ABSTRACT
The same man who first played Falstaff accomplished the most publicized and perhaps greatest athletic feat of early seventeenth-century England. Upon leaving the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s theater company, in 1600, the actor and dancer Will Kemp undertook a feat for which he sought financial and social capital: dancing a morris for 130 miles from London to Norwich. Most scholars agree that the name of the dance takes its name from the Spanish moresca, or “Moorish” dancing; the dance requires a number of steps taken to music from a pipe and tabor, and this music is accompanied by the sound of bells worn by the dancer as he or she performs the dance. Kemp details his journey in the pamphlet Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder (1600), which was written both to prove that he undertook the journey and to publicize the event. However, not even a year or two before Kemp drew crowds along the road from London to Norwich, he most likely played Falstaff, the “fat-witted,” “fat rogue” the future Henry V befriends and then publicly renounces in 1 Henry IV (written and performed in 1596-97; published in 1598) and 2 Henry IV (written and performed in 1598-99; published in 1600). So much of the dialogue in Henry IV depends upon references to the girth of Falstaff’s belly that we cannot but speculate about the state of Will Kemp’s body while he performed this now infamous role, even though few present-day scholars have said anything about Will Kemp as Falstaff. But, if Kemp could play the corpulent knight, how could he then perform such a rigorous athletic feat only months later?
