The crowds who flocked to the London playhouses
in the late-16th and early-17th centuries could
expect to be amused, amazed and moved. Not only
would they experience the drama of some courtly
comedy or woeful tragedy but, in many cases, if
they stayed on after the play had ended, they
would also be treated to a sort of 'B-feature', a
rude, lewd farce, commonly known as a 'jig'.
Featuring songs, dancing and slapstick, jigs
involved far more than the simple Irish folk
dance that the word has come to denote. In the
playhouses of Elizabethan London dramatic jigs
were established as the standard ending or
afterpiece to more serious theatrical fare.Not
that everyone approved. The playwright Thomas Dekker wrote in 1613:
"I have often seen, after the finishing of some
worthy tragedy or catastrophe in the open
theatres that the scene after the Epilogue hath
been more blacke about a nasty bawdy jigge
than the most horrid scene in the play was."
To the literary world they were an object of
disapproval. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) loathed the
'concupiscence of jigs', believing they prevented
audiences from appreciating plays. Shakespeare's
Hamlet, after drawing Ophelia into a particularly
vulgar exchange, apologises to her by calling
himself 'Your only jigmaker'. The satirical poet
Everard Guilpin (born c. 1572) dismissed the
'whores, bedles, bawds and sergeants' who
'filthily chant Kemps Jigge', noting how, on
leaving the playhouse fired up with lust, 'many a
cold grey-beard citizen' would sneak into 'some
odde noted house of sin': easy to do, as
theatres, bear-baiting pits and brothels were
situated in close proximity on London's South
Bank, outside the formal control of Dancers
perform in a circle around musicians in a masque
at a banquet held in the home of the courtier Sir
Henry Unton (detail, c.1596). Inset: Richard
Tarlton, a popular jig-maker and clown, portrayed
in a manuscript from 1588. the City authorities.
Even Thomas Heywood, a dramatist and actor with
the Lord Admiral's Men, felt disgust at these
sub-literary dramas. While on the one hand
delighting in the comic farces he called 'merry
accidents', he wrote in An Apology for Actors
(1612): 'I speak not in the defence of any
lascivious shrews, scurrilous jeasts, or
scandalous invectives. If there be any such I
banish them quite from my patronage.'
<http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=33819&amid=30301516>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2010/01/sexually-explicit-jigs-were-major-part.htm>monochrom
at 1/23/2010 01:01:00 PM
