jig
jig.A lively dance; the music from Shakespeare's time is often in simple rather than compound metre.
A short verse ballad on a comic, often sexual, theme accompanied by vigorous dancing and performed in the theatre as an afterpiece to the main play (cf. Hamlet's comment on Polonius, Hamlet 2.2.503). Richard Tarlton appears to have excelled in this entertainment and made it ubiquitous. Thomas Platter describes how, after a play about Julius Caesar, ‘they danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, two in each group dressed in men's and two in women's apparel’, suggesting that the jig was toned down if it followed a tragedy. At the other extreme of dignity was probably the bergomask dance by Bottom and Flute after their performance as Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Jeremy Barlow/Gabriel Egan
Bibliography
Baskervill, C. R., The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song...
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