ABSTRACT

One of the oldest and most popular of the home-cultivated almains, outlived the New Almain, which occurs only in the Elizabethan Source. To judge by the manuscript descriptions, the figures of the dance apparently changed little during the period covered by the sources though, like The Queen's Almain, it changed from a bipartite to a tripartite form. Although the received wisdom of some very recent scholarship accepts that there was but one perfect or absolute form of each dance, and that the numerous differences between the manuscript sources are due to scribal error, this cannot be proved, and is unlikely to be true, in every case. But some of the variations in structure and style between sources of the same dance are apparently so serious that they cannot so easily be explained away. Both the Old Almain and the Queen's Almain, for example, moved concurrently from a two-to a three-strain form.