Editorial note — Scene III. The Lodgings of Curtius.
Reading edition
Note to p. 121: The Jig and Dance.
Town Fop note:
A Jigg. There were, in Post-Restoration times, two interpretations of the word Jig. Commonly speaking it was taken to mean exactly what it would now, a simple dance. Nell Gwynne and Moll Davis were noted for the dancing of Jigs. cf. Epilogue to Buckingham’s The Chances (1682):—
The Author dreads the strut and meen Of new prais’d Poets, having often seen Some of his Fellows, who have writ before, When Nel has danc’d her Jig, steal to the Door, Hear the Pit clap, and with conceit of that Swell, and believe themselves the Lord knows what.
Thus at the end of Lacy’s The Old Troop (31 July, 1668), we have ‘a dance of two hobby horses in armour, and a Jig.’ Also shortly before the epilogue in Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers (1668) we read, ‘Enter a Boy in the habit of Pugenello and traverses the stage, takes his chair and sits down, then dances a Jig.’
But it must be remembered that beside the common meaning there was a gloss upon the word derived from Elizabethan stage practice. In the prologue to The Fair Maid of the Inn (licensed 1626), good plays are spoken of as often scurvily treated, whilst
A Jigge shall be clapt at, and every rhime Prais’d and applauded by a clam’rous chyme.
The Pre-Restoration Jig was little other indeed than a ballad opera in embryo lasting about twenty-five minutes and given as an after-piece. It was a rhymed farce in which the dialogue was sung or chanted by the characters to popular ballad tunes. But after the Restoration the Jig assumed a new and more serious complexion, and came eventually to be dovetailed with the play itself, instead of being given at the fag end of the entertainment. Mr. W. J. Lawrence, the well-known theatrical authority to whom I owe much valuable information contained in this note, would (doubtless correctly) attribute the innovation to Stapylton and Edward Howard, both of whom dealt pretty freely in these Jigs. Stapylton has in Act v of The Slighted Maid (1663) a ‘Song in Dialogue’ between Aurora and Phoebus with a chorus of Cyclops, which met with some terrible parody in The Rehearsal (cf. the present editor’s edition of The Rehearsal, p. 145). Indeed all extrinsic songs in dialogue, however serious the theme, were considered ‘Jigs’. A striking example would be the Song of the Spirits in Dryden’s Tyrannic Love, Act iv.
In Post-Restoration days a ballad sung in the streets by two persons was frequently called a Jig, presumably because it was a ‘song in dialogue’. Numerous examples are to be found amongst the Roxburgh Ballads.
The Jig introduced in Sir Timothy Tawdrey would seem to have been the simple dance although not improbably an epithalamium was also sung.
Argument.
Source.
Theatrical History.
Dedication.
Prologue.
Dramatis Personæ.
Act I.
Scene I. A Room with several Tables.
Scene II. The Council-Table.
Scene III. Surelove’s House.
Act II.
Scene I. A Pavilion.
Scene II. The Widow Ranter’s Hall.
Scene III. A Sevana.
Scene IV. The Council-Table.
Act III.
Scene I. The Country Court.
Scene II. The Sevana.
Act IV.
Scene I. A Temple.
Scene II. A Field of Tents.
Scene III. A Tent.
Act V.
Scene I. The Sevana.
Scene II. Wellman’s Tent.
Scene III. A thick Wood.
Scene IV. Another part of the Wood.
Scene V. A Grove.
Epilogue.
Notes to The Widow Ranter