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Dancing in the Theatre

The court masque, however, was not the only event in early modern England that cast dancing in a culturally ambiguous role. Both public and private theatres featured dancing prominently, sometimes within the context of a play and sometimes as an interlude or accompanying performance. As in the court masque, the role of dancing in the theatre is complicated by the varying backgrounds and expectations of sponsors, creators, actors, and audience. Although dancing in private theatres and plays at court and universities played an important role in negotiating popular and elite culture, in this paper I will concentrate on dancing in the public theatre to provide a clearer point of contrast with the court masque.

While there are accounts of specific accounts being paid to dancers and dance makers for court masques, it is less clear who choreographed dances for plays. According to Peter Thompson in Shakespeare's Theatre, 'It is unlikely that the Chamberlain's/King's Men needed a choreographer. The ability to dance was one of an actor's skills, and John Lowin, who joined the company in 1603, was the author of a pamphlet called Conclusions upon Dances, both of this age and the olde (1607).'³¹ Similarly, another member of the King's Men, Augustine Phillips, in addition to being an actor was also a musician and choreographer; 'We know that he was the author/performer of a jig -- one of the short song-and-dance afterpieces that were a popular feature of the public theatres -- entered in the Stationers' Register on 26 May 1595 as "Phillips his gigg of the slyppers".'³² However, while we do not know for sure who made the dances, we do know that the players were the ones who performed them.

Jigs followed many theatre performances and were sometimes a bigger draw for the audience than the actual play, 'On 1 October 1612, at the General Session of the Peace in Westminster, 'An order for suppressinge of Jigges att the ende of Playes; was issued, to meet protests about the disorderly crowds that rushed to the Fortune for the jig at the end of the performance.'³³ In William Kempe, the Chamberlain's Men had their own noted dancer. Kempe drew crowds for his jigs, and in 1600 organised a magnificent publicity stunt, a nine-daylong morris dance. Unfortunately for dance reconstructors, Kempes nine daies wonder, performed in a dance from London to Norwich details the path and reception of the marathon morris, but offers little description as to the steps or music. Nevertheless Kempes nine daies wonder confirms the lively interest the public had in dancing as well as the skills (and stamina) possessed by theatre players.

In Shakespeare's Theatre, Peter Thomson quotes Thomas Platter's description of a jig following a performance of Julius Caesar at the Globe theatre, 'At the end of the comedy they danced according to their custom, with extreme elegance. Two in men's clothes and two in women's gave this performance, in wonderful combination with each other.'³⁴ While Thomson stresses the 'disproportionate attention' Platter gives to the jig in comparison to the play, what I find most striking is that this jig is danced by two couples with 'extreme elegance'. This description resembles courtly masque dances 'performed with great majesty and arte... with other proportions exceeding rare and full variety'³⁵ more than the more usual definition of a jig as a 'Dance and song of a bright and apparently bawdy nature at the end of a play.'³⁶

There is also a definite possibility that dance and dancers in plays might have been 'borrowed' from masques or other entertainments. In Shakespeare and the Dance, Alan Brissenden makes a strong argument for the twelve men who performed the dance of satyrs in The Winter's Tale in 1611 at the Globe being the same dancers who performed the satyr dance in the masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince, earlier in that same year; 'The theory is attractive and is perhaps supported by the servant's comment that three of the dances, 'by their own report, sir, hath danc'd before the king.'³⁷ If so, it is quite likely that the dance performed in the theatre would have been quite similar if not exactly the same as that of the court masque. More importantly, that the public would have the opportunity to see the same dance as the king himself (and for a discount of several thousand pounds) suggests that non-elites could have access to the same kinds of dancing as the elites of the court.

The crossover of elite and popular dancing worked both ways. Queen Elizabeth I, for example, was reported to have 'enjoyed watching the ladies of the court perform "country dances".'³⁸ Although in 'Unstable movement codes in the Stuart masque' Barbara Ravelhofer writes that 'In England, a throng of dancing masters kept up the standards in courtly repertoire; best known among them were Sir William Erwin, teacher to Henry Prince of Wales, Thomas Giles, Hierome Herne, Bochan and Confesse, all of them significantly involved in Jacobean masque productions, and Simon Hopper, tutor to the family of Charles I in the 1630s,'³⁹ the dancing masters were not able to keep popular dances from influencing dancing at court. In Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance, Bruce Pattison quotes a complaint about the increasing 'countrification' of dancing in the masque:

The court of England is much altered. At a solemn dancing, first you had the grave measures, then the corantoes, and the galliards, and all this is kept up with ceremony; at length they fall to Trenchmore, and so to cushion dance, and then all the company dance, lord and groom, lady and kitchin-maid, no distinction. So in our court in Queen Elizabeth's time, gravity and state was kept up; in King James's time things went pretty well; but in King Charles's time, there has been nothing but Trenchmore and the cushion dance, omnium gatherum, tolly polly, hote cum toyte.⁴⁰

Enid Welsford makes this type of cultural appropriation and exchange explicit in her analysis of Henry VIII's participation in disguisings, momeries, tournaments and other entertainments, 'The chronicler represents his hero [Henry VIII] as throwing himself with equal gusto into folk-customs and courtly pleasures, if indeed there is any hard and fast distinction between them.'⁴¹ Moreover, Henry VIII frequently costumed himself as non-elite, if somewhat romanticised, characters; 'I have seen the King suddenly come in thither in a mask, with a dozen of other maskers, all in garments like shepherds,'⁴² and on another occasion, 'They arrived in couples, the King and the Earl of Essex dressed as Turks...'⁴³ This readiness for a monarch to portray himself in the garb of a peasant or heathen contradicts Stephen Orgel's assertion that when a monarch danced in a masque, 'a deep truth about the monarchy was realized and embodied in action, and the monarchs were revealed in roles that expressed the strongest Renaissance beliefs about the nature of kingship, the obligations and perquisites of royalty.'⁴⁴ While Orgel's interpretation works well for Ben Jonson and other masque writers' texts, it does not fit contemporary descriptions of the masque and dancing quite as well.

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Footnotes

³¹ P. Thomson, Shakespeare's Theatre (1983, 1992), pp. 104-105.
³² Ibid., p. 10.
³³ Ibid., p. 12.
³⁴ Ibid.
³⁵ Welsford, The Court Masque, p. 172.
³⁶ Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, p. 114.
³⁷ Ibid., p. 91.
³⁸ Rensselaer English Country Dances, 'What is English Country Dancing?', http://www.rpi.edu/~belld2/dancing.htm, (12 January 2003).
³⁹ B. Ravelhofer, 'Unstable movement codes in the Stuart masque' in D. Bevington and P. Holbrook (ed.) The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (1998), p. 259.
⁴⁰ B. Pattison, Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance, (1948, 1970), p. 187.
^{41 Welsford, The Court Masque, pp. 128-129}.
⁴² Ibid., p. 136.
⁴³ Ibid., p. 126.
⁴⁴ S. Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (1975), p. 38.

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