“A Ballad Intituled a Pleasant Newe Jigge”: The Relationship between the Broadside Ballad and the Dramatic Jig

Abstract

while many of the ballads printed on broadsheets in the seventeenth century were undoubtedly purchased only for reading, they also invited performance by those who sold or purchased them in, for example, the alehouse, the milking house, the workplace, or the home.Many surviving broadside ballads contain a dialogue between two characters, or occasionally three or four, that seems to invite dramatic enactment, and some also suggest the use of props, dramatic scenarios, action, and gesture.Additionally, some evoke performance in the form of dance or the vestiges of dance, as Bruce Smith discusses in his essay in this issue.Furthermore, certain ballads contain material intended to be acted out on the amateur or professional stage, or preserve in print traces of the performance of a dramatic jig 1 -a short, comic, and often 1.Dramatic has been used as a prefix throughout to distinguish such jigs from those that are solely a dance or solely a song (the dramatic jig is also sometimes referred to as the stage jig).This article extends a discussion into the relationship between the dramatic jig and the broadside ballad begun in Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs (2014), co-authored with Lucie Skeaping.My thanks to Lucie for sharing her knowledge of ballads and early music."A Ballad Intituled a Pleasant Newe Jigge":The Relationship between the Broadside Ballad and the Dramatic Jig Roger Clegg abstract Dialogues in song set to popular tunes describes both the broadside ballad and the dramatic jig, and no doubt both forms of popular entertainment are related.If the dramatic jig was a sung-drama featuring props, disguising, and dance, to be acted out on the common stage when a play was done, might the broadside ballad also be a script to be acted out as a dramatic performance?This article considers the relationship between ballad and jig and explores the extent to which the surviving broadside ballads from the seventeenth century may preserve in print vestiges of the stage jig.eywords: overlap between ballads and dramatic jigs; reconstructions of musical performance; William Kempe; theater afterpieces; solo and dialogue ballads; depictions of courtship ro ger clegg 2. In the prologue to Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great (London, 1590), the audience is told that "From iygging vaines of riming mother-wits, / And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay / Weele lead you to the stately tent of War" (sig.A3r), suggesting that the performance, in 1587, followed the jig.In Ben Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour (London, 1600), Carlo Buffone talks of "a jigge after a Play" (2.1); Jean Bodin complains "now adayes they put at the end of euerie Tragedie (as poyson into meat) a comedie or jigge, " in Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans.Richard Knolles (London, 1606), bk.6, p. 645; Thomas Dekker laments that "the Sceane after the Epilogue hath beene more blacke (about a nasty bawdy jigge) then the most horrid Sceane in the Play was, " in A Strange Horse-Race (London, 1613), sig.C4v; James Shirley suggests a surprising shift in the running order of Caroline performances-"Many gentlemen / Are not, as in the dayes of understanding, / Now satisfied without a Iigge, which since / They cannot, with their honour, call for, after / The play, they looke to be serv' d up ith' middle"-in Changes, or Love in a Maze (London, 1631), sig.H2r-v.3. In William Hemings's The Fatal Contract (London, 1661), the queen says, "Wee'l hear your jig, / How is your ballad titl' d?" (4.3, lines 49-50; sig.G4r).The ballad "The Three Worthy Butchers of the North.I weep, I wail, and Travel much in pain, Now all my youthful days are past, they'l never come again: Once I was a Man, but now alas am none, For all my Companions are from me fled and gone" gives Johnson, the Butcher, the refrain: "Be merry my hearts . . .let us sing up a jig" (1672-96), British Library (hereafter BL), Roxburghe 3.30; 4.80, C.20.f.10.80,EBBA 31506.The term jig was also employed in a number of broadside ballad titles, discussed below.4. The dramatic jig emerged in the late sixteenth century as a natural evolution of dramatic performance that included popular music, balladry, and songs in court farces and morality plays set to dance tunes and sung by players while dancing.London's celebrated clown, Richard Tarlton (d.1588), a ballad singer and witty extemporizer in rhyme, is often credited as one of the first players to develop song and dance as the conclusion to the afternoon's play.5. "Frauncis New Iigge, betweene Frauncis a Gentleman, and Richard a Farmer" (1617?), Pepys

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