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“…to make amends for One ill Dance”: Conventions for Dancing in Restoration Plays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Curtis A. Price
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Extract

In 1700 the London theatrical world was in crisis. The quality of English plays had deteriorated during the 40 years of restored Stuart rule. Playwrights, believing themselves to be working in the tradition of the finest Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic poets, were churning out ranting tragedies, stripped of the subtle heroes and comic relief of Shakespeare, and amoral comedies, rarely showing the sparkling wit of Jonson. The two London theatre companies were locked in bitter competition for the small, mostly aristocratic audience, and managers compromised the poets and actors by introducing into their plays music-hall entertainments, from ventriloquists to tumblers. At the center of the crisis, however, was not the lack of playwrights of genius nor a fickle, world-weary audience; rather British drama was seriously weakened by a tradition that had since 1660 allowed the play to become the vehicle not only for spoken drama, but for large quantities of music and dance as well.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Fall/Winter 1977 , pp. 1 - 6
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1977

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References

NOTES

1. Printed in Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne, ed. Montagu, W. D. (London, 1864), II, 55Google Scholar.

2. In the preface to his tragedy Brutus of Alba: or, The Enchanted Lovers (1678).

3. For example, the French dancer Jean Balon was paid 400 guineas for five weeks' work in London during 1699, a sum “far exceeding the fondest hopes of a contemporary actor”. See The London Stage 1660-1800, Part I: 1660-1700, ed. Lennep, William Van (Carbondale, Illinois, 1965), pp. cx–cxiGoogle Scholar.

4. Pirrotta, Nino, in Li/due Orfei (Turin, 1969)Google Scholar, notices a similar phenomenon in the pre-operatic drama of late sixteenth-century Italy, where “it was in the plays themselves rather than in their intermedi that the most important links between action and music … were formed…” This idea is summarized in Iain Fenlon's review of Pirrotta's study in The Musical Times, 117 (1976), 742–3Google Scholar.

5. Eric Rothstein would disagree; see his defense of these plays in Restoration Tragedy (Madison, Wisconsin, 1967), p. viiGoogle Scholar: “The neglect of Restoration tragedy … seems to me indefensible, explicable only because serious study of the Restoration is comparatively recent.”

6. See Day, Cyrus L. and Murrie, Eleanore Boswell, English Song-Books 1651-1702 A Bibliography (London, 1940)Google Scholar, No. 3172, hereafter referred to as “D&M.” The song is reprinted in Dryden: The Dramatic Works, ed. Summers, Montague (London, 1932), V, 293–5Google Scholar.

7. In British Library Sloane Ms. 1828.

8. Purcell Society (1971), XXVI, 82–115Google Scholar.

9. A good source for such pieces is Walsh, John's The Contpleat Flute-Master (1695) (copy in the British Library)Google Scholar.

10. The First Modern Comedies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 182–3Google Scholar.

11. 2 May 1668. See The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham, Robert and Matthews, William (Berkeley, 1976), IX, 183–4Google Scholar.

12. A similar observation is made by Cohen, Selma Jeanne, ‘Theory and Practice of Theatrical Dancing”, in Famed for Dance: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Theatrical Dancing in England, 1660-1740 (New York, 1960), pp. 21–58Google Scholar.

13. Consider, e.g., the directions for a dance in the third act of Purcell's Dioclesian (Purcell Society [1961], IX, xix)Google Scholar: “The figures come out of the hangings and dance, and figures exactly the same appear in their places. When they have danced a while, they go to sit on the chairs, they slip from 'em and after join in the dance with 'em.”

14. For example, in Higden, Henry's The Wary Widdow (1693), II.iiGoogle Scholar, Clarinda sings and dances a minuet, the favorite dance type used for this dual-purpose.

15. Ed. M. Summers (London [1928]), p. 28. Like the actress/dancer Nell Gwyn, Mrs. Davies was one of King Charles II's mistresses. Pepys (7 March 1667) considered her a better dancer than the more famous Nell. She is praised in verse Flecknoe, by Richard in Euterpe Reviv'd (1675), p. 64:Google Scholar “How I admire thee, Davies!/Who would not say, to see thee dance so light,/Thou wert all air, or else all flame and spright–”

16. A few native actors were apparently as skilled at dancing as the French professionals. The most famous of these was Hester Santlow. For an account of her long career, see Cohen, , “Theory and Practice of Theatrical Dancing”, pp. 49–58Google Scholar. Cohen states that Santlow made her debut in 1706, having been born about 1690. However, a few rubrics in Walsh, 's The Compleat Flute-Master of 1695Google Scholar (e.g., “A Skarromoutch by Mrs Saintloe att the Theatre”) suggest that she was born about ten years earlier.

17. D&M is an excellent bibliography of printed songs from plays. For a catalogue of instrumental music in the dramas, see Price, Curtis A., “Musical Practices in Restoration Plays,” Diss. Harvard (1974)Google Scholar, Appendix I.

18. Stage directions are not always reliable records of what music was played in a scene. For example, in Dryden, 's An Evening's Love (1671), III.iGoogle Scholar, a servant announces that “the Ladies have commanded me to tell you that they are willing, before they Play, to present you with a Dance; and to give you an Essay of their Guittars.” A stage direction states simply, “A DANCE,” but afterwards Wildblood says to Jacinta, one of the dancers (played by Nell Gwyn, by the way), “While you have been Singing, Lady, I have been Praying….”

19. See Dido and Aeneas; An Opera, ed. Laurie, Margaret and Dart, Thurston (London, n.d.), pp. iii–ivGoogle Scholar.

20. For example, in Shadwell's 1672 comedy The Miser, a group of fiddlers enter in III.iii to play and sing. Their number may be determined from the stage direction, “They Sing. A Catch in four Parts.” And in III.i of the same playwright's The Woman-Captain (1680), some villains commandeer a group of “three or four Fidlers” on their way to play for a wedding (the musicians have just accompanied a country dance in III.i). “Fiddler” also had the broader meaning of “musician,” and the onstage players were frequently called on to sing, as Timothy requests them to do in The Miser: “Violinmen, (I dare not call 'em Fiddlers, for fear they should be angry) sing us a catch. …”

21. The harpsichord's lack of portability probably precluded its use onstage. The slightly less unwieldy bass viol, however, does find its way into plays. In Behn, 's The Feign'd Curtizans (1679)Google Scholar, near the end of Act III, a fight involving some stage fiddlers erupts; one character loses his sword and in the confusion grabs “a Base VioL” This instrument is also found onstage in Centlivre, Susannah's The Beau's Duel (1702), I.iGoogle Scholar, and in Southerne, comedy was revived on 21 December 1700 and numerous times thereafter. See The London Stage, Part 2; 1700-1729, ed. Avery, Emmett L. (Carbondale, Illinois, 1960), I, 6.Google Scholar