Jig (theatre)

A jig might include songs sung to popular tunes of the day, and it might feature dance, stage fighting, cross-dressing, disguisings, asides, masks, and elements of pantomime.

[3] In London's public playhouses there had been a competition or tension between the playwright's script, where the lines were written down and memorized, and the comedian players, who could get laughs with extemporaneous asides and by disrupting.

[5] Often bawdy, sometimes satirical, usually comic, and something of the nature of farce, these sung-dramas, or playlets, drew their plots from folk tales, jest books, and Italian novellas and were populated by an assortment of traditional stock characters and tricksters, such as "cuckolds, rustic clowns, fools, bawdy wenches, enterprisingly faithless wives, gullible and cuckolded husbands, blustering soldiers, slippery gentlemen, foolish constables easily outwitted, prurient Puritans, falsely coy maidens and drunken foreigners".

Two of the surviving jig scripts appear as evidence appended to the Bill of Complaint in two separate cases of libel brought before the court of Star Chamber in the early seventeenth century.

The documents setting out the proceedings for the cases detail that the "libels" (verse that is sung of published in an attempt to defame a person's reputation) were written and performed by amateurs about the infamies of their neighbours and were sometimes taken up by semi-professional players and toured around towns and villages in England's localities.

[12] William Davenant, writing in The Unfortunate Lovers (performed 1638 [published 1643]), but looking back twenty years, says that attendants to the theatres would "expect a jig, or target fight".

[18] Paulus Hentzner, a German traveller to England, also observes that the many tragedies and comedies performed in the theatres conclude by "mixing acrobatic dancing with the sweetest music, they can expect to receive the final reward of great popular applause"[19] A year later, Ben Jonson, in Every Man Out of his Humour (1600; 2.1), talks of "as a jigge after a Play",[20] as does John Marston who, in Jack Drum's Entertainment (1601), says that "the Iigge is cald for when the play is done".