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Kemps Nine Dates Wonder: Dancing Carnival into Market

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Max W. Thomas
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Abstract

In 1600, Will Kemp danced a morris from London to Norwich and published an account of his feat, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder. His propensity for histrionics had won him widespread fame in England (as the Clown for the Chamberlain's Men, the acting company he had left in 1599). Attempting to capitalize on that propensity with his morris, he sought immediate monetary gain and also a lasting personal recognition; consequently, his pamphlet emphasizes the affinities between his project and a mercantile venture. In doing so, moreover, it presents Kemp's dance as a reworking of the medieval morris traditions, a version distanced from their carnivalesque associations and communal origins and offered for sale, so to speak, in the marketplace of theatrical representation.

Type
2. Underwriting Performance: Appropriation, Legitimation, Exchange
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 3: Special Topic: On Poetry , May 1992 , pp. 511 - 523
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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