A Finding List: Part 2.

Bacon’s Acquaintances, Friends, Companions, Colleagues

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W-X-Y-Z

In this section, it was felt the need to contain all persons referred to in Bacon’s works, speeches, and letters who were his acquaintances, friends, or companions.

They are given a well deserved synoptical, yet understandable biography. This way, all references noted to persons mentioned by Bacon would be well understood to why he referred to them, and under what circumstances they surrounded his lifestyle. In continuation to these synoptical biographies, are the works of these persons either in a detailed account that will be found in the Appendix volume or in a synoptical form after each individual biography.
Where no additional information is added to those works, is due to the lack of historical records, which is believed to be more and more noted to modern researchers on the history of those times and especially when compiling such a volume as this one.

A jesty note from Edmund Burke will end the introduction to this part: “Strip majesty of its externals and it is merely a jest.” [(m)ajest(y).]

K

Kemp William Was a comic actor of high reputation. Like Tarlton, whom he succeeded “as well in the favour of her Majesty as in the opinion and good thoughts of the general audience” 1 he usually played the Clown, and was greatly applauded for his buffoonery, his extemporal wit, and his performance of the Jig. That at one time, perhaps from about 1589 to 1593 or later, he belonged to a Company under the management of the celebrated Edward Alleyn is proved by the title-page of a drama which will be afterwards cited. At a subsequent period he was a member of the Company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants who played during summer at the Globe and during winter at the Blackfriars. In 1596, while the last-mentioned house was undergoing considerable repair and enlargement, a petition was presented to the Privy Council by the principal inhabitants of the liberty, praying that the work might proceed no further, and that theatrical exhibitions might be abolished in that district. A counter petition, which appears to have been successful, was presented by the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants; and, according to Collier’s Hist. of Engl. Dram. Poet. Vol I, pp. 297-298, at its commencement, the names of the chief petitioners are thus arranged: Thomas Pope, Richard Burbadge, John Hemings, Augustine Phillips, William Shakespeare, William Kempe, William Slye, and Nicholas Tooley. In Kemp’s work Kemps Nine Daies Wonder there ismention of a piece anterior to Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth: “Still the search continuing, I met a proper upright youth, only for a little stooping in the shoulders, all heart to the heel, a penny Poet, whose first making was the miserable stolen story of Macdoel, or Macdobeth, or Macsomewhat, for I am sure a Mac it was, though I never had the maw to see it; and he told me there was a fat filthy ballet-maker, that should have once been his Journeyman to the trade, who lived about the town, and ten to one but he had thus terribly abused me and my Taberer, for that he was able to do such a thing in print.”
When Romeo and Juliet and Much ado about Nothing were originally brought upon the stage, Kemp acted Peter and Dogberry; and it has been supposed that in other Shakespearean plays The Two Gentlemen of Verona; As you like it; Hamlet; The Second Part of Henry the Fourth; and The Merchant of Venice, he performed Launce, Touchstone, the Grave-digger, Justice Shallow, and Launcelot. On the first production of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, a character was assigned to him; and there is good reason to believe that in Every Man out of his Humour, by the same dramatist, he represented Carlo Buffone. In 1599 Kemp attracted much attention by dancing the morris from London to Norwich; and as well to refute the lying ballads put forth concerning this exploit, as to testify his gratitude for the favours he had received during his “gambols,” he published in the following year the curious pamphlet A Nine Daies Wonder and entered in the Stationers’ Books on April 22, 1600. Ben Jonson alludes to this remarkable journey in Every Man out of his Humour, originally acted in 1599.
The date of Kempe’s death has not been determined. Malone, in the uncertainty on this point, could only adduce the following passage of Dekker’s Guls Horne-booke, 1609, from which, he says, “it may be presumed” that Kemp was then deceased: “Tush, tush, Tarleton, Kemp, nor Singer, nor all the litter of fools that now come drawling behind them, never played the Clowns more naturally then the arrantest Sot of you all.” George Chalmers, however, discovered an entry in the burial register of St. Saviour’s, Southwark: “1603, November 2, William Kempe, a man,” and since the name of Kemp does not occur in the license granted by King James, May 19, 1603 to the Lord Chamberlain’s Company (who in consequence of that instrument were afterwards denominated his Majesty’s Servants) there is great probability that the said entry relates to the comedian, and that he had been carried off by the plague of that year.

Knight Charles (b.1791) His Biography of Shakspere was first published in 1842, shortly after the Stratford original gravestone had been removed.

Kyd Thomas (1558–1594) One of the most lawless assumptions in literary criticism of recent years is the introduction to a patient public of the author of the Shakespeare Works in the role of an understudy to Thomas Kyd. It is an offense that ought to be actionable in any Court of good-breeding; yet Lee thrusts “the sportive Kyd” upon our attention with a persistence that finally excites amusement, though our English kinsmen prefer to adjust their monocles and regard the deft showman, as he springs his favourite jack-in-the-box upon them, as they do the perennial suffragette, with evident admiration. Who is Thomas Kyd? Nobody knew, but, to get him into line, a genealogy was fashioned for him which would surprise a trained genealogist like Fitz Waters, or Colonel Chester. It is easy to find a name repeated at any period within a comparatively short range of time. We know that in Warwickshire the Stratford actor had several contemporaries bearing his name, and in Scotland the same may be said of Walter Scott.