Cross-References from Critical Notes: _The Amorous Prince_
p. 121 _The Jig and Dance._ cf. note (on p. 43), Vol. III, p. 477: _A Jigg (The Town Fop)_.
p. 43 _A Jigg._ There were, in Post-Restoration times, two interpretations of the word Jig. Commonly speaking it was taken to mean exactly what it would now, a simple dance. Nell Gwynne and Moll Davis were noted for the dancing of Jigs. cf. Epilogue to Buckingham’s _The Chances_ (1682):--
The Author dreads the strut and meen Of new prais’d Poets, having often seen Some of his Fellows, who have writ before, When Nel has danc’d her Jig, steal to the Door, Hear the Pit clap, and with conceit of that Swell, and believe themselves the Lord knows what.
Thus at the end of Lacy’s _The Old Troop_ (31 July, 1668), we have ‘a dance of two hobby horses in armour, and a Jig.’ Also shortly before the epilogue in Shadwell’s _The Sullen Lovers_ (1668) we read, ‘Enter a Boy in the habit of Pugenello and traverses the stage, takes his chair and sits down, then dances a Jig.’
But it must be remembered that beside the common meaning there was a gloss upon the word derived from Elizabethan stage practice. In the prologue to _The Fair Maid of the Inn_ (licensed 1626), good plays are spoken of as often scurvily treated, whilst
A Jigge shall be clapt at, and every rhime Prais’d and applauded by a clam’rous chyme.
The Pre-Restoration Jig was little other indeed than a ballad opera in embryo lasting about twenty-five minutes and given as an after-piece. It was a rhymed farce in which the dialogue was sung or chanted by the characters to popular ballad tunes. But after the Restoration the Jig assumed a new and more serious complexion, and came eventually to be dovetailed with the play itself, instead of being given at the fag end of the entertainment. Mr. W. J. Lawrence, the well-known theatrical authority to whom I owe much valuable information contained in this note, would (doubtless correctly) attribute the innovation to Stapylton and Edward Howard, both of whom dealt pretty freely in these Jigs. Stapylton has in Act V of _The Slighted Maid_ (1663) a ‘Song in Dialogue’ between Aurora and Phoebus with a chorus of Cyclops, which met with some terrible parody in _The Rehearsal_ (cf. the present editor’s edition of _The Rehearsal_, p. 145). Indeed all extrinsic songs in dialogue, however serious the theme, were considered ‘Jigs’. A striking example would be the Song of the Spirits in Dryden’s _Tyrannic Love_, Act IV.