ABSTRACT
The jig was a unique form, combining drama, dance and song but the fact that Richard Tarlton and Will Kemp, the two most celebrated Elizabethan clowns, were particularly associated with jigs suggest that it was also comic. The jig owes something to medieval sports, carnivals and festivals of misrule, which mixed dance and song with knockabout humour and topsy-turvy games. Charles Read Baskervill insisted that it was the dance which the spectators really loved in the jigs, but they probably equally enjoyed the tumbling, slapstick, pratfalls and so on. The steps available to jig performers were very varied, from the galiard, a strong, muscular dance with leaps and turns, and the somewhat similar Volta, to the statelier branle, though this too could involve jumping and pirouetting. The hornpipe, a sailor’s dance, was common, and indeed the jig, when the performer presumably whirled like a child’s spinning top, or whirligig, was a dance in its own right.
