Staging the jigs

Text 
Music 
Dance

Appendix: Dance instruction  

Bibliography   

A popular crowd-pleaser in the late 16^th and mid-17^th century, the dramatic jig was a short, comic, bawdy musical-drama which included elements of dance, slapstick and disguise. With a cast of ageing cuckolds and young head-strong wives, knavish clowns, roaring soldiers and country bumpkins, jigs often followed as afterpieces at London's playhouses, and were performed at fairs, in villages and in private houses. Troublesome to the authorities, they drew the crowds by offering a lively antidote to more sober theatrical fare. 
This performance edition presents for the first time nine examples of English dramatic jigs from the late sixteenth century through to the Restoration; the scripts are re-united as far as possible with their original tunes. It gives a comprehensive history, discusses sources, plots, instrumentation and dancing, and offers practical information on staging jigs today.
Includes:

• 
  Transcriptions of the original texts

 

• 
  Contextual notes: plot synopses and discussion of sources, themes and audience reception

 

• 
  Musical notation for each tune, with suggestions for underlay and chords, and notes on instrumention and style

 

• 
  Appendix of dance instructions and reconstructions

 

 

 




 




 

Roger Clegg is Senior Lecturer in Drama Studies at De Montfort University, where his teaching includes Twentieth Century European Drama, Popular Theatre, Pre-texts and Contexts of Drama and Renaissance English Theatre.

His research is in the politics and practice of Renaissance popular performance and the relationship between the stage and the culture and society which it inhabits. He has researched and written on English jigs from the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, and has also investigated the staging of Singing Simpkin at Shakespeare's Globe as part of Globe Education's 'Winter Playing' research (2003).

Publications include He's for a jig or a Tale of Bawdry: Notes on the English stage Jig, with Peter Thomson, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2009.

Roger is also particularly interested in popular humour, political satire and comic performance, and organises a conference and other events annually under the banner Playing for Laughs: On Comedy in Performance (as part of Dave's Leicester Comedy Festival) which invites academics and practitioners of comedy to come together to share ideas on just why and how people generate laughter through performance.