'What is thy excellence in a galliard, knight?'
Masculinity and Dancing in Early Modern England

Conclusion

Protestant moralists 'indicted dance on several counts: for the physical harm it occasioned, for the social and economic problems it engendered, and especially for the moral threat it posed.' [61] According to one of the most vehement, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa's The Vanity of Arts and Sciences (1527, 1676), dancing was 'A thing, which were it not set off with Musick, would appear the greatest Vanity of Vanities, the rudest, most nonsensical, and ridiculous sight in the world. This is that which lets loose the reyns of Pride, the friend of Wickedness, the food and nourishment of Lust, the bane and enemy of Chastity, and unworthy so much as the thought of any honest person.' [62]

Yet dancing's association with 'a broad spectrum of evils, such as brawling and indecency in talk and dress' [63] while damaging to women's reputations, was less denigrating for men. Although a wealthy, married, office-holding gentleman might not want to be linked to such activities, they were if not acceptable, at least commonly accepted as normal activities for young men, 'in better times alehouses might afford the craftsman or smallholder one of the few local opportunities for conspicuous consumption and convivial entertainment -- drinking, smoking, and perhaps singing or dancing.' [64] Dancing's association with taverns and alehouses linked it with masculine behaviour as did the competitive aspect of dance contests such as those mentioned earlier from Twelfth Night and The Old Law.

Even its critics recognised dancing as masculine. One of the complaints in the anonymous A Treatise of daunses, wherin it is shewed, that they are as it were accessories and depēdants (or thinges annexed) to whoredome (1581) is that a woman seeing a man who danced well would become so convinced of his desirability as a marriage partner that she would ignore such factors as his wealth, rank, or reputation:

The daughter and sister of the County or Earle of A. was so enamoured or ravished with the love of a very simple and base gentleman whom she had seene daunse in the courte, and it printed so wel, that is, toke such deepe impression and roote in her hart, and understanding, that against the will of Father and Mother, parentes and friendes shee married him. [65]

Men's dancing conveyed virility and masculinity. As Howard writes, 'Cosmic eruptions in the form of high caprioles were the centerpiece of the masculine pyrotechnics that exploded over the courtly dancing place.... The vertical dimension was claimed and penetrated by the gentleman, with the high capers, performed exclusively by the male, clearly an analogue of masculine prowess.' [66] What was problematic in this story was not that the man danced, or even that he danced well, but that his dancing led to a disruption in the patriarchal and hierarchical system.

While conduct manual writers, dance defenders, and antidance treatise authors disagreed on many aspects of dancing, they shared a concern with dancing's potential to undermine established hierarchies of rank and status and recognised (however reluctantly) that dancing was a masculine practise. They were mutually interested in legislating relationships between men as well as between men and women. Proficiency in dancing was necessary for a gentleman at court, but skilfully execution was secondary to an overall image of grace and nobility. According to one antidance writer, dancing was not inherently wrong, 'the evil in it arises from the motives of the dancers and the manner in which they dance.' [67] Most early modern conduct writers and defenders of dancing would have to agree. 

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