William Kempe

• 1. Introduction

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  William Kempe was the most famous clown in Elizabethan England, and almost nobody today knows his name. He performed alongside William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage. He morris danced 110 miles from London to Norwich to prove he could. He died around 1603, unregarded and in poverty. How does a man at the center of the most celebrated theatrical company in history end up vanishing from the record entirely? That question leads into a story about fame, improvisation, artistic tension, and the strange distance between a performer's celebrity and their legacy.

• 2. From Leicester's Jester to Elsinore

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  Kempe first entered the historical record in May 1585, performing with Leicester's Men at Leicester House. When Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, departed for the Low Countries to take part in the Eighty Years' War, Kempe went with him. His presence on that military and diplomatic mission says something about how valued a court entertainer could be. Philip Sidney, Leicester's nephew, sent letters home through a man he called "Will, my Lord of Lester's jesting player," and scholars now broadly accept that this was Kempe. Sidney wrote to Francis Walsingham to complain that "Will" had delivered those letters to Lady Leicester rather than to Sidney's wife, Frances Walsingham. Even in a small errand, Kempe managed to cause trouble. By 1586 he was entertaining Frederick II of Denmark at Elsinore, alongside two future colleagues in the Lord Chamberlain's Men: George Bryan and Thomas Pope. The journey from a London great house to the Danish royal court, all within a year, sketches the speed of Kempe's early ascent.

• 3. The Clown's Art

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  Thomas Nashe dedicated his 1590 pamphlet An Almond for a Parrot to Kempe, calling him "vicegerent general to the ghost of Dick Tarlton." Tarlton had been the dominant comic performer of the previous generation, and that comparison placed Kempe at the very top of the profession. The title-page of the quarto of A Knack to Know a Knave advertised Kempe's "merriments," a publisher's signal that Kempe's name alone could sell a book. Critics noted that the written scene in that play was rather flat, which points toward something important: Kempe's value was not in the text but in what he did beyond it. He improvised. Entries in the Stationers' Register record three jigs possibly written by Kempe between 1591 and 1595, two of which survive. The jig was a form in its own right, a partially improvised song-and-dance piece for as many as five performers, with bawdy plots and an emphasis on physical comedy. It was a rustic cousin to commedia dell'arte. Two of Kempe's jigs survive in English and two more in German, and examples can be found in the manuscript collection of John Dowland, now held at Cambridge University Library. A tune called Kemp's Jig, named directly after him, was published in the first book of John Playford's The English Dancing Master in 1651. Jan Akkerman and the folk band Gryphon are among those who recorded it in later centuries.

• 4. Shakespeare's Company, Shakespeare's Plays

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  By 1592 Kempe was listed among Lord Strange's Men in a Privy Council authorisation allowing the troupe to perform seven miles outside London. When Strange's Men dissolved in 1594, Kempe joined the newly formed Lord Chamberlain's Men along with Burbage and Shakespeare. By December 1598 he was one of just five actor-shareholders in the company. Shareholders bore financial risk and shared in profits, so this was a position of real institutional weight. Two of Kempe's roles in Shakespeare's plays are certain: he is identified by name in speech prefixes and stage directions in the quarto text of Romeo and Juliet, where he played Peter, and in both the quarto and First Folio of Much Ado About Nothing, where he played Dogberry. From those confirmed roles, scholars have deduced a probable further list: Costard in Love's Labour's 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. Whether he played Falstaff is less settled. Falstaff has some features of an Elizabethan comic clown, but his class and complexity sit above Kempe's other documented parts. He played his last role for Shakespeare in 1598.

• 5. The Exit and the Dance

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  Kempe had shared in the plans to build the Globe Theatre, but when it opened in mid-1599 he had already left the company. The precise circumstances remain unclear. Two passages from Shakespeare's own work have been read as possible evidence. Henry V contains no promised continuation of a Falstaff role, and Act 3, Scene 2 of Hamlet carries a complaint against clowns who improvise beyond their cues. Neither is conclusive, but taken together they suggest some friction between Kempe's improvisational style and the direction the company was taking. In February and March 1600, Kempe undertook what can only be described as a public spectacle: he morris danced from London to Norwich, a distance of about 110 miles, completing the journey in nine days spread across several weeks, often before cheering crowds. Later that year he published Kempes Nine Daies Wonder to answer doubters who refused to believe it had happened. The pamphlet was a direct appeal to his audience over the heads of his critics.

• 6. Poverty and Disappearance

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  By 1601 Kempe was borrowing money from Philip Henslowe and had joined Worcester's Men. The Travels of the Three English Brothers, a 1607 play by Day, Rowley, and Wilkins, depicts him meeting the celebrated traveller Sir Anthony Shirley in Italy, and scholars take this as evidence of another European tour, possibly reaching Italy, around that year. The connection to Shirley is itself tangled. Shirley's mother was a daughter of Sir Thomas Kempe of Olantigh, a property about one mile north of Wye in Kent, and the Olantigh Kempes were a wealthy Catholic dynasty. Whether the actor genuinely shared kinship with them, or simply used the shared surname to gain an introduction, is not established. Sir Thomas Kempe's own son named William was buried at Wye church on the 27th of March 1597, making it impossible for that man to be the actor. The last undoubted mention of William Kempe in the documentary record appears in Henslowe's diary in late 1602. A death entry for "William Kempe, a man" appears in the parish register of St. Saviour, Southwark, on the 2nd of November 1603. It is not certain this was the comedian, but it fits the moment his name disappears from all other records. A 1615 lawsuit brought by Thomasina Ostler against her father, John Heminges, referred to Kempe in passing as "Willelmo Kempe nuper de Londonia generoso defuncto" - a gentleman recently deceased. The gap between that honorific and his actual circumstances in his final years is hard to square.

• 7. Afterlives in Fiction and Performance

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  Kempe began appearing as a fictional character almost immediately after his death. The Return from Parnassus, possibly written during his lifetime or very shortly after, shows him praising Shakespeare for outdoing university-educated playwrights. Neil Gaiman depicted him in the 1991 graphic novel The Sandman: Dream Country, in the issue A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ann Young's 2002 novel for young adults, The Nine Days Wonder, takes his famous march as its subject. Paul Aldred's 2022 novel Will Kempe, Clown covers his last three years with the Lord Chamberlain's Company. On screen he has been played by Patrick Barlow in the 1998 John Madden film Shakespeare in Love and by Spencer Jones in the 2016 BBC sitcom Upstart Crow, where the character is written as a parody of modern comedian Ricky Gervais. In the 1978 TV series Will Shakespeare, Derek Royle played him as an oafish alcoholic who is framed by Robert Armin and ousted from the troupe. On stage, Chris Harris began touring a one-man show called Kemp's Jig in 1973, describing Kemp's life and the Nine Days' Wonder. A performance at the National Theatre was televised for LWT's Aquarius programme. Blue Fire Theatre Company took over the production in 2019. In 2008 comedian Tim FitzHigham re-enacted the London-to-Norwich morris dance and built it into a play, The Bard's Fool, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe. Tortive Theatre launched a new one-actor play about Kempe at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2021, written by T.G. Hofman, with Robin Leetham in the title role and touring the UK from 2022. The persistence of the story across stage, screen, fiction, and graphic novels over four centuries suggests that the arc of Kempe's life - fame, conflict, a defiant public stunt, and then silence - carries something that later storytellers have not been able to leave alone.