At least
thirteen of Shakespeare's plays contain dances and most of
the others refer to dancing, but modern audiences of Shakespeare
are unlikely to see dancing on the stage. Such well-known
Shakespeare plays as Much Ado About Nothing, As
You Like It, The Tempest, Macbeth, Twelfth
Night, and A Midsummer Night's Dream contain dancing
as do less commonly known plays like Pericles, Timon
of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and King
Henry VIII. References to dancing occur in Love's Labour
Lost, Henry V, Othello, and Richard III
amongst others. There are also entrances and exits, accompanied
by music, which would have been in the style of the pavan,
the slow, processional dance which is the ancestor of the
modern, wedding procession. Like the specified dances, these
processionals with music are either brushed aside, hurried
over, or simply deleted in performance.
Currently,
Romeo and Juliet is virtually the only Shakespeare
play which when staged is likely to retain any dancing. The
masquerade ball demands it since lines in several scenes refer
directly to the dance. Act One, scene four, for example, contains
Benvolio's "let them measure us by what they will, /
We'll measure them a measure and be gone" (I.iii. 9-10),
Mercutio's "Nay, gentle Romeo, we must have you dance"
(I.iii. 13), and Romeo's "Some consequence yet hanging
in the stars / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With
this night's revels" (I.iii. 107-109). In the next scene,
Capulet cries "Ah, my mistresses, which of you all /
Will now deny to dance?" (I.v. 20-21) and to his cousin,
"sit, good cousin Capulet; / For you and I are past our
dancing days." (I.v. 31-32) Lastly, when Romeo asks,
"What lady is that, which doth enrich the hand / Of yonder
knight?" (I.v. 43-44), he is inquiring about the lady
(Juliet) who is dancing with the knight. In Romeo and Juliet,
dance and plot are enmeshed. A dance mediates the first encounter
of the star-crossed lovers. While dance is integral to the
plots of several other Shakespeare plays, most of them are
either less frequently performed or the function of the dance
in the plot is less apparent.
One reason
for dancing's almost certain deletion is the lack of accessible
information. Twentieth-century actors, directors, critics
and readers suffer from a double ignorance. They are ignorant
of what the dances are and how to perform them, and they are
ignorant of the dance's role in establishing character description,
metaphor, and plot action. Therefore, it is hardly surprising
that the dances in Shakespeare's plays are the first thing
cut from almost every production when such ignorance of dance
permeates Shakespeare scholarship and performance.
At first,
I assumed and was told by professors from Princeton to Cambridge
that little or no dancing was retained in performance because
there existed scant information about the dance in Shakespeare's
time, the dances were added by later editors, or simply because
the dancing was unimportant. Although it is hardly utilized
by performers or scholars, a wealth of information on dance
published in Shakespeare's day does exist. The dance manuals
of Thoinot Arbeau and Fabritio Caroso as well as the records
of the Inns of Court contain descriptions of the steps and
dances mentioned in the plays and give instructions on how
to execute them. In addition, some of the dances in John Playford's
The English Dancing Master (1652), the main source
of English country dance, were danced in the early 1600s.
There are also descriptions of what the dances looked like
in Ben Jonson's court masques as well as in the accounts of
foreign visitors to England, and information on the role dance
played in society in etiquette books like Count Baldassare
Castiglione's The Courtier and Sir Thomas Elyot's The
book named the Governor. Puritan diatribes against dancing
also attest to its prominence in the public imagination as
well as in theaters and private homes. However, this information,
separated from studies of and performances of the plays, can
only be found in books on dance or social history. With the
exception of Brissenden's Shakespeare and the Dance,
dance scholarship and Shakespeare scholarship have remained
mutually exclusive fields of inquiry.
As to
the dances being added by dance-happy editors, such a suggestion
barely deserves a response. Lines such as Polixenes's "Pray,
good shepherd, what fair swain is this, / Which dances with
your daughter" (The Winter's Tale IV. iv. 166-167)
and Cardinal Wolsey's "Your grace, / I fear, with dancing
is a little heated" (Henry VIII I. iv. 100-101)
clearly refer to dancing that is or has been going on onstage.
I direct anyone who disagrees to reread the play in question.
The only editorial license taken in most of the italicized
stage directions specifying dancing is in deciding where exactly
the dance occurs with respect to the text referring to it
and whether speaking goes on during the dancing. While editors
may have selected the relative position of the dances within
the text, editors do not decide if there are dances; Shakespeare
has already decided for them.
Finally,
to assume that dancing was unimportant or gratuitous
by the meager descriptions of the dancing in the
plays is ignorant but not unjustified. Many of
the dances give no more information as to what
they are or how to do them than an italicized "music.
dance." One reason for this is that Elizabethans
knew what Renaissance dances looked like and how
to do them. A jig, for instance, always followed
a play at the Globe, so there was no reason to
write down common knowledge. Unique variations
and choreographies to particular pieces of music
certainly existed, but most of Shakespeare's audience
would have a basic idea of what sort of dances
the coranto, the canary, and the branle were and
how to perform galliard steps like a caper or the
back-trick. Most of the dances performed by the
actors would have been common dances or variations
on known dances since the actors rehearsed too
briefly to spend hours learning complicated, new
choreographies (the way the aristocracy could).
Then there remains the difficulty of describing
dancing with words. As one Inns of Court manuscript
says of the Spanish Pavin or Pavan, "It must
be learned by practise & demonstration, being
performed with boundes & capers & in the
ende honour."4
Especially as Shakespeare's plays were written
down for actors and not for future readers, like
Ben Jonson's masques were (it would have just given
rival companies an edge), there was no need to
record the dances given how difficult that task
could be. Lastly, since dance no longer plays the
same prominent role now that it played in Shakespeare's
time, the lack of expectation of a dance in every
play has made it even easier for modern scholars
and directors to overlook the dances in Shakespeare's
plays.
The lack
of dance descriptions also suggests that Shakespeare did not
particularly care which dances went where as long as dances
occurred when they were referred to in the text. This hypothesis
grants the choreographer some leeway and freedom in choosing
dances. But it also implies that there are no helpful suggestions
from Shakespeare himself, unlike in Ben Jonson's masques where
he at least lists the types of dances and their order for
the measures.
Ignoring
the dancing in Shakespeare's plays has allowed certain questionable
interpretations to flourish. Professors make much of the difference
between our phrase of "going to see a play" and
the Elizabethans' "going to hear a play." They emphasize
that the aural experience was much more important than the
visual experience. Yet, they also note the huge sums of money
companies like The King's Men spent on lavish costumes or
how richly the stage was decorated though the actors used
few set pieces. Considering the dances helps explain this
paradox. Dancing is a decidedly visual spectacle showing off
grace, poise, and costume and appealing to the eye even in
metaphor. But, this spectacle was always accompanied by music,
binding the visual and aural elements of the playgoing experience
together. To eliminate the dances in Shakespeare's plays eliminates
a significant portion of the visual entertainment and spectacle
that impressed audiences and angered Puritans just as much
if not more than the words. Thus, the current state of dance
in Shakespeare is characterized by ignorance and misconceptions
about the forms and significance of Shakespearean dance.
