The
first ballet was Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx's Ballet
Comique de la Royne in 1581. It was sponsored
by Catherine de Medici, queen to Henri II of France.
In addition to spectacular costumes and set including
a gigantic fountain from which the dancers emerged,
it featured certain aspects of court dance applicable
to the dances in Shakespeare's plays. The dance's
interpretation of Greek mythology romanticized nature,
"Beaujoyeulux's setting was the pastoral, reflecting
ephemeral happiness"28
and his characters were gods and goddesses mostly
danced by the royalty themselves: "The Queen
was on this car, with eleven other royal ladies,
representing naiads who "climbed down from their
fountain."29
Like Caroso's dances it emphasized symmetrical, ordered
movement, and Beaujoyeulux claimed "I have satisfied
the eye, the ear, and the understanding in one well-proportioned
creation."30
Morever, in commemoration, the choreogrpaher wrote
down a summary of the gala event. Although he does
not give step by step descriptions of the dancing,
he does describe many of the formations the dancers
made, what dances they performed during the revels,
and other helpful details. From his account, it appears
that what distinguished dance on the stage from dance
at a ball or party was not the steps or even the
types of dances done but the new and inventive floor
patterns and configurations that the choreographer
devised using known steps and dances.
So
what were these known steps and dances? Shakespeare
mentions a few specific steps such as a caper and
the hay and a goodly number of dances including the
pavan, galliard, jig, canary, coranto, and branle.31
These are all Renaissance court dances or steps therein,
with the exception of the jig and arguably the hay,
which are associated more with English country dances
or folk dances of the lower classes. Since the goal
of this paper is to combine dance and Shakespeare
scholarship, let us now examine and explain each
of these terms with regard to the context in which
they appear within two of Shakespeare's plays: Twelfth
Night and Love's Labor's Lost.
