Note 1750 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 5)

Gosson, P. C. (1582; cf. App. C, No. xxx), ‘daunsing of gigges’; Much Ado, II. i. 78, ‘Wooing ... is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical’; Hamlet, III. ii. 132, ‘O God, your only jig-maker’; E. M. O. (Q1), 1147, ‘a thing studied, and rehearst as ordinarily at his comming from hawking, or hunting, as a Iigge after a play’; Jack Drum, i. 404, ‘as the Iigge is cal’d for when the play is done’; R. Knolles, Six Bookes of a Commonweal (1606), 645, ‘Now adayes they put at the end of euerie Tragedie (as poyson into meat) a comedie or jigge’ (translating Bodin’s ‘obscoena quadam fabula turpissimis ac sordidissimis narrationibus condita’); Cotgrave (1611), ‘Farce ... also, the Iyg at the end of an Enterlude, wherein some pretie knauerie is acted’; Dekker, A Strange Horse Race (1613, Works, iii. 340), ‘As I haue often seene, after the finishing of some worthy Tragedy, or Catastrophe in the open Theaters, that the sceane after the Epilogue hath been more blacke (about a nasty bawdy jigge) then the most horrid sceane in the play was: The stinkards speaking all things, yet no man understanding any thing’; cf. the late Shirley allusion on p. 528. The term is sometimes more loosely used. In James IV, 82, 88, 620, 636, 661, 666, 673, 1116, the speakers of the Induction call the main action a jig; cf. 1 Tamburlaine, prol. 1, ‘iygging vaines of riming mother wits’. Swaen (Sh.-Jahrbuch, xlvi. 122) points out that a tune known as The Cobler’s Jig would fit the dialogue song by cobblers in Locrine, 569. Naylor, 124, gives some account of jig tunes and derives the term from giga, an instrument of the fiddle type.