Abstract:
Although several books and articles have discussed
English antidance treatises, and other works have considered
pro-dance literature and the role of dance in Shakespeare
plays and court masques, there has been very little
analysis of the hundreds of references to dancing found
in unpublished materials such as ecclesiastical and
civic court records, treasurers' accounts, and letters
and petitions.
This
absence of scholarship is particularly surprising since
the Records of Early English Drama (REED) collections
have made these records readily available. The REED
volumes publish excerpts from British county archives
that refer to dance, theatre, music, and recreations.
Records date from the Middle Ages to 1642, and volumes
include detailed indexes, scholarly introductions,
Latin translations, and Latin and English glossaries.
This
presentation will draw on excerpts from REED collections
as well as my own research in English archives. I will
examine archival records describing dance instruction,
"naughty" dancing, and pro- and antidance
clergymen in order to provide evidence of the variety
of contexts in which men and women danced in early
modern England, and the range of opinions they held
about what such dancing meant.
Sample
Records:
The
following examples give a taste of the types of records
I will be discussing in the presentation.
An
episcopal visitation to New College, Oxford, in 1566
resulted in the charge that:
...the
aforesaid Bartholomew Bolnye, contrary to the form
of the statutes of the said college, is accustomed
to fighting, and that, for the sake of dancing, almost
every day he betakes himself from dinner into the
town and to suspect places.... Likewise that the
said Christopher Diggles and William Browne in a
similar way commonly frequent the town and the aforesaid
suspect places for sake of dancing. (Ref. 1)
The
journal of Justin Pagitt, a student at the Middle Temple
of the Inns of Court, contains interesting "notes
to self" in an entry from 1633:
De
arte Saltandi [The Art of Dancing]
I.
ffollow yr dauncing hard till you have gott a habit
of dauncing neately
2. Care not to daunce loftily, as to carry yr body
sweetly & smoothly away with a graceful comportment
3. In some places hanging steps are very gracefull
& whill give you much ease & time to breath
4. Write the marks for the stepps in every daunce
under the notes of the tune, as the words are in
songs. (Ref. 2)
References:
1.
John R. Elliott, Jr. & Alan Nelson (University);
Alexandra Johnston & Diana Wyatt (City) eds.,
Records of Early English Drama: Oxford (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 984.
2. Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque
1604-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 114.
