10 December. The pageants in his honour at Utrecht, Leyden, and the Hague were remarkable. Stowe records festivities at Utrecht on St. George's Day, 23 April 1586. These included an after-dinner show of 'dauncing, vauting, and tumbling, with the forces of Hercules, which gave great delight to the strangers, for they had not seene it before'.[1] It is a reasonable inference that the performers in The Forces of Hercules were English.[2] And on 24 March 1586 Sir Philip Sidney, writing to Walsingham from Utrecht, says:
'I wrote to yow a letter by Will, my lord of Lester's jesting
plaier, enclosed in a letter to my wife, and I never had answer
thereof . . . I since find that the knave deliverd the letters to my
ladi of Lester.'[3]
That the 'jesting plaier' was William Shakespeare is on
the whole less likely than that he was the famous comic
actor, William Kempe; and this theory is confirmed by
a mention in an earlier letter of 12 November 1585 from
Thomas Doyley at Calais to Leicester himself of 'Mr. Kemp,
called Don Gulihelmo', as amongst those remaining at
Dunkirk.[4] Leicester returned to England in November
1586. 'Wilhelm Kempe, instrumentist' and his lad 'Daniell
Jonns' were at the Danish Court at Helsingör in August
and September of the same year; and so, from 17 July to
18 September, were five 'instrumentister och springere'
whose names may evidently be anglicized as Thomas Stevens,
George Bryan, Thomas King, Thomas Pope, and Robert
Percy (cf. ch. xiv). Some or all of these men are evidently
the company of English comedians referred to by Thomas
Heywood as commended by the Earl of Leicester to Frederick II
of Denmark. Stevens and his fellows, but not apparently
- ↑ Stowe, Annales, 717, from a description by William Segar.
- ↑ The show itself was perhaps of Italian origin, for on 17 June 1572 the Earl of Lincoln was entertained at Paris by the Duke of Anjou (2 Ellis, iii. 12, from Cott. MS. Vesp. F. vi, f. 93) with 'an Italian comedie, which eandid, vaulting with notable supersaltes and through hoopes, and last of all the Antiques, of carying of men one uppon an other which som men call labores Herculis'.
- ↑ J. Bruce from Harl. MS. 287, f. 1, in Who was Will, my Lord of Leicester's jesting player? (Sh. Soc. Papers, i. 88). Bruce thinks that 'Will' might be Johnson, Kempe, or Sly, but not Shakespeare, whose 'earliest works bear upon them the stamp of a mind far too contemplative and refined' for Sidney to call him 'knave' and 'jesting player'. I do not subscribe to the reasoning. W. J. Thoms, Three Notelets on Shakespeare, 120, upholds the Shakespeare theory, and attempts to support it by evidence of military knowledge in the plays.
- ↑ Wright, Eliz. ii. 268, from Cott. MS. Galba C. viii; cf. M. L. R. iv. 88.
