Daryl W Palmer

When Hospitality made his entrance in Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, Elizabethan audiences probably thought they knew what was about to unfold. A multifaceted term, hospitality referred to the generous entertainment of friends and strangers alike. For several decades, preachers and pamphleteers had been reminding their audiences that hospitality was an essential part of Christian life. As the years passed, these reminders had turned into complaints about the decay of hospitality. With all this in mind, Wilson’s early audiences must have expected poor Hospitality to be ignored and dismissed, but Wilson surprised them with three elements: a heteroclite Hospitality, his startling murder, and Simplicity’s comic reaction. In my analysis of each of these elements, I want to pay particular attention to the ways in which Wilson's dramaturgy – what Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean have called ‘medley’ – energizes the revisionary enterprise.

A London morning at the turn of the century, gloomy. Carnival is past. The city wakes to a close winter dawn on the first Monday of Lent, and citizens of all shapes and sizes, carrying torches, crowd around the Lord Mayor's house, hoping for a sight of "Caualiero Kemp, headmaster of Morrice-dauncers, high Head-borough of heighs, and onely tricker of your Trill-lilles and best bel-shangles betweene Sion and mount Surrey." 1 As the throng grows, Lent takes on a festive spirit in the person of William Kemp, London's (and Shakespeare's) famous but unemployed clown, who leaps through the crowd, dancing his way to the city gates and then on to Norwich. As readers did at the beginning of the seventeenth century, we may savor this scene by lingering over Kemp's pamphlet account published as Kemps nine dales wonder. Performed in a daunce from London to Norwich. My straightforward concern in this essay will be twofold: first, to recognize Kemp's brilliant but neglected prose as one of the earliest and brightest re-presentations of what we would today call "performance art"; second, to interrogate this occasion as one of the first encounters between unscripted performance and an emerging author culture that legitimates performance by ascribing it to an authorized version. We will want both to appreciate the jingling prose of this "best-belshangles" and, simultaneously, to scrutinize the alterations of performance practice in its transformation into text. Kemp's Nine Dales Wonder is an event for contemporary scholarship, perhaps more exciting today than it was for an age familiar with the clown's techniques. We will want, therefore, to ask other questions. What does performance have to do with popular culture? What difference does it make that the so-called popular culture we study comes to us in the mediated form of texts? How did a writer, prior to the birth of the novel, go about translating popular elements into prose? In the limited space of the following discussion, I can only propose avenues of future exploration and possible answers. Kemp's morris and its generally neglected analogs will demand our attention for some time to come.