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Introduction

While some historians have divided Early Modern culture into clearly delineated popular and elite categories, almost all acknowledge the difficulty of classifying individual persons, practices, beliefs, and texts as definitively popular or elite. Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms argues that Menocchio the miller's literacy classifies him amongst a literate elite at the same time as his selective and inconsistent understanding of written material associates him with a popular, oral tradition. Clive Holme's "Popular Culture? Witches, Magistrates, and Divines in Early Modern England" contends that responses to witchcraft reflected a dialogue between theological doctrine and popular sentiment. Roger Chartier's examination of the Bibliothèque bleue in 'Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France' concludes that 'all cultural forms in which historians thought they could identify the culture of the masses now appear mixed corpora, containing elements of diverse origins.'¹

This essay will examine the similar cultural complexities of another, often-neglected element of Early Modern culture: dancing. Investigations of dancing and popular/elite culture might include comparing accounts of 'popular' dancing such as John Playford's The English Dancing Master, or Plaine and easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to each Dance (1651) or James I's Book of Sports (1613)with accounts of 'elite' dancing such as Fabritio Caroso's Nobilità di dame (1600)or Sir Francis Bacon's 'Of Masques and Triumphs' in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (1597-1625).² This paper, however, will concentrate on dancing in court masques and public theatres to explore how the elite or non-elite status of performers as well as the types of dances performed affect cultural categories. While dances of this period are usually divided into 'elite' court dances and 'popular' country dances, references to country dances at court and court dances at the public theatres point to a high degree of cultural appropriation and call the very categories of court and country dance, elite and popular culture, into question.

Terms and Definitions

As many of these terms are potentially ambiguous or simply unfamiliar, I will begin with an explanation of terms and working definitions. For popular and elite culture, Peter Burke's definitions in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe serve as a starting point; culture is the 'system of shared meanings, attitudes and values, and the symbolic forms (performances, artifacts) in which they are expressed or embodied,'³ popular culture the 'unofficial culture, the culture of the non-elite, the 'subordinate classes...'⁴ and elite culture the culture of the 'great tradition', the literate, privileged classes, particularly members of the court and universities.⁵ However, I depart from Burke's definitions in that I do not assign all women and children to popular culture, but to the same culture as the men in their families; and I see literacy as a component of elite culture, not its defining factor. Moreover, Roger Chartier's critique of 'popular' and 'elite' as cultural categories in the aforementioned 'Culture as Appropriation' is very compelling, especially when considering dance in Early Modern England; 'Debate as to whether it was permissible to describe such-and-such a cultural form as "popular" was lively, but no one questioned the basic assumption of the antagonists -- namely, that it was possible to identify popular culture by describing a certain number of corpora...'⁶ Cultural appropriation describes the borrowing or appropriating of beliefs, practices, etc. either from another culture or from another group within the same culture.

As for dance terminology, court dances include galliards, corantos, lavoltas, canaries, and other dances explained in the court dance manuals of Robert Coplande's The maner of dauncynge of base daunces after the use of fraunce & other places (1581), Thoinot Arbeau's Orchesographie (1589), Fabritio Caroso's Il ballarino (1581) and Nobilità di dame (1600), and Cesare Negri's Le Gratie d'Amore (1602). (While many of these manuals are continental in origin, the dances they describe were known and danced in England. Many are mentioned in English plays,⁷ and the numerous accounts of foreign ambassadors dancing at English masques and revels demonstrate that Early Modern Europe shared much of the same dance repertoire.⁸) In addition, the dances of the Measures described in various Inns of Court manuscripts (c. 1570-1630) and danced in the Revels section of the court masque also fall under the category of court dance.⁹

Although many dance reconstructors use the term 'country dance' to refer specifically to the dances in John Playford's The English Dancing Master, or Plaine and easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to each Dance (1651) (the only non-court dance manual still extant), there were several other prominent dance types such as the jig and the morris dance that had popular origins. The dances in The English Dancing Master are usually for two or three couples and feature stock steps and patterns such as set and turn (one step to the left, one step to the right, and a turn to the left) and arming (linking arms with your partner and going around each other in a circle).¹⁰ The jig was an athletic 'stepdance in which the performers mimed the action of the song they were singing,'¹¹ which was often licentious or scurrilous in content.¹² The morris dance, which is still danced in parts of England today, featured six costumed dancers wearing bells on their legs; often accompanied by characters from the Robin Hood legend or a fool, a hobby-horse, a dragon, and a man-woman; and based on a spring step or kick that alternated feet.¹³ (See Appendix A for an example of country and court dance debates in the historical dance community.)

Lastly, while the Early Modern period is generally considered to be from 1500-1800, in this paper it refers only to 1500-1700. Repetitions of 'sixteenth- and seventeenth-century' are soon tedious while 'Elizabethan and Jacobean' or 'Tudor and Stuart' exclude several relevant sources although the latter encompasses the bulk of materials consulted.

But to return to the question at hand, 'What implications does dancing have on understanding popular and elite culture in Early Modern England?' The main descriptions and references of dancing lead us to two entertainments: the court masque and the public theatre.

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Footnotes

¹ 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.
² Nobilità di dame, has been translated into English by J. Sutton, Courtly Dance of the Renaissance: A New Translation and Edition of the "Nobilità di dame" (1600), (New York, 1995).
³ P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978), p. xi.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid., p. 28.
⁶ Chartier, 'Culture as Appropriation', p. 229.
⁷ A. Daye (ed.), A Lively Shape of Dauncing: Dances of Shakespeare's Time (1994), pp. 7-8.
⁸ E. K. Chambers, "The Mask" in The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. I (1923).
⁹ D. R. Wilson, "Dancing in the Inns of Court" in Historical Dance, Vol. 2, No. 5 (1986-1987), p. 3.
¹⁰ Daye, A Lively Shape of Dauncing, p. 3.
¹¹ A. Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (1981), p. 14.
¹² Charles Baskerville's The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (Chicago, 1929) remains the primary work on the jig.
¹³ Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, pp. 19-20.

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