FABIO CIAMBELLA
Introduction
[1] Known as one of the most skilful actors on the Elizabethan stage, especially for dancing practise and stage or dramatic jigs (Dyce 1840: v; Baskervill 1929; Clegg 2019: 89), William Kemp[i] is a controversial figure whose self and persona have always wavered between self-congratulation and his contemporaries’ praise and biting criticism. Gray (1930) was probably one of the first critics to highlight Kemp’s controversial reputation as an actor. Although Kemp’s contemporaries were sometimes annoyed by him ‘tak[ing] off his slipper and throw[ing] it at some other actors’, Gray also acknowledged that ‘he [Kemp] must have shown his ability to do other things than throw slippers about the stage’ (262). In fact, he was ‘the outstanding comedian […] of the Shakespearean company’ (262). As will be seen later in greater detail, Kemp’s controversial reputation can be ascribed to some mysterious events of 1599, a year that marks the divide between celebrations of and invectives against his persona. As underlined by some critics, if Kemp was saluted as a skilful actor when a member of The Chamberlain’s Men (1594–9), he became a target of his contemporaries’ criticism afterwards, so much so that ‘Shakespeare […] may well have had Kempe in mind when he has Hamlet lecture the players: “And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them”’ (Dutton 1989: 112).
[2] In order to conduct an in-depth analysis of Kemp’s self (or, more precisely, the representation of his self), specific attention must be paid to both hints and references to his character in his contemporaries’ writings and to his semi-fictional autobiographical pamphlet[ii] titled Nine Days Wonder. In fact, as noted by Wiles, ‘Kemp’s Nine Days Wonder relates the details of his famous morris dance from London to Norwich in 1600, and it is to this that we must turn to get a feel for the man’s voice and character’ (1987: 24). However, as both his contemporaries’ accounts and Kemp’s own work are primarily fictional, objectivity remains elusive. On the contrary, the analysis carried out in this article aims to understand how Kemp’s persona emerges from extant early modern English pieces of writing in a continuous balance between representation and self-representation of his persona. Although the topic of this article has heretofore been mined, the methodology adopted here, i.e., a pragmastylistic analysis[iii] of Kemp’s Nine Days Wonder and dance-related textual episodes in particular, represents an original contribution to the scholarly debate surrounding his personality.
William Kemp: Some Notes from His Contemporaries
[3] Not much is known about Kemp’s life and even less before he joined The Chamberlain’s Men in 1594. As summarised by Forrest,
Kemp first appears in 1585 as a member of a breakaway group of Leicester’s men who toured Denmark in that year and the next, and then moved on to Saxony before returning to England in 1587. On the Earl of Leicester’s death in 1588, the company disbanded and several of its principal actors (including Kemp) joined the Strange company which, after many metamorphoses, became the Chamberlain’s company, with which he performed with Shakespeare and Burbage. (1999: 237)
Around 1590, when he was 30 (he was born c. 1560), Kemp must have been quite a famous Elizabethan actor, judging by Thomas Nashe’s humorous dedication of his pamphlet An Almond for a Parrat (1590): ‘to that most comicall and conceited Caualier, Monsieur du Kempe, Iestmonger and vice-gerent generall to the ghost of Dicke Tarleton’ (3). Nashe’s dedication evinces the fact that Kemp was considered by his contemporaries the natural successor of Dick Tarlton, “London’s first jigging clown” (Clegg 2019: 89), who had died only two years previously in 1588 (Schoenbaum 1987: 184),[iv] as both were clowns with similar abilities to compose and dance jigs. When writing his Nine Days Wonder in 1600, Kemp must have had Nashe’s alliterative pun in mind when he defines himself as ‘Caualiero Kemp’ (p. 3)[v] and when, among the personalities who had accused him, he sarcastically mentions ‘[o]ne [who] hath written Kemps Farewell to the tune of Kery, mery, Buffe’ (p. 1). Defined in the OED as ‘[s]ome kind of blow or buffet; perhaps a loud but not severe blow, such as one given in sport with the hollowed hand’, the multiword lemma KERRY MERRY BUFF, spelled similarly to the one in Kemp’s pamphlet, can be found only in Thomas Nashe’s Have with you to Suffron-Walden (1596) prior to 1600 on EEBO. It is unlikely that Kemp read the expression, this time spelled as one word, ‘kirimiriebuff’, in John Florio’s first Italian-English dictionary, World of Words (1598). The word is used by Florio to define the obsolete Italian lemma TARTOFFOLA, indicating ‘the swelling, marke, or black and blue of a blow or hurt: also a blow giuen with ones knuckles vpon ones head: also a kirimiriebuff’ (413. My emphasis). Nevertheless, it is highly improbable that a clown would bother looking up a term in an Italian-English dictionary to rail against the author of Kemp’s Farewell; nor does it seem likely that Florio is the target of Kemp’s invective or the author of the alleged Farewell. Given the context of Kemp’s criticism, therefore, it is more likely that his target is his former colleague in the world of the Elizabethan theatre rather than John Florio.
[4] Kemp’s consecration as a leading Elizabethan clown occurred in 1592, when the anonymous[vi] play A Knack to Know a Knave was staged and published with the intent of exalting the performative skills of such leading actors as Edward Alleyn and William Kemp, as stated by the play’s complete title in the frontispiece: ‘A most pleasant and merry new comedy entitled A Knack to Know a Knave, newly set forth as it hath sundry times been played by Ed. Alleyn and his company; with Kemp’s applauded merriments of the men of Gotham in receiving the King into Gotham’. Here Kemp appears as a kind of guarantee of quality (and a comic one, given the mention of ‘applauded merriments’; cf. Ford 2010: 164) together with Alleyn, both members, at this time, of The Lord Strange’s Men.
[5] Kemp’s relationship with William Shakespeare officially began in 1594, when both men began to work for and collaborate with the newly-formed company The Chamberlain’s Men, although some critics argue that the playwright had created ad hoc characters such as Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1587) or the Clown in Titus Andronicus (1589–90) with Kemp in mind (Leech 1969: xxi–xxxv; Wiles 1987: 73; Schlueter 1990: 15). His fortunate career with The Chamberlain’s Men lasted from 1594 to 1599, with critics such as Gray, Gurr, and Wiles agreeing with the idea that Shakespeare also invented the character of Falstaff for Kemp (Gray 1930: 265 and ff.; Gurr 1970: 88; Wiles 1987: 73–4; 116–35).[vii] Moreover, it has often been noted that Kemp certainly acted as Peter in Romeo and Juliet, since the play’s Q2 (1599) states, ‘Enter Will Kemp’ (London, British Library, C.12.g.18, fol. K3r), a hypothesis also supported by other intratextual elements in the text of Q2 that may hint at Kemp’s presence onstage (Ford 2010).
[6] Alas, for Kemp, the most noteworthy event in his life was his resignation from the lease of the Globe theatre, as soon as it opened in 1599, where he was one of the actors and shareholders together with Shakespeare, Heminges, Philips, and others (Nielson 1993: 466–7). Very little is known about what led Kemp to resign, and what we do know from the scant information at hand comprises mere biased comments and allusions aimed at defending Kemp’s interests (as in the case of Nine Days Wonder) or those of his former friends and colleagues. As examined in the next section, this unlucky incident is echoed in Kemp’s pamphlet; in fact, it appears to be one of the primary reasons Kemp wrote it.
[7] It has been argued that Kemp may have returned to The Chamberlain’s Men sometime after his nine-day journey from London to Norwich and back in 1600 (Chambers 1923: 326–7; Nielson 1993: 466–7), although in Nine Days Wonder, as Nielson noted (1993: 467), the actor himself suggests that he quit the company for good in 1599 and left England to visit Italy and Germany. Nevertheless,
[s]ome scholars have speculated that after his return from the Continent, he rejoined the Chamberlain’s Men, which would explain his association with them in the mind of the anonymous Cantabrigian author of The [Second Part of the] Returne from Parnassus, where the actors Burbage and Kemp are represented onstage together. But the only strong evidence we have for any appearance by Kemp on the English stage after 1600 is the presence of his name in the records of payment in Henslowe’s diary, which E. K. Chambers considers proof that ‘during the winter of 1602-3 [Kemp] was certainly one of Worcester’s men’. (467)
[8] The dance aficionado and playwright John Marston was probably the most enthusiastic author to celebrate Kemp’s dancing abilities. In his satire The Scovrge of Villanie (1599), Marston, parodying Sir John Davies’s Orchestra (1596), triumphantly declares that ‘the orbes celestiall / Will daunce Kemps Iigge’ (Satire X, vv. 30–1), thus acknowledging Kemp’s outstanding ability in performing jigs, the skill that led him to be considered an heir to the famous Dick Tarlton.
[9] Nevertheless, after 1600, the most famous invective against Kemp the clown is thought to have been that in Shakespeare’s Hamlet’s Bad Quarto (hereafter Q1), probably written in 1603. When Hamlet is onstage with the players, whom he had summoned to perform the well-known dumb show The Murder of Gonzago, he instructs them not to deviate from the text he has provided them with. When compared with Q2 and the Folio text, Q1 contains a considerably longer tirade against clowns and their bad habit of over-improvising, an art at which Kemp excelled and that is considered to be the root cause of his break with The Chamberlain’s Men, as noted by Evelyn Tribble (2017: 127). Hamlet instructs the players as follows:
Let not your Clowne speake
More then is set downe, there be of them I can tell you
That will laugh themselues, to set on some
Quantitie of barren spectators to laugh with them,
Albeit there is some necessary point in the Play
Then to be obserued: O t’is vile, and shewes
A pittifull ambition in the foole the vseth it.
And then you haue some agen, that keepes one sute
Of ieasts, as a man is knowne by one sute of
Apparell, and Gentlemen quotes his ieasts downe
In their tables, before they come to the play, as thus:
Cannot you stay till I eate my porrige? and, you owe me
A quarters wages: and, my coate wants a cullison:
And your beere is sowre: and, blabbering with his lips,
And thus keeping in his cinkapase of ieasts,
When, God knows, the warme Clowne cannot make a iest
Vnlesse by chance, as the blinde man catcheth a hare:
Maisters tell him of it. (London, British Library, C.34.k.2, fols. F2r–v)
Whether or not this is a mischievous interpolation by an actor belonging to Shakespeare’s company (Grant White 1862: 11; Duthie 1941: 226), the above speech does not refer to clowns in general — as do Q2 and the Folio — but to one clown in particular who is used to improvising, and Kemp was famous for ‘his ability to improvise and amuse’ (Gray 1930: 262).
[10] Rev. Alexander Dyce, who published the first annotated critical edition of Kemp’s pamphlet for the Camden Society in 1839, identifies two plays where Kemp is involved not as an actor, but as part of the dramatis personae (x–xvii): the anonymous Cantabrigiensis satiric comedy The Return from Parnassus: The Scourge of Simony (1606; henceforth 3 Parnassus, to distinguish it from its prequels, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus and The Return from Parnassus), as we have already seen (cf. the quotation from Nielson 1993: 467, above), and the collaborative play The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607), written by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins.
[11] In act 4, scene 3 of 3 Parnassus, Kemp enters the stage together with Richard Burbage, and they are later joined by two other fellows, Philomusus and Studioso — the latter a character whom Kemp mockingly addresses as Mr. Otioso. Kemp actually utters the majority of the lines, leaving little for the other three characters to say. The clown of 2 Parnassus is an opponent of those University Wits who ‘smell too much of that writer Ouid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Juppiter’ (cit. in Dyce 1840: xi), and goes so far as to dismiss Ben Jonson as ‘a pestilent fellow’ (xi), thus also demonstrating, as Keilen and Moschovakis pointed out, a ‘limited grasp of classical tradition’ (2017: 221). It has been noted that the English clown is a character who owes more to the Medieval mystery play than to Greek and Roman drama (Stevenson 1984: 166–7). According to Wiles, Elizabethan spectators at the turn of the seventeenth century were perfectly aware of the ‘tension between a neo-classical aesthetic which could not accommodate the clown and a performing tradition in which the clown was central’ (1987: 43). Thus even the fictitious Kemp depicted by the anonymous dramaturgs of St. John’s College who wrote 3 Parnassus embodies that tension between the English Renaissance neo-classical taste for Latin and Greek cultures and the clown tradition inherited from the Anglo-Norman Middle Ages.
[12] In the other play listing Kemp among its characters, The Travels of the Three English Brothers, the audience finds the clown in Venice with one of the three Shirley brothers of the play’s title, who, after saluting Kemp as an old friend, invites the clown to perform a metatheatrical scene with an alleged harlequin and his wife. Scholars cannot agree on whether Kemp actually visited Italy after his morris dance to Norwich, as he hints at the end of Nine Days Wonder (Nielson 1993: 467). Nevertheless, this scene offers an important insight into Kemp’s persona, acknowledging him as a skilled and renowned actor and associating him with the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, according to some scholars (Wright 1926).
[13] Adverse criticism of Kemp remained animated almost a decade after his death. William Rowley, in his pamphlet, A Search for Money (1609. Cit. in Dyce 1840: iv), is ironical about those who travelled by dancing ‘wild morrise to Norrige’, whereas even Ben Jonson does not miss the opportunity to denigrate the clown’s terpsichorean accomplishment in his poem, On the Famous Voyage,[viii] where he inveighs against ‘those […] which / Did dance the famous morris, unto Norwich’ (vv. 35–6).[ix] Whether or not such statements are accurate, it is worth noting here the marked resonance, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, of both Kemp’s journey from London to Norwich and back, and of the publication of Nine Days Wonder.
[14] The descriptions of Kemp’s personality reported in this section shift from praise for his thespian skills (especially his ability to dance jigs, improvise and amuse the audience) to harsh criticism, with 1599 being a divide between these two attitudes. Post-1599 comments, in particular, show that Kemp’s resignation from the lease for the Globe is not the only reason for his decline as an actor: Jonson and other playwrights and pamphleteers all depict Kemp as a self-confident clown whose art of improvising and dancing jigs was becoming out of fashion at the turn of the seventeenth century. So much so, in fact, that, according to the critics, he was dismissed from The Chamberlain’s Men in favour of Robert Armin, who was as ‘attuned to Renaissance notions of folly as to the English folk tradition’ (Wiles 1987: 136). The following section focuses on Kemp’s reaction to the watershed event of 1599. Turning our attention to the actor’s autobiographical pamphlet, we can describe his reaction to his critics in terms of what Belinda Tiffen, paraphrasing Harry Berger, defines as ‘self-representation […]: the careful depiction of a public face for a selected purpose’ (2006: 171), this purpose being the preservation of Kemp’s ‘public face’ (understood in the Goffmanian sense of an image ‘self delineated in terms of approved social attributes’, 1967: 5) in the eyes of his audience, the Court, and, ultimately, the Queen.
Dancing from London to Norwich (and back): Nine Days Wonder (1600)
[15] Leaving London on 10 or 11 February 1600, William Kemp reached Norwich on 8 March, having covered the over-100-mile distance not in only nine days but in almost a month. However, Kemp counted only those days when he was actually travelling while dancing his morris, without taking into account pauses or breaks due to inclement weather or to the hospitality of courteous individuals along the way. During his journey, Kemp meets both peasants and gentlemen, members of the lower and middle class, and of the gentry; he is always welcomed by everyone, thus combining, as Wiles suggests, a ‘middle-class code of values [with] populist Protestantism’ (1987: 25). Of course, his main intent was to regain the favour of Queen Elizabeth following the incident with The Chamberlain’s Men and also to earn some money thanks to the people betting on his London-to-Norwich undertaking. Unfortunately, on his way back to London, Kemp did not manage to collect his money and thus arrived in the capital as poor as ever.
[16] If Kemp actually danced to offer a better representation of his own personality than the one provided by his contemporaries, the choice of the morris must have been a very considered one, especially if one also takes into account that dancing the morris was prohibited during Lent (Parr 2016: 89), precisely the period during which Kemp decided to set out on his journey. As noted earlier, Kemp’s terpsichorean skills were mainly associated with the jig, a dance not unlike the morris, both of which allowed dancers to display their physical qualities in terms of strength and resistance. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources, on the one hand, and dance historians, on the other, agree on the fact that jigs and morris dances were quite similar lively performances (West 2009: 207), and that sometimes the word jig could “indicate a solo version of other group or social dances” (Clegg and Skeaping 2014: 8) as the morris jig. Both dances were performed in the streets, among peasants, but it was not uncommon to have jigs and morris dances at the end of stage performances (especially in the long seventeenth century, as stated by Forrest 1999: 323) or at Court. Unlike the jig, whose origins seem to be Irish or even Italian (Breathnach 1973), during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the morris dance was thought[x] to have local roots in the legendary Celtic, pagan past, a mystical era from whose imagery Kemp draws myths and legends in order to identify himself with pivotal community figures such as Robin Hood, the King of the May, and the Summer King. Such figures and Kemp’s association with them enable us to see Nine Days Wonder as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque journey of inversion where an oddly dressed fool is the paramount element and functions as the glue that holds it all together.
[17] As the pragmatic analysis carried out in the next section will show, Kemp’s self-representation in Nine Days Wonder is very far removed from this statement by Wiles: ‘Except [for] his self-mockery, he is never a man to aggrandize himself. Others may address him as “Master Kempe”, but he refers to himself as plain “Will Kemp”’ (1987: 24). On the contrary, I would argue that the clown’s self-congratulation and false modesty emerge in several parts of this ‘rude and plain pamphlet’ (p. 1), as Kemp defines his own work. Starting from the initial captatio benevolentiae, confessio modestiae, and self-pity, targeted to move both his readers and dedicatee, the dance aficionada Mistress Anne (Mary) Fitton,[xi] the widespread and immodest comments Kemp spreads all over his pamphlet about his remarkable terpsichorean skills must be explored.
[18] Once in Chelmsford (almost 33 miles from London), Kemp dances with a tireless fourteen-year-old girl who praises him because he ‘would haue challenged the strongest man in Chelmsford, and amongst many I thinke few would haue done so much’ (p. 7). After leaving Chelmsford, the clown meets some ‘vnknowne friends’ (p. 8) who would like to accompany him to Sudbury (almost 59 miles from London), but something prevents them from doing so: ‘coming to a broad plash of water and mud, which could not be auoyded, I fetch a rise, yet fell in ouer the ankles at the further end. My youth that follow’d me tooke his jump, and stuck fast in the midst […]: a hartye farwell I gaue them’ (p. 8). High jumping and leaping were two important characteristics that connoted a male’s pronounced inclination for dancing, and here Kemp’s self-celebration is highlighted by his skilful performance of powerful jumps. Another self-celebratory moment occurs in Norwich, where, in order to avoid the crowd that had gathered to celebrate him, Kemp manages to jump over the wall of the town hall for a meeting with the mayor.
[19] The most self-celebrative passage in Nine Days Wonder may be the very odd pas de deux that Kemp dances with a butcher in Sudbury. In this small Suffolk town, the clown, after gladly accepting the man’s proposal, wears him out to the point where the poor butcher leaves Kemp in the middle of the field and returns to his business because, as Kemp boasts, ‘my pace in dauncing is not ordinary’ (p. 9). This is bolstered by Kemp’s similar statement upon leaving five men behind on the way to Barford Bridge from Hingham, because ‘my pace was not for footemen’ (p. 15). Again, going from Bury to Thetford, Kemp admits he had danced ten miles in three hours, since ‘so light was my heeles, that I counted the ten mile non better than a leape’ (p. 12). In the early modern period, being a tireless dancer also implied being a tireless lover (see, among others, Nevile 2018: 34–5), an idea that is strengthened by the many women Kemp meets along his journey and who are particularly kind towards him.
[20] I would also argue that the link between clowns and sexual prowess was quite common in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. The Foucaultian scholar Laurie Shannon has argued that early modern society was governed by the idea that human relationships were based on the principle of likeness (even from a sexual standpoint) and that heterosexual marriages were merely necessary for the continuation of the human species. She labels this idea ‘Renaissance homonormativity’, a principle so powerful that it ‘normalize[d] relations between members of one sex above relations that cross sexual difference’ (2000: 187). One suitable example among many is Antonio and Bassanio’s intimate bond in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Another scholar, Rebecca Ann Bach, even argues that heterosexual affairs, especially in comedies, are prioritized in subplots centred on the vicissitudes of lower-class members (2007). Therefore, Kemp’s dexterity in dancing is associated with his masculinity, a binomial reinforced by the fact that Kemp is a clown, since, according to Bach, in early modern times, masculinity and heterosexual love were reserved for clowns, fools, and servants (2–5).
[21] A perfect example of the association between dance, heterosexual display, and foolish characters is offered by act 1, scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, where Sir Andrew Aguecheek, provoked by Sir Toby Belch, tries to insinuate his virility and machismo—however ineffectively—by boasting about his exaggerated ability as a dancer:
SIR TOBY BELCH. What is thy excellence in a galliard, knight?
SIR ANDREW. Faith, I can cut a caper.
SIR TOBY BELCH. And I can cut the mutton to’t.
SIR ANDREW. And I think I have the back-trick simply as strong as any man in Illyria.
SIR TOBY BELCH. Wherefore are these things hid? Wherefore have these gifts a curtain before ’em? are they like to take dust, like Mistress Mall’s picture? why dost thou not go to church in a galliard and come home in a coranto? My very walk should be a jig. I would not so much as make water but in a cinquepace. What dost thou mean? Is it a world to hide virtues in? I did think, by the excellent constitution of thy leg it was formed under the star of a galliard.
SIR ANDREW. Ay, ’tis strong, and it does indifferent well in a flame-coloured stock. Shall we set about some revels?
SIR TOBY BELCH. What shall we do else? Were we not born under Taurus?
SIR ANDREW. Taurus! That’s sides and heart.
SIR TOBY BELCH. No, sir; it is legs and thighs. Let me see the caper. [Sir Andrew capers] Ha, higher! Ha, ha, excellent. Exeunt (I.iii.97–114)[xii]
[22] Returning to the content overview of Nine Days Wonder sketched in this section, it is now worth briefly examining some paratextual elements, e.g., its frontispiece. The pamphlet was recorded at the Stationers’ Register on 22 April 1600 and printed the same year in London by Edward Allde for the bookseller Nicholas Ling. To begin with, two significant elements of the title page must be noticed. The name of the narrative’s protagonist is the first term a reader encounters: this might seem like a further self-celebratory attempt by William Kemp, but actually the title page was the printer’s rather than the author’s prerogative. Evidently, Allde believed that placing Kemp’s name before any other linguistic element would be a successful marketing strategy, thus confirming that the clown was still famous in London in 1600 and that his feat had caused a considerable stir in the English capital.
[23] The other noteworthy element in the title page is the central image where Kemp is portrayed together with his drummer. Wiles describes Kemp’s outfit in detail: ‘[t]he title-page shows him dressed in the full regalia of a country morris dancer: a plume, scarves waving from his arms, and a special shirt decorated with flowers to symbolize the coming of spring’ (1987: 26). However, another physical detail must be noticed: Kemp’s quadriceps are unnaturally tensed and well-developed, even when taking into account the muscular effort he is making to perform his morris dance. Once more, this anatomical detail underlines the clown’s natural gift for dancing, for performing a lively and energetic dance such as the morris requires strength and coordination. Merely by glancing at the title page of Nine Days Wonder, readers may have appreciated Kemp’s physical attributes, particularly natural aptitudes that would enable him to dance for his self-promotion.
A Pragmatic Analysis of Self-celebration in Nine Days Wonder
[24] Thus far we have contextualised Nine Days Wonder and its author in their historical and cultural early modern English milieu. This section will delve into a pragmatic analysis (primarily referential and interpersonal pragmatics) of the pamphlet in order to identify the stylistic devices through which Kemp represented himself in the eyes of his readership, going so far as to belittle other personalities through the use of impoliteness strategies.[xiii]
[25] As hinted above, Nine Days Wonder is a self-celebratory pamphlet, written in the first person singular, aimed at exalting Kemp’s personality. It is no surprise that, even from a quantitative point of view,[xiv] the personal deictics ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’, and ‘mine’ outnumber all the other elements of the same pragmatic type, as summarised in the table below (Table 1):
| Deictic/anaphoric element | Absolute frequency |
| I(le) | 213 |
| My | 121 |
| Me(e) | 71 |
| His | 64 |
| It | 50 |
| He(e) | 45 |
| Her | 37 |
| You/ye | 29 |
| Their | 21 |
| Your | 20 |
| Him | 19 |
| They | 19 |
| She | 14 |
| Them | 12 |
| Thee | 9 |
| Our | 8 |
| We(e) | 5 |
| Thou | 5 |
| Thy | 4 |
| Mine | 4 |
Table 1. Occurrences of deictic pronouns and possessives in Nine Days Wonder
Even considering that ‘[t]hird person forms are generally anaphoric’ (Culpeper and Haugh 2014: 24) in substitution of their antecedents (e.g., ‘a Mayde […] made request […] that she might daunce the Morrice with me in a great large roome’, p. 7. My emphases), and that hence statistics may vary somewhat in favour of these non-deictic person markers, it is fairly obvious that the first-person narrator of this half-fictional, half-autobiographical pamphlet is mainly concerned with himself. Although Kemp encounters a number of people along the way, he remains the fulcrum of his own account, and this is also reinforced by the fact that the majority (almost 89%) of the occurrences of the second-person deictics ‘you’, ‘ye’, ‘thou’, ‘thou’, etc., do not refer to somebody else, although he is reporting verbatim the words of the people he meets as direct speech[xv] (e.g., ‘O Kemp, deere Master Kemp! you are euen as welcome as—as—as—’, p. 13. My emphasis). What is more, third-person forms, deictic or anaphoric as they may be, are sometimes (33%) used by Kemp to talk about himself in the third person (e.g., ‘poore Will Kemp was seauen times stayed ere hee could recouer his Inne’, p. 11. My emphasis), adopting a stylistic technique known as illeism, employed by Greek or Latin writers such as Xenophon or Julius Caesar.[xvi] This technique usually ‘spotlight[s] […] the relationship between the character using [the illeism] […] and [her/]his inner self’, as Viswanathan argues in the case of Hamlet 5.2.125–8[xvii] (1969: 409), and gives the impression of ‘objective impartiality’ (Dimitrova 2017: 46). This is what Kemp aims to do when using illeism: he is establishing a connection between his character and his inner self, while at the same time trying to convey a sense of narrative objectivity, so that his readers may believe that he danced from London to Norwich and back in nine days and that he is merely the victim of his jealous contemporaries’ criticism. In closing this account of the use of personal pronouns and possessives, it is worth observing that the use of the ‘inclusive we’ is quantitatively very limited, almost statistically irrelevant (less than 8%). This, I argue, underlines Kemp’s sole agency in his feat and his lack of a sense of community: all the people he meets between London and Norwich invariably praise his physical skills and dancing ability.
[26] Other personal deictic elements in Nine Days Wonder pertain to ‘social relationship marking’ (Culpeper and Haugh 2014: 25). In this sense, ‘Caualiero Kemp’ (p. 3) and ‘Master Kemp’ (pp. 13, 16) can be considered examples of honorifics, to indicate an ‘asymmetrical relationship between speakers’ (Culpeper and Haugh 2014: 26). In fact, the actor uses ‘Caualiero Kemp’, together with a series of flamboyant epithets, in a highly self-celebrative co-text at the beginning of the pamphlet:
The first mundaye in Lent, the close morning promising a cleere day, […] my selfe, thats I, otherwise called Caualiero Kemp, head-master of Morrice-dauncers, high Head-borough of heighs, and onely tricker of your Trill-lilles and best bel-shangles betweene Sion and mount Surrey, began frolickly to foote it from the right honorable the Lord Mayors of London towards the right worshipfull (and truely bountifull) Master Mayors of Norwich. (p. 3. My emphasis)
Similarly, Kemp is saluted as a very important and welcome individual by the host of an inn in Rocklands: ‘O Kemp, deere Master Kemp! you are euen as welcome […] as the Queenes best grey-hound’ (p. 13. My emphasis), and ‘one Thomas Gilbert’ (p. 16) recites a Shakespearean sonnet entitled ‘Master Kemp his welcome to Norwich’ (p. 16) when the actor enters the gates of the Norfolk city.
[27] Moving from referential to interpersonal pragmatics, Kemp’s self-celebration is also seen in his frequent direct attacks against contemporary intellectuals as well as indirect insults and offences towards the people he meets, this latter behaviour clearly indicating his intent to distance himself from the poor rural folk he encounters between London and Norwich. It is interesting to note that Kemp uses two different pragmatic strategies that can be understood in the light of the application of pragmatic frameworks such as politeness theory.
[28] A thorough illustration of impoliteness theory lies beyond the scope of this article; suffice it to say that I will adopt Culpeper’s face-based model (1996; 2011)[xviii] and attempt to illustrate only those theoretical aspects relevant to the analysis herein. To make matters clearer, I will divide Nine Days Wonder into three different sections:
1) The dedicatory epistle to Anne (Mary) Fitton
2) The nine-day journey itself
3) The epilogue against ‘the impudent generation of ballad-makers and their coherents’ (p. 20).
In sections 1 and 3, Kemp adopts what Culpeper (1996: 356) defines as ‘bold on record impoliteness’, an offence, an insult produced ‘in a clear, direct, unambiguous and concise way’. This is effected thanks to derogatory adjectives and adjectival phrases directly addressed to his enemies (e.g., ‘a sort of mad fellows’, p. 2; ‘lying fooles’, p. 2; ‘impudent generation of ballad-makers’, p. 20; ‘notable Shakerags’, p. 20; ‘a sort of witles beetle-head’, p. 20; etc.) or, through the syntactic mechanism of hypallage, to their anti-Kemp literary output (e.g., ‘abhominable ballets written of me’, p. 20; ‘beastly ballets’, p. 21; etc.). The aim of Kemp’s ‘bold on record impoliteness’ is self-defence: his former fellows, who had accused him of lying about his terpsichorean journey from London to Norwich, are in turn accused of lying. Re-addressing the same accusations he had received, Kemp is using the same impoliteness strategy he has been a victim/target of.
[29] The impoliteness strategies used in section 2 are far more subtle. Here Kemp never insults or offends the people he meets directly, but uses strategies that highlight and reinforce the social distance between himself and the poor yet genuine peasants he encounters on his way to Norwich. In particular, in the first part of his journey, the clown seems to adopt what Culpeper calls positive impoliteness output strategies aimed at ‘damage[ing] the addressee’s positive face wants’ (356),[xix] that is, damaging the addressee’s desire to be ‘appreciated and approved of’ (Brown and Levinson 1987: 61). Culpeper lists ten of these strategies, some of them clearly adopted by Kemp, perhaps even unconsciously, when dealing with the hordes that always gathered in various towns and villages to watch him dance. For instance, at least on one occasion, the actor seems to use Culpeper’s strategy called ‘Dissociate from the other’ (1996: 357). This happens during the second day, at Burntwood, when two of the people who had followed him from London were arrested as pickpockets. Although Kemp knew they were thieves, he ‘iustly denyed their acquaintance’ (p. 6), accusing them of being two cutpurses and testifying against them. Similarly, the actor uses strategies 1 and 2, i.e., ‘ignore, snub the other’ and ‘exclude the other from an activity’ (Culpeper 1996: 357) on the third day at Chelmsford, when he was so tired that he locked himself in his room and spoke to the people from the window rather than perform his morris in the streets: ‘I had to passe by the people at Chelmsford, that it was more than an houre ere I could recouer my Inne gate, where I was faine to locke my selfe in my Chamber, and pacifie them with wordes out of a window insteed of deeds: to deale plainely, I was so weary, that I could dance no more’ (p. 7).
[30] The closer he gets to Norwich, the more evident Kemp’s transition from positive to negative impoliteness output strategies becomes. Unlike positive impoliteness, which aims to damage the addressee’s desire to be appreciated and approved of, negative impoliteness is the desire that one’s ‘actions [be] unimpeded by others’ (1987: 61). This switch from positive to negative impoliteness, I would argue, emphasises Kemp’s rhetorical construction of actual power over the people he meets,[xx] and it is reached both intra- and extralinguistically by exalting his physical abilities as a morris dancer. Among the negative impoliteness output strategies identified by Culpeper, Kemp seems to privilege no. 2: ‘Condescend, scorn or ridicule […] Belittle the other’ (1996: 358). This is what happens, for instance, at Chelmsford, when a fourteen-year-old girl ‘a whole houre […] held out’, but then Kemp ‘let her off’ (p. 7), demonstrating that a forty-year-old man can easily tire a very young girl (here the sexual metaphorical connotation of dance is rather obvious, as explained in the previous section). Similarly, on his way to Braintree, on the fourth day, two ‘vnknowne friends’ (p. 8) are mocked by the actor because they look like two frogs, incapable of emerging from a muddy puddle that Kemp easily managed to jump over while dancing his morris, while they did not. Again, in Sudbury, on day 5, ‘a lusty, tall’ (p. 9) butcher gives up dancing the morris with Kemp half a mile from Bury because the clown’s ‘pace in dauncing is not ordinary’ (p. 9). These episodes emphasise Kemp’s physical stamina by belittling those he meets and dances with. Hence, as noted earlier, the positive and negative impoliteness output strategies he adopts in narrating his journey to Norwich, fictional or genuinely autobiographical as it might be, confirm that even at a linguistic level, Kemp struggles to exalt his physical abilities as a dancer by belittling younger, inexperienced individuals. In so doing he tries to persuade his readership — his audience, his dedicatee, and, hopefully, Queen Elizabeth herself — that he still possesses all the physical and terpsichorean requisites to be the great actor he used to be prior to leaving the Globe in 1599.
Conclusion
[31] It is hoped that the analysis carried out in this article has shed some light on the figure of William Kemp by comparing and contrasting opinions about him given by early modern English pamphleteers and playwrights (especially after 1599, when he left or was expelled from The Chamberlain’s Men), and by means of thematic and pragmastylistic considerations of his semi-fictional autobiographical pamphlet, Nine Days Wonder. The results obtained reveal a self-centred personality particularly inclined to speaking about himself and focused on belittling those around him. Moreover, through ad hoc impoliteness strategies that move from ‘bold on record’ to positive and negative impoliteness, Kemp carefully fashions a grandiose self-image whose dance skills are the main element of comparison between himself and the people he encounters on his journey from London to Norwich. This comparison aims to exalt his personality and physical abilities in the eyes of his readership by belittling others and conveying his sense of superiority. Might this ill-concealed self-centred, albeit highly fictionalised, personality be the very reason for Kemp’s departure from Shakespeare’s company and from the Globe itself?
Notes
[i] Due to early modern fluctuating spelling, the clown’s name is variably written as ‘Kemp’ or ‘Kempe’. In this study, the former version will be adopted, as it is the spelling chosen in Nine Days Wonder’s first edition of 1600.
[ii] Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich is the only work by Kemp to enter the Stationer Register, Stationer’s Liber C, f. 58b: ‘22 Aprilis [1600] Master Linge Entered for his copye vnder the hands of master Harsnet and master man warden a booke Called Kemps morris to Noruiche’.
[iii] One of the first definitions of pragmastylistics is given by Hickey (1993), who describes this discipline as the study of the linguistic choices a speaker/author makes “determined by the desired effects […], by the communicative qualities aimed at […], and by the context or the situation itself” (578). These three factors are fundamental in Kemp’s Nine Days Wonder, which is why pragmastylistics has been chosen as the methodology to analyse the text.
[iv] See, in particular, Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (1612), where the author states: ‘Heere I must needs remember Tarleton, in his time gratious with the Queene his soueraigne, and in the peoples generall applause, whom succeeded VVil. Kemp, as wel in the fauour of her Maiesty, as in the opinion & good thoughts of the generall audience’ (Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 13309, fol. E2v).
[v] For ease of reading, all the quotations from Kemp’s Nine Days Wonder are indicated by ‘p./pp.’ + the number of page(s) of the 1600 edition.
[vi] Variously attributed to Robert Greene, George Peele, and/or Thomas Nashe (see, among others, Rutter 2006), A Knack to Know a Knave has recently been attributed to Robert Wilson by Freebury-Jones, thanks to stylometric evidence (2022).
[vii] The question is actually controversial and very much debated. See, for instance, Baldwin 1931 for differing opinions on this matter.
[viii] Stansby and Meighen first published the poem in Epigrams (Jonson’s First Folio, 1616).
[ix] Actually, this is not the first and only reference to William Kemp by Ben Jonson. In Every Man out of his Humour (1599), the jester Carlo Buffone tells the knight Puntarvolo, ‘Would I had one of Kemp’s shoes to throw after you’ (v. 3434).
[x] This origin story has been debunked by Forrest (1999), among others. Adopting an anthropological perspective, the scholar concludes that ‘• morris has no single origin point. • morris is not and never has been a single or simple phenomenon. • morris has evolved continuously throughout its documented history. • morris is not especially ‘folk’ or rural. • styles of morris from different contexts have had a constant evolutionary influence on one another’ (27).
[xi] Mary Fitton was maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. She was very fond of dance, so much so that in June 1600 she led a dance in the masque staged for the marriage of Lady Anne Russell and Henry Somerset. During the dance she invited the Queen to dance, but Her Majesty refused (Strong 1977: 29–30; Brennan et al. 2013: 501).
[xii] Unless noted otherwise, references to Shakespeare’s canon are taken from The New Oxford edition (see the Works Cited section at the end of this article).
[xiii] Although (im)politeness strategies have been studied primarily in an interactional context, recent studies have broadened their perspectives to apply them to an analysis of extradiegetic moments in narrative texts (see, among others, Kizelbach 2017 and McIntyre and Bousfield 2017).
[xiv] The preliminary quantitative analysis and keywords extraction have been carried out using #Lancsbox software (https://lancsbox.lancs.ac.uk/).
[xv] At the end of the day, direct speech is not direct at all, as it is always mediated by the narrator—i.e., even reported voices are Kemp’s, ultimately.
[xvi] As noted by Viswanathan (1969), illeisms were widespread tropes in early modern English texts. Although he believes that the use of illeisms by such authors as Shakespeare may derive from the medieval theatre, others (see, i.a., Velz 1978) hypothesise that the adoption of this rhetorical technique derives directly from Shakespeare’s classical sources, especially in his Roman plays.
[xvii] ‘HAMLET. Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet / If Hamlet from himself be ta’ken away, / And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, / Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it’.
[xviii] As anticipated above, face-based pragmatic models derive from Goffman’s definition of face-work, i.e., all the linguistic strategies adopted by a speaker to preserve her/his own reputation. In his words, ‘[f]ace is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes’ (1967: 5). Since, according to Goffman, face-work can be positive (when the speaker wants to be accepted by others) and negative (when the speaker does not want others to impede her/his needs), Culpeper’s face-based model of impoliteness is built on this distinction and considers pragmatic strategies aimed at preserving or damaging both positive and negative face.
[xix] In this case, face wants may be equated with reputation.
[xx] In fact, according to Culpeper (1996: 358), in the passage from positive to negative impoliteness, the rhetorical construction of the speaker’s ‘relative power’ over the hearer/addressee is emphasised. It is as if the closer Kemp gets to the end of his journey, the more he wants to construct his power over others from a pragmatic/rhetorical viewpoint, thus widening the gap between his persona and the people he meets.
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London, British Library, C.12.g.18
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