Kemps nine daies wonder: performed in a daunce from London to Norwich / With an introduction and notes by the Rev. Alexander Dyce.

  • William Kempe
Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Kemps nine daies wonder: performed in a daunce from London to Norwich / With an introduction and notes by the Rev. Alexander Dyce. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the title-page mean nothing more than ‘merriments in which Kemp had been applauded;’ and since it is not easy to imagine that the scene, as preserved in the printed copy, could have been received with any unusual degree of approbation even by the rudest audience, the probabi- lity is, that he enlivened his part,* not only by his ever-welcome buffoonery, but also by sundry speeches of extemporal humour: see a passage in The Travailes of The three English Brothers, cited at p. xv. There can be no doubt that Kemp figured in other “ merrimentes ” besides those “ of the men of Goteham,” though they have not descended to our times: “ But,” says Nash to Gabriel Harvey, “ by the meanes of his [Greene’s] death thou art depriued of the remedie in lawe which thou in- tendedst to haue had against him for calling thy Father Ropemaker. Mas, thats true, what Action will it beare ? Nihil pro nihilo, none in law ; what it will doe vpon the stage I cannot tell, for there a man maye make action besides his part, when he hath nothing at all to say: and if there, it is but a clownish action that it will beare; for what can bee made of a Ropemaker more than a Clowne ? Will Kempe, I mistrust it will fall to thy lot for a merri- ment one of these dayes.” Strange Newes, Of the inter- cepting certaine Letters, &c. 1592. * He played, I presume, the Cobler. + Sig. E. 4.—Mr. Collier’s conjecture (Hist. of Engl. Dram. Poet. iii. 33) that Nash ‘refers possibly” to the ‘‘ Merrimentes of the men of Goteham’’ was thrown out, I think, somewhat hastily.