The last serious attempt to show which roles Kemp played was that of T. W. Baldwin. The attempt foundered because it was based upon character analysis. Kemp's ‘line’ was assumed to be that of ‘the pompous, countrified, blundering clown’ – and from that premise a series of highly speculative conclusions resulted. My own method will be to avoid any concept of character, and to concentrate instead upon the terminology of stage directions, and upon structural features within the organization of the text.

The argument of the last chapter turned on the assumption that the ‘clown’ of the play-text can be identified with the comic protagonist of the jig. The argument needs to be consolidated. In this chapter, therefore, I analyse the term ‘clown’ in order to show that when it appears in Elizabethan texts it refers to the actor a company employed specifically to be its clown. This prepares the way for an analysis, in the next chapter, of the roles written for Kemp qua ‘the clown’ of the Chamberlain's and later of Worcester's Men.

The term ‘clown’ does not appear before the Elizabethan period. The word entered the language because it expressed a new concept: the rustic who by virtue of his rusticity is necessarily inferior and ridiculous. The word was evidently borrowed from Low German, although a spurious etymology from the Latin colonus – ‘a tiller of the soil’ – was posited by some Elizabethans. The use of ‘clown’ to refer to a type of comic performer is marginally later, and may be traced back to Tarlton, in whose person the twin meanings of ‘comedian’ and ‘rustic’ were rendered indisseverable.