If one of the esoteric aims of the Black Plaque scheme were to create a major arcana of heroic failures then ATU 0 would have to be William Kempe, Shakespeare's original fool. He played the roles of Falstaff - that lord of misrule, the changeling Bottom, as well as Hamlet's gravedigger and clown.

Born in 1560, Kempe gained his reputation as a jester from his work as a member of The Chamberlain's Men. A renaissance and versatile group of theatre players, they formed Shakespeare's inner circle – throughout the playwright's career they were the only actors he ever used. It has been speculated that many of the roles in Shakespeare's works were tailored for specific players' talents and traits; moreover imagined for them in mind as the play was written. Never was this more evident than with William Kempe. He was England's foremost comedian; its village idiot par excellence. Small in stature and stout in girth, he was nevertheless nimble on his feet – a master of jigs and morris 'daunces'.

His clothes were outlandish or craven: sometimes a pantomime dame; other times a rustic fool. His hair was as wild and extemporized as his ribald songs and jokes. He would halt performances with his own improvised routines. Strangely shamanic, one almost suspects that he may have been a tulpa created from the playwright's imagination - an unruly poltergeist tearing up the manuscript from which he was conjured.

It is thought that Kempe quit Shakespeare's company over disagreements about this tendency to interrupt performances. Having written increasingly challenging parts for Kempe, culminating in the shape-shifting Bottom, it would appear that Shakespeare tired of his unruly player. In Hamlet, the final play written for Kempe, he is chided in the script itself with the complaint "let those that play your clownes speake no more than is set for them". Perhaps this is less a criticism, more a spell cast by Shakespeare: a banishing operation to rid the company of this crazy tulpa that had invaded his plays. Indeed, the character of Bottom was based on Lucius in Apuleuis' Golden Ass. In this hermetic allegory, Lucius experiments with magic and is accidentally transformed into an ass. Perhaps Shakespeare, by casting Kempe as Bottom was alluding to the folly of his own incantations. Or maybe the roles themselves served as powerful invocations upon Kempe - psychodramas that turned him into the archetypal ass.

Commentators on Shakespeare have suggested that the departure of Kempe marked a transition in his writing; a movement from low to high art. The esoteric, wispish imp of Ariel replaces the flatulent physical clown of Falstaff. From an occult perspective perhaps this marked a transition from low magic to high magic: the divine enchantress replacing the ranting shaman.

Or more poetically, perhaps Kempe was released into the wider world as a chaos servitor (to borrow the parlance of post-modern theurgy ) . On leaving the company, Kempe used the landscape as his stage like some kind of Elizabethan performance artist. In February 1600, he undertook a madcap nine-day Morris dance from London to Norwich. An arduous journey of 120 miles, in the miserable climate of a rural winter, this was a grueling feat. Is such a ludicrous venture not comparable to the spirit walk of an aboriginal initiate? Does not this crazy jig resemble the sorcerous and peyote driven choreography of Castaneda's Don Juan? Kempe's deranged peregrination was immortalised in a chapbook travelogue he wrote of the dance, "The Nine Daies vvonder", 'wherein eoery dayes iourney is pleasantly set down.' Along the way he extemporised bawdy songs accompanied by his 'Taberer' on drum. A delirious image is conjured from the frontispiece of this journal; a haywire Everyman, rustic speaker-in-tongue.

The nine days is apocryphal though, the entire trip actually having taken a month, starting on 11 February and finishing on 11 March. By pleasant qabalistic coincidence it is interesting to note that his journey began and ended on the 11^th day of each month. This returns us to our original image of Kempe as the Tarotic Fool. In his whirling dervish of insane occultism "Outside the Circles Of Time", Kenneth Grant points out that the clown is the sole guide on the eleventh path of the Qabalistic Tree of Life, 'the path of magick or energy tending unto change'. Grant claims this path 'is the key to the nature of the antique rites or masques that are figured forth in the antics of the harlequin, madman, or fool. A superficial view, even, of the lives and activities of adepts such as … Crowley, Gurdjieff and Dali reveals an element of buffoonery combined with bestial undertones and currents that fuse into one dazzling image: the ineffably wise and abysmally ignorant'.

Etymological connections between the tarotic fool and morris dancer run deep. The medieval sword dance is known variously as a mattacino, matachin or danse des bouffons. In French Tarot decks the Fool is known by the epithet "Le Mat" meaning "madman" and in Italian decks it is ascribed the moniker "il Matto".

Kempe's life ended at Southwark, three years later, in the boiling hell of the bubonic plague. This final image of his death is divine: a magical epitaph of mass gravedigger and clown, evoking those dual roles he played in Hamlet. One almost senses these parts were elements in a dramatic transmogrification scripted for Kempe by a master puppeteer of the Globe Theatre.

Proposal:

English Heretic will direct a "Road Movie" from Norwich to London, over nine days, retracing but reversing the route taken by Kempe. Narration will be carried out in Elizabethan tongue, with ribald poetry and extemporized jigs celebrating the customs of peasantry encountered along the way. We begin where Kempe's career and life ended; we cast Kempe as a plague ridden clown, exhumed from a burial pit by his alter ego, the gravedigger. Our journey will take us through the Brueghelian landscapes of now; we will witness the Triumph of Death in the car parks and aisles of Homebase – that procession of Saturday afternoon coffin makers, measuring the hypogeal constructs for their very own vanquished by corporate souls.

Behind mere post-modern ruse, there is a magical intent to our retroactive treatment of Kemp's mad dance. This intention forms part of a larger ongoing concern of the organisation, that is: to fuse two Elizabethan ages. By reversing Kempe's journey, we foolishly hope to create a fold in the space time continuum, through which renaissance philosophy, magic and art may seep back into our own age. We assert that our times are bereft of even the most basic tenets of medieval ontology and may even benefit from a revisioning of their eschatological symbols - their angels and plagues. A Black Plaque DVD will be made of the travelogue to be presented at the site of the Globe Theatre, London.