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the acrobat becoming a leader amongst the Queen's, and even so late as 1601 Henslowe fitting out the Admiral's boy Nick to tumble in the presence of royalty. The country tours of the Queen's were for some time accompanied by a Turkish rope dancer.[1] In the theatres themselves Italian players made their success and their scandal, with the help of tumbling women.[2] Whether English players did the same we do not know. But we do know that the dance by way of afterpiece was a regular and enduring custom.[3] It was known as the jig.[4] At first, perhaps, nothing more than such dancing, with the help of a variety of foreign costumes, as was also an element in the early masks, it developed into a farcical dialogue, with a musical and Terpsichorean accompaniment,

  1. Murray, ii. 206, 293, 304, 367, 'upon the Q. players at the dancing on the rop' (1590, Bridgnorth), 'vnto the Torkey Tumblers' (1589-90, Ipswich), 'to certen playars, playinge uppon ropes at the Crosse Keyes' (1590, Leicester), 'to the Quenes men when the Turke wente vpon roppes at Newhall' (22 April 1590, Norwich); Coventry Corp. MS. A 7 (b), 'the Queens players & the turk' (1589-90, Coventry); cf. Nashe, Epistle to Strange Newes (1592, Works, i. 262), 'Say I am as verie a Turke as hee that three yeeres ago ranne vpon ropes'. A Gloucester payment of 1594-5 for 'a wagon in the pageant for the Turke' (Murray, ii. 285) may or may not refer to the acrobat of 1590.
  2. Cf. ch. xiv.
  3. Both Hentzner (1598) and Platter (1599) describe it; cf. ch. xvi, introd. Platter saw it at both the Globe and the Curtain, where it was 'Englisch unndt Irlendisch'. Von Wedel also describes something very much like a well-developed jig after a baiting on the Bankside in 1584 (cf. ch. xvi, Hope).
  4. Gosson, P. C. (1582; cf. App. C, No. xxx), 'daunsing of gigges'; Much Ado, II. i. 78, 'Wooing . . . is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical'; Hamlet, III. ii. 132, 'O God, your only jig-maker'; E. M. O. (Q_{1}), 1147, 'a thing studied, and rehearst as ordinarily at his comming from hawking, or hunting, as a Iigge after a play'; Jack Drum, i. 404, 'as the Iigge is cal'd for when the play is done'; R. Knolles, Six Bookes of a Commonweal (1606), 645, 'Now adayes they put at the end of euerie Tragedie (as poyson into meat) a comedie or jigge' (translating Bodin's 'obscoena quadam fabula turpissimis ac sordidissimis narrationibus condita'); Cotgrave (1611), 'Farce . . . also, the Iyg at the end of an Enterlude, wherein some pretie knauerie is acted'; Dekker, A Strange Horse Race (1613, Works, iii. 340), 'As I haue often seene, after the finishing of some worthy Tragedy, or Catastrophe in the open Theaters, that the sceane after the Epilogue hath been more blacke (about a nasty bawdy jigge) then the most horrid sceane in the play was: The stinkards speaking all things, yet no man understanding any thing'; cf. the late Shirley allusion on p. 528. The term is sometimes more loosely used. In James IV, 82, 88, 620, 636, 661, 666, 673, 1116, the speakers of the Induction call the main action a jig; cf. 1 Tamburlaine, prol. 1, 'iygging vaines of riming mother wits'. Swaen (Sh.-Jahrbuch, xlvi. 122) points out that a tune known as The Cobler's Jig would fit the dialogue song by cobblers in Locrine, 569. Naylor, 124, gives some account of jig tunes and derives the term from giga, an instrument of the fiddle type.