JONNS, DANIEL. Denmark, 1586.
JONSON, BENJAMIN. Pembroke’s (?), 1597; Chamberlain’s (?), c. 1598; and dramatist.
JUBY, EDWARD. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1594–1618, Fortune lessee, 1618. An Edward Juby is traceable during 1598 to 1619 in the token-books of St. Saviour’s, Southwark. In the last year he is marked ‘dead’, and his burial was registered on 20 November 1618. In 1610 and 1614 he filled parish offices. He may fairly be identified with the ‘player’ whose children occur in the registers from 3 June 1599 to 15 September 1614. His widow Francis held his share of the Fortune lease in 1622 (H. ii. 290; Rendle, Bankside, xxvi; Bodl.).
JUBY, RICHARD. Admiral’s, 1602. His son Richard was baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 1 May 1602 (Bodl.).
JUBY, WILLIAM (?). Admiral’s, 1599–1602 (H. ii. 290).
JUGLER, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
KEMP, JOHN. Germany, 1601.
KEMPE, WILLIAM, cannot be securely identified or connected with any one of various homonyms who have been traced in D. N. B. and elsewhere.[968] He probably emerges as one of Leicester’s men in the Low Countries during 1585–6 and thence made his way to Denmark. He was in London and had already won a comic reputation by 1590 when the dedication of An Almond for a Parrat (Nashe, iii. 341), ‘To that most Comicall and conceited Caualeire Monsieur du Kempe, Jestmonger and Vice-gerent generall to the Ghost of Dicke Tarlton,’ tells how the anonymous author, possibly Nashe, had been asked by ‘that famous Francatrip’ Harlicken’ at Bergamo in the previous summer, whether he knew ‘any such Parabolano here in London as Signior Chiarlatano Kempino’ of whose ‘pleasance’ Harlicken had heard ‘report’. In Four Letters Confuted (1592) Nashe says of an action of Harvey’s, ‘Will Kempe, I mistrust it will fall to thy lot for a merriment, one of these dayes’ (i. 287). An example of Kempe’s merriments is to be found in sc. xii of A Knack to Know a Knave (1594) played by Strange’s men, to whom Kempe belonged by 1593. He was also famous for his jigs. Four of these are entered in the Stationers’ Register during 1591–5 (cf. ch. xviii) but are not preserved, and ‘Kemps jiggs’ is the heading to some music collected by John Dowland and preserved in Camb. Univ. Libr. MS. Dd. ii. 11 (cf. Halliwell, MS. Rarities, 8). Marston (iii. 372), Scourge of Villainy (1598), sat. xi. 30, ‘the orbs celestial Will dance Kempe’s jig,’ and E. Guilpin, Skialetheia (1598), sat. v, ‘Whores, bedles, bawdes, and sergeants filthily Chaunt Kemps Jigge, or the Burgonians tragedy,’ show his vogue. In 1594–5 he was one of the recently constituted Chamberlain’s men and the intrusion of his name into stage-directions to R. J. iv. 5. 102 (Q2) and M. Ado, iv. 2, shows that he played Peter in the one play and Dogberry in the other. Oddly enough, one of his speeches (iv. 2. 4) in M. Ado is assigned to ‘Andrew’, possibly a generic name for a clown or ‘merry-Andrew’. He is in the actor-list of Every Man in his Humour (1598) but not in that of Every Man out of his Humour (1599), and this fact, together with his sale of his share in the Globe soon after the lease of 21 February 1599 was signed, points to his leaving the company. ‘Would I had one of Kemps shooes to throw after you,’ says a speaker in E. M. O. IV. v (q.v.). This may be an allusion to some clownery by Kempe, perhaps in a performance with some other company at the Curtain in the autumn of 1599 after the Chamberlain’s left that house; or, less probably, to Kempe’s famous morris-dance for a wager from London to Norwich, at the end of which he hung his buskins in the Guildhall, for this began on 11 February 1600 and ended on 11 March, the year being fixed by the mayoralty (1599–1600) of Roger Weld at Norwich. Another allusion to ‘Kemps morice’ is in Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600), i. 45. Dudley Carleton wrote to John Chamberlain on 13 October 1600 (S. P. D. Eliz. cclxxv. 93) that on his way from Witham to Englefield ‘we met a company of mad wenches, whereof Mrs. Mary Wroughton and young Stafford were ringleaders, who travelled from house to house, and to some places where they were little known, attended with a concert of musicians, as if they had undertaken the like adventure as Kemp did from London to Norwich’. Kempe’s own account of his adventure was entered in the Stationers’ Register as ‘Kemps morris to Norwiche’ on 22 April 1600 (Arber, iii. 160). In the Epistle to Anne Fitton, whom, possibly by confusion with her sister Mary, he describes as maid of honour to Elizabeth, he refers to unentered ballads on the subject, and when he says that ‘I haue daunst my selfe out of the world’ is not improbably jesting on his departure from the Globe. At the end he foreshadows crossing to Calais, which he no doubt did. A John Kemp, who was in charge of a touring company, which had been in Holland and reached Münster by November 1601, may have been a relative. But William Kempe had returned to England, after visiting Italy as well as Germany, on 2 September 1601, as is shown by the following interpolation in a diary of one William Smith of Abingdon, in Sloane MS. 414, f. 56 (wrongly cited by Halliwell, Ludus Coventriae 410, as Sloane MS. 392, f. 401; cf. F. J. Furnivall in N.S.S. Trans. 1880–6, 65):
‘Sep. 2. Kemp, mimus quidam, qui peregrinationem quandam in Germaniam et Italiam instituerat, post multos errores, et infortunia sua, reversus: multa refert de Anthonio Sherley, equite aurato, quem Romae (legatum Persicum agentem) convenerat.’
Possibly Kempe rejoined the Chamberlain’s for a while. In 3 Parnassus (? January 1602), iv. 3, he is introduced as a fellow of Burbadge and Shakespeare, and greeted with allusions to his ‘dancing the morrice ouer the Alpes’ and ‘the Emperour of Germany’. But on 10 March 1602 he had a loan from Henslowe, and during the winter of 1602–3 he was certainly one of Worcester’s men. The dates do not lend support to the suggestion of Fleay, ii. 20, that he had already in 1599–1600 been at the Rose with Pembroke’s men. After the end of Elizabeth’s reign he is not traceable, and he is mentioned as dead in Heywood, Apology (c. 1608), and dead or retired in Dekker, Gull’s Hornbook (1609), 11, ‘Tarlton, Kemp, nor Singer, nor all the litter of fools that now come drawling behind them, never played the clown more naturally.’ A William Kempe is recorded in token-books of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, as living in Samson’s Rents in 1595, 1596, 1598, and 1599, in Langley’s New Rents in 1602, and later near the old play-house (Collier, iii. 351, and Bodl.; Rendle, Bankside, xxvi). Collier, but not Rendle, gives the date ‘1605’ for the last entry, probably with a view to supporting his notice of Kempe, as playing with Armin at the Blackfriars (q.v.) in 1605, which is doubtless a fabrication. On the other hand, though the date is plausible, the notice of ‘Kempe a man’ as buried at St. Saviour’s on 2 November 1603 (Rendle, xxvii) is not so worded as to be absolutely conclusive. The name was a common one, and Collier, Actors, xxxvi, gives notices of it from other parishes. In T. Weelkes, Ayres on Phantasticke Sprites (1608), it is said of Kempe that ‘into France He took pains to skip it’. His visit to Venice and meeting with Sherley are dramatized in Travels of Three English Brothers (1607) and apparently misdated after the Englands Joy of November 1602. Finally, an epitaph upon him is in R. Braithwaite, Remains after Death (1618), sig. F 8v, which suggests that he died not long after his morris.