Search winerock.com

Conclusion

Dancing despite its ephemeral nature provides cultural historians with concrete examples of cultural appropriation. While contemporary elites might have viewed the court masque as a prime example of the elite culture of the court, the presence of professional, non-elite performers and country dances undermines our ability to classify the court masque as purely culturally elite. Similarly, the convincing performance of court dances in the public theatres by non-elites makes it difficult to classify dancing on the public stage as exemplifying popular culture. Although 'court dance' and 'country dance,' 'elite culture' and 'popular culture' make convenient categories, high degrees of cultural appropriation demonstrate their instability and flexibility. 'Cultural consumption, whether popular or not, is at the same time a form of production, which creates ways of using that cannot be limited to the intentions of those who produce.'⁵¹ Whether they were set by contemporaries or modern historians, dancing in Early Modern England had a tendency to dance across boundaries.

Footnotes

⁵¹ R. Chartier, 'Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France', in S. Kaplan (ed.) Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (1984), p. 232.

<< Back <<  Top  >> Next >>