Judging by contemporary complaints accusing jigs of inciting social disorder and distracting audiences from the dramatically advanced content of the play, early modern jigs might be considered as the farthest removed in performance culture from the expressly religious events of Christmastide and sermon performances. Yet while jigs were part of the new commercial drama, their theatrical ancestry reaches back to modes of integrating drama and religion that predate the Reformation. And thus, I want to suggest that their function in this new commercial setting was to reinforce the greater, trans-Reformational religious context of the playhouse and of performance culture as a whole.
Famous stage jig performers like Richard Tarlton were known for bantering with the audience and improvising speeches. The Chamberlain’s Men’s Will Kemp was known for his dancing and dramatic clown roles and then after 1599, when he left the company, for the “Nine Days Wonder” during which he danced from London to Norwich. Jigging was physical, musical, improvisational, and sometimes even acrobatic. Roger Clegg notes that in this way the jig was atmospherically characteristic of the “rowdy proto-capitalist playhouse” where “music, singing, and dancing mingled with the variously evolving branches of slapstick, sword-play, bawdy, satire and farce, a dramatic heritage more physical than literary.” Later in the seventeenth century the term “jig/jigg” would contain a host of related meanings—from music and dance, to dialogue and sex—but in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, its home was on the stage. Some early modern writers opposed play companies’ uses of jigs at the end of the final act, as when Thomas Dekker memorably judges that the “Sceane after the Epilogue hath beene more blacke (about a nasty bawdy jigge) then the most horrid Sceane in the Play was.” Still, as the opening to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great attests, others embraced the jig’s place as an idiom, as it were, of the greater play event: “From iygging vaines of riming mother-wits, / And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay / Weele lead you to the stately tent of War.”
Furthermore, according to Philip Massinger’s account, jigs were so central to audiences’ expectations of the playhouse routine that they even threatened the spirit of the play that preceded it: “If the gravity and height of the subject distaste such as are onely affected with Jigges, and ribaldrie (as I presume it will,) their condemnation of me, and my Poem, can no way offend me: my reason teaching me such malicious, and ignorant detractors deserve rather contempt, then [sic.] satisfaction.” In some ways, the dramatic jig is on the opposite end of the performance culture spectrum from liturgical and sermon events like boy bishop festivities and cycle plays, but in other ways, they elaborately cull from the performative nuances afforded by the theatrical milieu of trans-Reformational England. Thus, more than a possible distraction or base entertainment, the jig acts as a kind of theatrical intermediary between these explicitly religious performance types and the play that precedes it.
Descriptions of the jig variously as “ribaldrie” and as “nasty bawdy” notwithstanding, the majority of jigs that survive today are cohesive dramas. Such dramatic jigs are short yet complete stories with characters, plots, and tunes; and the recycling of staple character types and themes among them, as in ballads, suggests that jigs constitute an advanced genre. Dramatic jigs normally take the form of a dialogue between two or more characters. Typical themes include sexual seduction, pranks, and the mixing of social levels. At the end of a play performance, the company clown would reenter the stage, perhaps with one or two more players, and then perform his song. And indeed, the dramatic jig is more a dialogue song than it is a dance, tough dancing frequently accompanied it.
To watch a jig performed after a play may well have had a jarring effect, especially if it followed a tragic catastrophe, but it is worth pointing out that jigs share many of their thematic and theatrical elements with even the bleakest of early modern tragedies—music, dancing, sexuality, rampant wordplay, deception, conspicuous reliance on particular stage properties, thwarted ambition. And this partial list does not account for how the postlude jig reprises the musical and farcical activities that frequently occurred before plays and between acts.
To close the comparative study of Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street with a jig has a similar effect to ending a play with a jig: it does not terminate the event but expands it. The jig extends the play into the audience, other performance forms, and a common playhouse vocabulary. It extends forward into future plays and, in many cases, into future audiences, since in the Elizabethan period new audience members would enter the playhouse after the play ended in order to see the jig specifically. Postlude jigs even stretched into future performance events, taking form in broadside print and being sung by new performers in alehouses and market stalls—we might imagine, for example, at the entrance to the premier of a new play. Conversely, early modern jigs were nostalgic and also looked backwards in time. In a sense, jigs were “born old”: they made sure that a time past persisted into the time present through their folk characters, music, and wooing dramas, and by invoking May games, Morris dancing, wedding plays, interludes, pastorals, and the role of the medieval Vice.
(excerpted from postlude)
