110 miles or 177 km, 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 to prove to doubters that it was true.[11] His later activities are obscure. 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 necessarily the comedian, the record fits his departure from the documentary record.
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 tune called Kemp's Jig[12] was named after Will Kempe and was published in the first book of John Playford's The English Dancing Master of 1651. The tune has received a number of modern renditions, including those by Jan Akkerman and the folk band Gryphon.
As an actor, Kempe is with certainty 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 probable list of Kempe's parts has been deduced as follows: 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 less certain. Although Falstaff presents some features of an Elizabethan dramatic clown, his character is higher in class and more complex than Kempe's other roles.
In 1973 Chris Harris began touring in "Kemp's Jig" a one-man humorous show describing Kemp's life and the Nine Days' Wonder. The play toured globally, with its performance at the National Theatre televised for LWT's Aquarius programme. In 2019 Blue Fire Theatre Company took over the production, which continues to tour with Steve Taylor playing Kemp.
In 2008, comedian Tim FitzHigham re-enacted Kemp's Nine Day's Wonder by Morris dancing from London to Norwich, forming the basis of his play The Bard's Fool, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe.[14]
In 2021, Tortive Theatre launched a new one-actor play about the life and death of William Kempe, written by T.G Hofman, at the Edinburgh Fringe.[15] Shakespeare's Fool starred Robin Leetham as Kempe and was directed by Ben Humphrey. The show started touring the UK in 2022.[16]
During the COVID-19 Lockdowns 2020–2021, Hexachordia, a Musical trio created KEMP’S JIG - a fifty-five minute “Docu-Concert” following the exploits of the Shakespearean comic actor and available to view online.[17]