In his brief exchange with the harlequin, Kemp focuses almost exclusively on the actress/wife, implying through heavy innuendo the inevitable sexual availability of women players. When Harlequin attempts to cast Kemp as a servant who must 'keep my wife', Kemp responds, 'who so fit to make a man a cuckold as he that keeps his wife? ' (121-3). Leaning over to kiss the wife, Kemp reassures Harlequin that 'We are fellows, and amongst friends and fellows, you know, all things are common' . In the guise of good fellowship, Kemp reproduces the misogynist and xenophobic attitude about foreign actresses found in texts like Pierce Pennilesse, where Thomas Nash praises English actors at the expense of 'players beyond the sea' who 'have Whores and common Curtizens to playe womens partes'. 2 Within the fiction of the play, Kemp may be collaborating with the Italian duo, but he views his collaborators with a contempt grounded in his negative stereotype of women performers. 3 In marked contrast to the character Kemp in The Travels of the Three English Brothers, the historical William Kemp is much more sympathetic to women's performance in the pages of his own slender pamphlet, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder (1600). An account of Kemp's morris dance from London to Norwich shortly after he left his position as the principal clown in the Chamberlain's Men, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder features several women Kemp met along the way, including two who joined his dance, one at Chelmsford and one at Sudbury. 4 Women are involved in Kemps Nine Daies Wonder at every 46 Peter Parolin turn, watching Kemp dance, welcoming him into their communities, and performing with him in front of large audiences. 5 As scholars have insisted, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder is not an objective historical account of Kemp's dance but rather a carefully constructed self-presentation; women's prominent role in the volume therefore suggests that Kemp saw their participation as integral to the success of his venture. 6 Unlike The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder establishes that positive representations of women's performance could enhance rather than threaten the status of the professional male performer.By showcasing the ease with which women join Kemp's dance and the expertise they bring to it, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder suggests a great deal about the broad cultural phenomenon of women's performance. Most clearly, it establishes the customary and unexceptional nature of women's performance. 7 Recent scholarship has shown that women's active participation in the world of performance was the rule, not the exception, all across England. James Stokes, for example, identifies an unbroken tradition of female performance stretching back hundreds of years in counties as varied as Somerset, Devon, and Lincolnshire. 8 Gweno Williams, Alison Findlay, and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright show that women in York, Gloucestershire, and Lancashire were deeply involved in performance. They say that for the York Corpus Christi cycle alone, 'documentation reveals that wome...
