Note DO — No. XI.
Reading edition
The Canaries is the name of an old dance, freqnently alluded to in our early English plays. Shakspeare uses it in All's well that ends well—
——"I have seen a medicine, That's able to breathe life into a stone; Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary With spritely fire and motion;"
Sir John Hawkins, in his History of Musick, iv. 391. says that it occurs in the opera of Dioclesian, set to music by Purcell, and explains it to be "a very sprightly movement of two reprises, or strains, with eight bars in each: the time three quarters in a bar, the first pointed." I take this opportunity of mentioning, that among Dr. Rawlinson's MSS. in the Bodleian, [Poet. 108.] is a volume which contains a variety of figures of old dances, written, as I conjecture, between the years 1566 and 1580. Besides several others are the pavyan; my Lord of Essex measures; tyntermell; the old allmayne; the longe pavian; quanto dyspayne; the nyne muses, &c. As the pavian is mentioned by Shakspeare, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and as the directions for dancing the figure have not been before discovered, I shall make no apology for offering them in the present note.
"THE LONGE PAVIAN,
ij singles, a duble forward; ij singles syde, a duble forward; repīnce backe once, ij singles syde, a duble forward, one single backe twyse, ij singles, a duble forward, ij singles syde, prerince backe once; ij singles syde, a duble forward, reprince backe twyse."