Kempe, William

Kempe, William (?–c.1603), one of the best known of Elizabethan clowns and a great player of jigs. A member of the company which toured Holland and Denmark in 1584–6, he probably joined Queen Elizabeth's Men in succession to Tarleton. He is known to have been in the 1592 production of the anonymous A Knack to Know a Knave, of which he may have been part-author. On his return from a provincial tour with them in 1594 he joined the Chamberlain's Men on their formation and was the original Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing and Peter in Romeo and Juliet. He also appeared in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (1598). He was famous for his improvisations, and it may have been Shakespeare's dislike of extempore gagging (as shown in his slighting reference in Hamlet to clowns that speak ‘more than is set down for them’) that caused him to leave the company in 1600. In that year, for a wager, he danced his famous nine-day morris dance from London to Norwich, of which he published an account in his Kemps Morris to Norwiche. He then went back to the Continent, but returned to London in 1602, when he borrowed some money from Henslowe (duly recorded in the latter's diary), and is last heard of as one of Worcester's Men at the Rose Theatre.