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Introduction

From 1606 to 1636, the Oxford City Council granted John Bosseley a lease of a room at the Boccardo, the city jail at the North Gate of Oxford. This upper chamber (which was not in the jail itself, but in the same building) was "called or knowne by the name of the Dauncing Schoole then and now" (REED Oxford, 397-8). Apparently John Bosseley, described as a city musician, ran a lively operation, for the 1610 City Council Minutes record the following amendment: "a Provisoe shalbee putt into Iohn Bosseleys Lease nott to lett or sett without lycense etc And also not to daunce nor sufferr any Dauncing after tenne of the Clocke in the night nor before ffyve of the Clocke in the morning" (REED Oxford, 389). That this proviso was added just four months after Bosseley had signed the 1610 lease implies that dancing at the school between 10pm and 5am was a significant enough problem to warrant an amendment. This proviso also indicates, as do the repeated renewals of the lease, a substantial interest in dancing in seventeenth-century Oxford. On the other hand, housing a dancing school with the city jail, at the gates of the city, suggests that dancing was considered a marginal activity.

But was dancing a marginal activity? While Renaissance universities condemned dancing as a frivolous, even dangerous, waste of time, they also commissioned or condoned events with dance components, and expected students to be able to participate in them. Universities catered to (or were at least supposed to graduate) studious, religious, and serious scholars, but at the same time, wealthy and aristocratic young men in the Renaissance increasingly viewed universities as places to acquire the cultural and social patina of the courtier or gentleman-statesman, a view expressed in educational treatises and conduct manuals. This view of dancing as a requisite courtly art is most closely associated with Italian universities, but it also affected English educational institutions. However, while scholars including Peter Holman, Robert Wienpahl, and David Wilson have looked at dancing at the Inns of Court, England's so-called third university, discussions of dancing at Cambridge and Oxford have been limited to short sections of more general studies. Thanks to the Records of Early English Drama (REED) collections, which contain theatre, music, and dance references organized by city or county, there is now substantial evidence of dancing at English universities. As the Cambridge REED collection has been available since 1989, in this paper I will focus on Oxford records, to take advantage of the very recent publication of the REED volumes for Oxford (2004). I will also compare the perspective of dancing implied by these records with that expressed in English and Continental educational treatises and conduct manuals.