‘Come,now a roundel and a fairy song’: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the early modern invitation to the dance

Abstract

French

This article considers the status and function of dance in one of Shakespeare’s best-known comedies. Equally importantly, it seeks to embed this playtext within the intense and multifaceted cultural debate surrounding dance and performance in early modern England. Dance is explored in legal, moral, philosophical and spiritual terms in the course of this discussion. In its final stages, this article also considers the appeal for dancing which the comedy has exercised for generations of performers down the centuries.

Keywords

Shakespeare dance early modern England Elizabeth I danse l’Anglterre de la première modernité Elisabeth I

On Thursday morning, hir Maiestie was no sooner readie, and at hir Gallerie window, looking into the Garden, but there began three Cornets to play certain fantastike dances, at the measure, whereof the Fayerie Queene came into the Garden, dancing with hir maides about hir. She brought with hir a garland made in forme of an imperiall croown, which in the sight of hir maiestie, she fixed vpon a siluered staffe, and sticking the staffe into the ground, spake as followeth.

I that abide in places under ground,

Aureola, the Queene of Fairy land,

That euerie night in rings of painted flowers

Turne round and carroll out Elisaes name:

Hearing that Nereus and the Syluane Gods

Haue lately welcomde your Imperiall Grace,

Opend the earth with this inchanting wande,

To doe my duetie to your Maiestie,

And humblie to salute you with this Chaplet,

Geuen me by Auberon, the Fairy King…¹

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/96?) may have been performed at court to welcome in the New Year in January 1604 (‘play of Robin goode-fellow’),² but the initial performances in early modern England either in the London playhouses or elite residences remain the subject of critical speculation. Nonetheless, as may be witnessed above, it becomes apparent on reviewing the pageantry and ceremonial surrounding the Elizabethan court that the last Tudor sovereign was far from being unaccustomed to the company of fairy kings and queens soliciting her attentions in dramatized performance.

Interestingly, the entertainment described above dates from the autumn of 1591, just a few years before the composition of Shakespeare’s comedy. This divertissement populated by figures such as Aureola and Auberon unfolded on the fourth day of the court’s residence at the home of the Earl of Hertford at Elvetham in Hampshire. Furthermore, we learn that ‘After this speech, the Fairy-Queene and hir maids danced about the Garden, singing a song of sixe partes’, and that

This spectacle and Musicke so delighted hir Maiestie, that she commanded to heare it sung and to be danced three times ouer, and called for diuers Lords and Ladies to behold it; and then dismist the actors with thankes, and with a gracious larges, which of hir exceeding goodnesse she bestowed vpon them.³

Royal largesse, a precious commodity during the Elizabethan period and infrequently gifted, offers a good indication of the queen’s receptiveness to such performances and feeds into the larger concerns of the discussion which follows to reflect upon the status and functions of dance in Shakespeare’s comedy. Equally importantly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream not only asks us to attend to movement as narrative action in the dramatic intrigue but, as we shall see, makes very particular invitations into the multifarious world of early modern dance. Drawing on courtly, legal and social documents of the period, this discussion examines how capers, corantos and the like tempted both participant and spectator into a profoundly morally chequered environment. In its final stages, the present study also considers some of the ways in which Shakespeare’s playtext has continued to encourage writers, directors and audiences down the centuries to anticipate in this particular comedy an enhanced status for dance – a practice which, as Randy Martin has stressed, ‘treats the mobilization of bodies more reflexively than quotidian bodily acts’.⁴

Early modern England and the dance

In turning to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we enter a dramatic world in which, as Alan Brissenden argues, Shakespeare exploited the potential of dance ‘more abundantly than he was ever to do again’.⁵ However, the roles and referencing of dance and (dis)placement in this fairy entertainment might not be a source of surprise given, as Sondra Horton Fraleigh has highlighted more generally, the art form’s propensity to communicate ‘movement that has undergone some meaningful transformation…it holds the transformational power to move us beyond self and beyond the ordinary’.⁶ The artistic undertaking of this comedy is indeed to move us beyond self and beyond the ordinary into an environment of seemingly benign improbability. In the final stages of the play, Titania instructs the assembled company, specifying ‘First rehearse your song by rote, / To each word a warbling note. / Hand in hand, with fairy grace, / Will we sing, and bless this place’ (5.1.387-90).⁷ In so doing, she not only indicates a function of dance in Shakespeare’s intrigue to modulate narrative speed and to restore an axis of temporal organisation in what might appear a fractious and flux-ridden dramatic world, the fairy queen also posits authoritatively a form of ritualized agency that exists beyond the realm of the spoken word. Indeed, such various figuring forth of dance in terms of benediction, transformation and, ultimately, transcendence would not have been at all unfamiliar to early modern minds. In the early Tudor period, for example, Sir Thomas Elyot had conceded in The Boke named the Governour (1531) that

Some interpretours of poetes do imagin, that Proteus, who is supposed to haue turned him self into sondry figures, as somtyme to shew hym selfe like a serpent, some tyme lyke a lyon, otherwhyles lyke water, an other tyme like the flame of fyre, signifieth to be none other, but a delyuer and crafty daunser⁸

Arguing in this way, Elyot carefully intimates not only the fascinating measures and motions which might beguile both onlooker and dancer in the early modern period but also the apprehension and ethical ambiguities which frequently surrounded such practices at the time.

While recognition of the significance of dance in early modern culture is widely in evidence in current scholarship, there is frequently recourse to a form of critical mourning when its study is broached as a discipline. In a key enquiry, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England, for example, Skiles Howard laments that ‘dancing is an evanescent practice that leaves no trace of itself’.⁹ Similarly minded in Music and Society in Early Modern England, Christopher Marsh draws attention to the difficulty in understanding ‘the prominent and often controversial place occupied by dance within early modern culture’.¹⁰ Strikingly, this sentiment continues to be voiced in more recent times for the art form as a whole, as the testimony of the leading choreographer Merce Cunningham bears witness:

Yes, it’s difficult to talk about dance. It’s not so much intangible as evanescent. I compare ideas on dance, and dance itself, to water. Surely, describing a book is certainly easier than describing water.…I’m not talking about the quality of the dance, but about its nature.¹¹

In terms of dance practice in Tudor and early Stuart England and, most especially, in the context of this discussion of theatre performance, one of the greatest challenges remains, as Emily F. Winerock underlines, that ‘there are no surviving English dancing manuals for the period between the compilation of the Gresley manuscript (c. 1500) and the publication of John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (1651)’.¹² There are the rare examples of descriptions for the English reader, such as Robert Copelande’s brief appendix to his 1521 book of French grammar entitled The Manner of Dauncyinge the Bace Daunces after the use of France. In addition, continental publications (principally French or Italian) circulated, such as Fabritio Caroso’s Il Ballarino (1581) and Nobiltà di dame (1600), Cesare Negri’s Le gratie d’amore (1602) and Nuove inventione di balli (1604)) – and, on occasions, these enjoyed translations into the vernacular as they travelled the continent.¹³ Elsewhere, the Jacobean dancing master François de Lauze, for example, found his treatise on dance pirated by a rival, Barthélemy de Montagut, and printed in London as Apologie de la Danse (1623) with a dedication to Buckingham.¹⁴ However, what can be established conclusively about dance practice across the British Isles from such publications remains open to speculation.¹⁵

Nonetheless, on consulting surviving documents from the period it remains abundantly clear there were a whole host of possibilities for encountering dance at all levels of early modern society – and this consideration of A Midsummer Night’s Dream necessarily directs attention to the stage as a notable location. For the playhouse alone, Dorothy Richey recounted that in a review of 237 surviving Elizabethan scripts, sixty-eight ‘call for the performance of one or more dances as an integral part of the plot’.¹⁶ Perhaps most familiar to modern critical debate, the Swiss visitor Thomas Platter noted that during his own visit to the London theatre in the late sixteenth century, ‘At the end of the comedy, they danced according to their custom with extreme elegance. Two in men’s clothes and two in women’s gave this performance, in wonderful combination with each other’.¹⁷ The practice seems to have been widely acknowledged. When a young German lawyer, Paul Hentzner, visited the realm in 1598, he also recorded that in the capital’s theatres ‘English Actors represent almost every day Tragedies and Comedies to very numerous audiences; these are concluded with excellent music, variety of dances, and the excessive applause of those that are present’.¹⁸ Moreover, the native-born lawyer/poet, Sir John Davies, recognized in verse, ‘we see at all the play-house doores, / When ended is the play, the dance, and song, / A thousand townesmen, gentlemen, and whores, / Porters and serving-men, together throng’.¹⁹

The intervention of dance in the London playhouse has frequently been dominated in critical debate by the widely documented practice of the gig associated with those playing fools and foolery, such as Will Kempe, who was reputed to have ‘spent his life in mad Iigges and merry iestes’.²⁰ The gig in theatrical fare of the period was clearly a highly sought-out performance which might occur onstage before, during and/or after the performance of tragedies, satires and comedies. Indeed, the satirist Edward Guilpin poured scorn on the ‘rotten-throated slaues / Engarlanded with coney-catching knaues, / Whores, Bedles, bawdes and Sergeants’ who, amongst other things, ‘filthily / Chaunt Kemp’s Jigge’.²¹ However, this particular dance has largely proved an imponderable performative act, owing perhaps to its resemblance in nature to a coloratura intervention in opera, incorporating marked elements of improvisation. Whatever the case, knowledge of it at the time appears to have been commonplace. Hamlet dismisses Polonius as one who cares only ‘for a jig or a tale of bawdry’ or his own slumbers (2.2.422), and Jonson’s dedication to Catiline lamented the nature of ‘these Iig-giuen times’.²² Indeed, its performance continued to have a memorable effect on participant and audience as the decades went by, as the following entry records from the later seventeenth century: ‘Priscilla did dance a jig with Tom / Which made her buttocks quake like a Custard’.²³ Brissenden notes that by 1612 such were the disorders associated with the unruly jig that the authorities issued an order to suppress it altogether in the theatre.²⁴ However, in direct comparison with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, other Shakespearean plays, such as Much Ado About Nothing, indicate that dance literacy among theatre audiences extended significantly beyond the warmly anticipated jig. Assuming the role of comic pedagogue to Hero, Beatrice dismisses

wooing, wedding, and repenting…as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque pace: the first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly-modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance and, with his bad legs, falls into the cinque pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave. (2.1.61–7)

Certainly, the roles of dance in dramatized performance might be many and various, as we witness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and audiences might clearly bring extra-theatrical knowledge of such activities to bear when prising meaning from the spectacles enacted before them. Indeed, dance might all too often augment, enhance and/or demarcate the parameters of spoken text in the unfolding narrative representation of human experience onstage: thus, Ingrid Pfandl-Buchegger persuasively argues that in scrutinizing early modern performances, we may discover that ‘The body is what is left beyond the text’.²⁵ Like music, dance may offer an alternative mode of communication and exchange to the written or printed script. Exciting, re-enacting, reflecting upon and, elsewhere, resolving tensions and conflict, the intervention of dance inevitably revises and complicates our understanding of a given dramatic world or any primacy or autonomy with which the spoken word might be attributed in an intrigue. Such stylized movement may entertain participant and onlooker alike, but in the theatre, it can serve to evoke locale, event or act as a narrative drive or supplement. As will become apparent, in a text such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, its performances also offer the possibility of expressing power relations, both equal and unequal, to the eye as well as the ear and posit the body itself as a learning environment to audiences on- and off-stage.

‘Middle summer’s spring’: A dancing Nation and a dancing Queen

One of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s post-war editors, Harold F. Brooks, acknowledged that ‘the text of the Dream is on the shorter side, though in performance the songs and dances would lengthen it’,²⁶ and Shakespeare’s play itself constantly invites us to conjoin speech, music and dance to render its narrative wholly legible. When Oberon accuses Titania of unwarranted intimacies with Theseus, the fairy queen replies disarmingly:

These are the forgeries of jealousy:

And never, since the middle summer’s spring,

Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,

By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,

Or in the beached margent of the sea,

To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,

But with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport. (2.1.81–7)²⁷

Here, conjuring up the never-never land of ‘middle summer’s spring’, Titania’s account of the contrary motions of the collectively enacted ‘ringlets’ as opposed to the imperious dancing vigour of ‘brawls’ or branles deploys a strategic narrative amorce for the play’s increasingly complex meditation upon alternative modes of sovereignty and (self-) governance.²⁸ Moreover, in this instance, as throughout Shakespeare’s playtext, the referencing of dance urges us to quit the surroundings of courtly or formal gatherings and to situate the dances in a more broadly experienced environment of Elizabethan England which remained highly receptive to such measures. At this point in Shakespeare’s narrative, the evocation of inclusive revelries (rather too inclusive for Oberon who covets the Indian boy) is thus traumatized, challenged by the robust capering initiated by the fairy king. Interestingly, however, adversarial dancing manoeuvres would not have seemed out of place for those conversant with early modern practice. As Sydney Anglo underlines in his magisterial study L’Escrime, La Danse et L’Art de la Guerre, ‘Passer sans transition de Mars à Terpsichore peut sembler maladroit, mais la différence entre la danse de cour et le combat…n’est pas aussi grande qu’on le pense’.²⁹ Indeed, de Lauze’s Louange de la Danse (1623) insisted that dance ‘est d’autant plus necessaire à la Noblesse, que ce qu’il luy faille paroistre en Compagnie, ou apprendre le maniment des Armes, pour le Seruice de sa Patrie’.³⁰ If the war with the Amazons is consigned to the past in Shakespeare’s comedy, the potential for physical (and verbal) violence is nevertheless still regularly evoked in the intrigue.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written for an early modern society that seems to have been renowned (for good or ill) both nationally and internationally as having an exceptional appetite for dancing which was shared by all ranks. The young German visitor Hentzner affirmed in 1598 that the English as a whole ‘excell in dancing and music’, adding, ‘for they are active and lively, though of a thicker make than the French’.³¹ In the same year, John Stow’s Survey of London adjudged that ‘In the holy dayes all sommer, the yoouths are exercised in leaping, dancing, shooting, wrastling, casting the stone, and practising their shieldes; the maidens trippe it with their Timbrelles, and daunce as long as they can well see’.³² Indeed, when the player Kempe engaged in his dancing marathon from London to Norwich, he recalled later in the published account

a lusty lasse being among the people, cal’d…if the Dauncer will lend me a leash of his belles, Ile venter to treade one mile with him my selfe. I lookt vpon her, saw mirth in her eies, heard boldnes in her words, and beheld her ready to tucke vp her russet petticoate, I fitted her with bels: which [s]he merrily taking, garnisht her thicke short legs, and with a smooth bow bad the Tabrer begin. The Drum strucke, forward marcht I with my merry Mayde-marian: who shooke her fat sides: and footed it merrily.³³

As Kempe’s (and a host of early modern) records indicate, the passion for dancing among the broader population was in evidence for everyone to witness in Elizabethan England.

Conversely, in Shakespeare’s fairy kingdom when Oberon declares to the assembled company ‘Every elf and fairy sprite / Hop as light as bird from brier; / And this ditty after me/Sing, and dance it tripplingly’ (5.1.383-6), he might be seen as appealing to a more select audience; and it was certainly the case that the elevated status of dance at Elizabeth’s court throughout the length of her reign was found to warrant comment again and again by visitors from home and abroad.³⁴ If her successor, James VI/I, observed in Basilikon Doron that

Kings being publike persons, by reason of their office and authority, are as it were set (as it was said of olde) vpon a publike stage, in the sight of all the people; where all the beholders eyes are attentiuely bent, to looke and prye in the least circumstance of their secretest drifts.

Elizabeth showed herself to be richly sensitive to the nation’s need for a sovereign on public display – in the arts, in progresses and in person – and dancing remained a key strategy for responding to her own appetites and those of others for regal performance.³⁵ In the opening years of her reign, in 1564, the Scottish emissary Sir James Melville lengthened his visit to the Tudor court: ‘[I] stayed two days longer, till I might see her dance’.³⁶ In the New Year festivities of January 1582 honouring the visit of the royal suitor Francois, Duc d’Anjou, ‘The Barriers for Monsieur’ was staged and ‘La mascarade qui fut le soir mesme, fut de fort bonne grace. La Reine & Monsieur dancerent ce soir-là, comme ils auoient fait plusieurs fois auparauant’.³⁷ By the end of that decade, one of the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber assured his correspondent that ‘six or seven galliards in a morning, besides music and singing, is her ordinary exercise’.³⁸ Moreover, Elizabeth seems to have nurtured this lively taste for dancing throughout her whole household. At the close of 1593, in the final decade of her reign, Robert Carey recorded that

I made all the haste I could to court, which was then at Hampton Court. I arrived there on St. Steven’s day in the afternoon. Dirty as I was, I came into the presence, where I found the lords and ladies dancing. The Queene was not there.³⁹

Equally striking, it seems that Elizabeth remained most responsive to the dancing talents of others and was willing to reward them with high distinction. Most famously, it was widely credited that Sir Christopher Hatton secured senior status on account of his accomplished dancing skills. Indeed, his adversary, Sir John Perrot, allegedly dismissed his meteoric rise as of one who had come ‘into the court…by the Galliard’. In his Fragmenta Regalia (posthumously published in 1641), Sir Robert Naunton recorded for posterity that Hatton, ‘came thither as a private Gentleman of the Innes of Court in a Mask, and for his activity, and person…taken into [Elizabeth’s] favour’, adding more judiciously that ‘besides the graces of his person, and dancing, [Hatton] had also the adjectaments of a strong and subtill capacity’.⁴⁰ Whatever the case, the legend of this dancing virtuoso continued and for his Entertainment at Althorp (1603) staged for the new Queen and Prince Henry, Jonson brought forward for ‘the first Nights shew…a Morrise of the Clownes thereabout’, with the leading clown (‘No-body’) delivering ‘the Huisher to a Morrise, / (A kind of Masque) whereof good store is / In the Countrey hereabout’. Jonson’s No-Body remains at pains to acknowledge those who ‘come to see, and to be seene, / And though they dance afore the Queene, / Ther’s none of these doth hope to come by / Wealth, to build another Holmby’ – the late Hatton’s estate.⁴¹ Indeed, even in the final decade of Elizabeth’s reign, in 1597, the French emissary André Hurault de Maisse reported back to Henri IV that Elizabeth laid claim to the multiple identities of dancer, choreographer, instructor and spectator:

[the queen] takes great pleasure in dancing and music. She told me…in her youth she danced very well, and composed measures and music, and had played them herself and danced them. She takes such pleasure in it that when her Maids dance she follows the cadence with her head, hand and foot. She rebukes them if they do not dance to her liking, and without doubt she is a mistress of the art, having learnt in the Italian manner to dance high. She told me that they called her ‘the Florentine’.⁴²

Thus, even in the final years of her reign, the lure of the dance did not falter. In 1601, it was noted with reference to the visit of the Italian duke Virginio Orsino that ‘The Queen hath been pleased to have many discourses with him and to dance before him’,⁴³ and at the close of the following year, 1602, in the final months of Elizabeth’s life, Robert Sidney learned from his correspondent, Rowland Whyte, the appeal of the dance had not palled for the sovereign:

Mrs. Mary vpon St. steuens day in the after noone dawnced before the Queen two galliards with one Mr. palmer the admirablest dawncer of this tyme both were much commended by her Maiestie then she dawnced with hym a Corante.⁴⁴

Yet the court’s marked penchant for dancing did not always meet with universal approbation. The Spanish court was informed of Elizabeth’s participation in the Twelfth Night revelling of 1599 in which ‘the head of the Church of England and Ireland was to be seen in her old age dancing three or four galliards’.⁴⁵ Moreover, nor did the English court’s passion for the dance lapse with Elizabeth’s passing. Jonson’s masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618) affirmed that ‘dancing is an exercise / Not only shows the mover’s wit, / But maketh the beholder wise, / As he hath powre to rise to it’.⁴⁶ Nonetheless, the first performance failed to impress the Jacobean court. The chaplain to the Venetian ambassador, Orazio Busino, reported, ‘the King, who is naturally choleric got impatient and shouted aloud: “Why don’t they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance.” Upon this the Marquis of Buckingham, his Majesty’s most favored minion immediately sprang forward cutting a score of lofty and very minute capers’.⁴⁷

Despite these accounts of royal passions and dancing, it remains equally evident that dance’s potential to provoke misgovernment was frequently identified amongst certain sections of the broader population of early modern England. Indeed, in a striking inversion of Titania’s cohesive ‘roundel’ in Shakespeare’s comedy, Puck’s gamesome toying with the ‘mechanicals’ is expressed in terms of unruly dancing measures: ‘I’ll follow you; I’ll lead you about a round, / Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier’ (3.1.102–3). This artform’s ability to inspire both dancer and onlooker to err wildly, even to render themselves ungodly, was repeatedly pointed up in radical Protestant print culture. In more contemporary critical debate promoting the performative engagement of the audience, Jacques Rancière has affirmed, ‘Il nous faut donc un autre théâtre, un théâtre sans spectateurs’: thus a quest must be initiated ‘d’enseigner…[aux] spectateurs les moyens de cesser d’être spectateurs et de devenir agents d’une pratique collective…L’émancipation, elle, commence quand on remet en question l’opposition entre regarder et agir’.⁴⁸ However, it was precisely these possibilities of collapsing performative distinctions (and worse) between participant and audience that exercised early modern critics so heatedly. Philip Stubbes, for example, protested with lively animation, ‘what clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smouching & slabbering one of another, what filthie groping and vncleane handling is not practised euery wher in these dauncings?’.⁴⁹ If this tradition of censure had roots in the medieval centuries, many early modern critics frequently turned to the Church Fathers (notably Augustine) to consolidate the authority of their diatribes.⁵⁰ Citing the dictum of Augustine that melius est enim arare quam saltare (it is better to plough than to dance),⁵¹ hostile voices focused their scorn upon the practice as a disreputable and purposeless distraction in the working day which enfeebled body, mind and soul and caused the masses to profane holy days. Furthermore, dance might (like theatrical performance) prove an occasion for the abhorred custom of cross-dressing:

that you doe vse to attyre men in womans apparrell, whom you doe most commenly call maymarrions…I my selfe haue seene in a may game a troupe, the greater part wherof hath been men, and yet haue they been attyred so like vnto women, that theyr faces being hidde (as they were in deede) a man coulde not discerne them from women. What an horrible abuse was this? what abhominable sinnes might haue here vpon ensued?⁵²

Such tracts affirmed again and again that dancing imperilled the soul by leading to all kinds of vice-ridden behaviours. Many, like Gervase Babington’s A very fruitfull exposition of the Commaundements (1583), emphasized that dancing was among the principal ‘allurements to vncleannesse…The scriptures checke it, the fathers mislike it, the councels haue condemned it, & the proofe of Gods iudgementes vpon it biddeth vs beware’.⁵³ If, in the early years of the reign of Elizabeth’s successor, James VI/I, one Robert Corbett was hauled up before the judges at Bath for being ‘a minstrel [who] did with…three…[others] on Midsomer day now last past during the time of divine seruice in y^e afternoon play vppon theire instruments and maintained dauncing to the evill example of others’,⁵⁴ the vigorous appetite for dancing among Elizabeth’s subjects (and the periodic declaiming of it) was nonetheless widely recognized in the second half of the sixteenth century. Indeed, Stephen Gosson expressed a deep-rooted nostalgia for a time when, like Shakespeare’s youthful Antony,

english men could suffer watching and labor, hunger & thirst, and beare of al stormes w^t hed and shoulders, they vsed slender weapons, went naked, and were good soldiours, they fed vppon rootes and barkes of trees…The men in valure not yeelding to Scithia, the women in courage passing the Amazons.… But the exercise that is nowe among vs, is banqueting playing, pipyng, and dauncing.⁵⁵

In calling for the staging of dances, Shakespeare’s comedy directs attention specifically to the question of summer revelries. On discovering the lovers asleep in the Athenian forest, Theseus concludes, ‘No doubt they rose up early, to observe / The rite of May’ (4.1.131–2). Although such secular festivals as May Day and Midsummer might appear to be linked to precise moments in the calendar, in practice, the celebrations took place broadly during the period of late spring and summer in early modern England. If the acts of Maying celebrated renewal in the natural cycle, there were, it seems, many more associations with revenants, lunes, antics and magical events for Midsummer festivities.⁵⁶ In Christopher Fetherston’s A dialogue agaynst light, lewde, and lasciuious dauncing (1582), the pro-dance voice of Iuvenis affirms, ‘mee thinks it is good that we should daunce, when as we see all thinges so pleasant in May’.⁵⁷ Fetherston’s beleaguered figure adds that the practice may be ‘a meane wherby loue is acquired’, shadowing in part the steps of Elyot, who had submitted that ‘the ioyning of a man and a woman in daunsynge may be signified matrimonye’.⁵⁸ Indeed, going a stage further, Thoinot Arbeau (the French cleric Jehan Tabourot) in his treatise Orchesographie (1589) had affirmed that ‘dancing is practised to reveal whether lovers are in good health and sound of limb’.⁵⁹ Unsurprisingly, such contentions only served to enflame the critics further. In his Dialogue Fetherston’s ‘Minister’ chastises the wayward Iuvenis, insisting that

When as God did institute the firste mariage in paradice, hee did not sende for a pyper or idler, (for they were at that time vnhatched) to play, y^e Adam might daunce, and so please Euah. And is not God as well able to bring marriages to passe without dauncing, as he was then?⁶⁰

Similarly minded, the anonymously published A Treatise of Daunses (1581) railed,

although wee haue not any plane and expresse forbidding, where it should be sayd, Thou shalt not daunse, yet we haue a formall and plaine commandment, Thou shalt not commit adultery, or whoredome: to which the daunses ought to be referred.⁶¹

Certainly, such conclusions might be easily arrived at if early modern court proceedings were consulted. On the eve of the Civil Wars, for example, a Bridgwater magistrate heard that one Henry Pillchorne was summoned before the Bench because

he daunced with his britches downe about his heeles in the house of one Iohn Chute…and did shew his privie members vnto the companie most vncivillie there being then many women present, and said he did daunce Piddecocke bolt vpright, and readie to fight.⁶²

More specifically, Philoponus in Stubbes’ Anatomy of Abuses decries the highly prized ‘rites of May’ in which ‘I haue heard it credibly reported…that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood ouer night, there haue scarsely the third part of them returned home againe vndefiled’.⁶³ Certainly, there was every evidence at the assizes of the time that such times of festivity in the summer months could lead to a great number of exchanges. However, a court in early Stuart Somerset learned that the remnants of Midsummer revelry might last the full course of the year. One Thomas Cornishe was presented who ‘haue lived verie suspiciouslie of incontinent liffe with Ioane Cole’:

and especiallie that on Broomfeeldes las[t] fayer…(the said ffayer being always kept on the feast [or] daie of All Sowles yearelie) he had the carnall knowledge of her bodie against the parsonage wall & was by diverse seene soe comitting the said crime of incontinencie togethers, and on the said ffeast daie at night he had the carnall knowledge of her bodie agains the Sommer pole [in] which made a bell hanging on top of the pole to ring out whereby he was alsoe discovered & by some seene.⁶⁴

Such instances only served to strengthen the dance-phobic attitudes of the critics who in early modern England were often much influenced by the sermons of Calvin in such matters. The Genevan minister had turned his attentions to ‘danses, & semblables dissolutions’, stressing that those partaking ‘ne cerchent qu’à sauter et à dancer comme bestes esgarees’; and Stubbes reminded his Elizabethan readers that ‘Maister Caluin…calleth dauncing the cheefe mischeef of all mischeefs, saying there be such vnchast gestures in it, as are nothing els, but inticements to whordome’.⁶⁵ Certainly, there are abundant examples of episcopal directives during the period forbidding,

anye lords of misrule or sommerr Lordes or ladyes or anye disguised persons or others in christmasse or at may gammes or anye minstrels Morrie dauncers or others at Ryshebearinges or at any other tymes to come unreverentlye into anye churche or chappell or churchyeard and there daunce or playe anye vnseemelye partes.⁶⁶

However, these directives, regularly re-affirmed, seem to have received a decidedly mixed reception across the length and breadth of the land. In 1608, one Catherine Jones of Aston Botterell in Shropshire was reprimanded publicly by the parish’s minister for dancing on the Sabbath. She retorted, ‘I care not for parson…toord [turd] in his teathe; I will dance on the Sabaoth daie in despite of him even at his nose’.⁶⁷ Meanwhile, moving to the southern limits of the realm, to Wimborne in Dorset, one Joan Etherege was presented to the Church court ‘for sittinge in the streets at sermon tim on the Saboth day being the I of aprill & maintaining her prentises to play and when she was gently warned of she abusethe the officers & bad them kisse her asset wise’.⁶⁸

Despite the vigour of such exchanges, it remains the case that any perceived transgression of public order in such matters might be remorselessly punished in early modern England. A couple bringing forth an illegitimate child was ordered by a Jacobean court at Glastonbury to be

both whipped through the Highe Streete…vntill their boddies shalbe both bloody and that there shalbe during the time of their whipping two fiddles playeing before them in regard to make knowne their lewdnes in begetting the said base childe vppon the sabboath day coming from dancing’.⁶⁹

Thus, unsurprisingly, in The Praise of Muisicke (1586), the Oxford academic John Case tendered, ‘I dare not speake of dauncing or theatrall spectacles, least I pull whole swarmes of enimies vpon me’.⁷⁰

But which dance? – ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’

As was indicated at the opening of this discussion, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes very particular invitations to its audiences into the morally chequered world of early modern dance. The exasperated Oberon demands of his consort, ‘How long within this wood intend you stay?’, and is answered by a queen resolute in her pleasures:

Perchance till after Theseus’ wedding-day.

If you will patiently dance in our round

And see our moonlight revels, go with us;

If not, shun me, and I will spare your haunts. (2.1.139–42)

The fairy king thus is offered the opportunity to participate, spectate or to absent himself from the gathering. Here, once again, the invitation to the dance in Shakespeare’s intrigue operates as an opportunity for strategic (in early modern terms, civic, spiritual, erotic) decision-making and for securing competing identities – in short, an alternative and dynamic mode for diegesis for the stage.

Highly exercised by the moral indeterminacies surrounding such capers, Fetherston submitted that ‘it is to be feared, least lasciuious dauncing in time bee taken for a vertue, where as in deede it is but a vice, as it is nowe a dayes vsed’, and thus far this discussion has considered early modern debate surrounding the dancer and the ethical standing (or otherwise) of those who might refrain from such practices.⁷¹ However, turning to Titania’s invitation to ‘see our moonlight revels’, we may be reminded that the status and functions of the spectator were also seen to warrant the serious attention of writers, preachers and the authorities in early modern England. As Rancière has underlined, for those hostile to all forms of spectacle, ‘c’est un mal que d’être spectateur…regarder est le contraire de connaître…[et] c’est le contraire d’agir’,⁷² and such an activity might thus for critical eyes become a falsification of collective experience. Shakespeare’s Oberon for one remains deeply suspicious of the communal gatherings of the ‘round’, or ‘roundel’, which continue to deprive him of the prized Indian Boy and to remind him of his impermanent status in the affections of his queen. Conversely, as was intimated at the outset of this discussion, danceophile voices often sought to defend the positions of performer and onlooker by investing in narratives of transformation and transcendence – that the spectacle of dance might re-script our understanding of human experience. As Margaret M. McGowan argues, for sixteenth-eyes the spectacle of dancing could lift ‘the observer onto another plane of being, transferring him to a marvellous and transfigured realm’.⁷³ Indeed, in Sir John Davies’s ‘Orchestra’ (1598), even a recalcitrant onlooker could be brought to a state of awe:

So subtil and curious was the measure,

With such vnlookt for chaunge in euery straine;

As that Penelope rapt with sweet pleasure,

Weend she beheld the true proportion plaine

Of her owne webb weavd and unweavd again.⁷⁴

In the Timaeus, Plato had conceived of the universe itself as enacting complexly choreographed motions: ‘the dancing movements of [the] gods, their juxtapositions and the back-circlings and advances of their circular courses upon themselves’.⁷⁵ Later in antiquity, Lucian’s dialogue entitled ‘The Dance’ sought to laud the practice, employing the figure Lycinus to win over the cynic Crato.⁷⁶ While the former acknowledges the widespread criticism that dance was bewitching, ‘something unworthy and effeminate’, he subsequently makes the equally telling point that the practice ‘brings not only pleasure but benefit to those who see it; how much culture and instruction it gives; how it imports harmony into the souls of its beholders…the praise that [the dancer] gets from the spectators will be consummate when each of those who behold him recognizes his own traits, or rather sees in the dancer as in a mirror his very self, with his customary feelings and actions’.⁷⁷ Equally importantly, Lycinus also strategically directs attention to the close parentage of dance and eloquence: ‘The chief occupation and the aim of dancing, as I have said, is impersonating, which is cultivated in the same way by the rhetoricians’.⁷⁸ All these emphases upon loss of (self)government, the ethical enrichment of the onlooker and the highly articulate appeal communicated by the dancer’s motions would figure prominently in cultural debate across early modern Europe. Arbeau, for example, affirmed in Orchesographie that ‘la danse est une espece de Rhetorique muette, par laquelle l’Orateur peult, par ses movement, sans parler un seul mot, se faire entendre et persuader aux spectateurs’, and concluded his tract by insisting to his reader, ‘practiquez les dances honnestement, & vous rendez compagnon des planettes qui dancent naturellement’.⁷⁹ However, a generation earlier in early Tudor England, Elyot had argued at length for the presence of

a concinnitie of meuing the foote and body, expressyng some pleasaunt or profitable affectes or motions of the mynde.…there is no passe tyme to be compared to that, wherin may be founden both recreation and meditation of virtue…daunsyng [is said] to be of an excellent vtilitie, comprehending in it wonderfull fygures (whiche the grekes do call Idea, of vertues and noble qualities, and specially of the commodious vertue called prudence, whom Tulli defyneth to be the knowlege of thinges, whiche oughte to be desyred & followed: and also of them whiche ought to be fled from or eschewed.⁸⁰

Furthermore, dance was not only mythologized in tracts and treatises appearing across early modern Europe, it was also envisaged again and again as a material practice disciplining both mind and body in a requisite manner for acceptable engagement in the body politic and, indeed, in the hereafter.⁸¹ If in A Midsummer Night’s Dream dance is considered both in terms of discipline and insubordination, notable voices in sixteenth-century England might be heard firmly advocating such exertions. Peter Martyr, for example, attended to the spiritual training which dancing might facilitate:

This kinde of exercise seemeth to me of its owne nature neither viciouse nor to be prohibited, for as muche as agillitye and nimblenesse of the boddye, is the gifte of God; and if there be added some arte, that the boddye be mooued with decencye, iust pace, & comlines, I see not why it ought to be reprehended’.⁸²

Rather more focused upon questions of social preferment, among a host of different activities, Elizabeth I’s former tutor, Roger Ascham, asserted that the ability ‘to daunce cumlie…be not onelie cumlie and decent, but also verie necessarie, for a courtlie ientleman’.⁸³

Thus, in order to cater to those of rank and those wishing to embark upon a more gentrified condition, dancing schools proliferated across the Tudor realm as they did across its continental neighbours. If, during the reign of Henry VIII, the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives complained that

we nowe in chrystiane countreis haue scholes of daunsynge, how be it that is no wonder, seing also we haue houses of baudry…this newe fasshyon of daunsynge of ours, so vnresonable, and fulle of shakynge and bragging, and vncleanly handlynges, gropynges, and kyssynges

at the end of the century Shakespeare’s own Duke of Bourbon in Henry V shows himself swift to disdain the reputation of ‘English dancing-schools’ where ‘lavoltas high and swift corantos’ are taught (3.4.32–3).⁸⁴ In such a society, it would come as no surprise that ‘the modest Princesse [Penelope] blusht & smil’d’ in Davies’s ‘Orchestra’ when she revealed, ‘My feet, which onely Nature taught to goe, / Did neuer yet the Art of footing know’.⁸⁵ Davies was a product of early modern London’s Inns of Court where, we learn in the Middle Temple it was ‘accounted a shame for an Innes of Court man not to have learned to dance, especially the measures’.⁸⁶ Indeed, for the 1594 Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn the assembled company was instructed ‘to pass the time in dancing: so his Gentlemen-Pensioners and Attendants, very gallantly appointed, in thirty Couples, danced the Old Measures, and their Galliards, and other kind of Dances, revelling until it was very late’.⁸⁷ However, the Elizabethan authorities might be a good deal less appreciative of such activities among the lower orders. In 1582, for example, the directive was issued for the attention of the capital’s youth that ‘no Apprentice should frequent, or go to any Dancing, Fencing, or Musical Schools’.⁸⁸

As we have seen, in Shakespeare’s comedy Titania enquires whether Oberon ‘will patiently dance in our round / And see our moonlight revels’ (2.1.140–1) – in essence, whether he will agree to be subject to the designs of others. The dancing measure of the round, or roundel, looking back to a more inclusive experience of community might initially seem opposed to the decorous, sophisticated world of the court with its capering couples. Interestingly, the censorious voice in Fetherston’s Dialogue grudgingly submits, ‘I can like better of your common daunces, and yet the liking whiche I haue thereof is but a little’.⁸⁹ However, A Midsummer Night’s Dream invites us to attend to the fairy queen calling for these ‘common daunces’: ‘Come, now a roundel and a fairy-song’ (2.2.1). If Titania’s fondness for cohesive ringlets is here starkly contrasted with the more vigorous branles, or brawls, to the fairy king’s taste, both modes were familiar to England’s elite. Indeed, Elizabeth and her court actively sought out the dancing figures of those belonging to, what Puck terms, communities of ‘patches, rude mechanicals’ (3.2.9) – as McGowan underlines, ‘It is tempting to depict the modes of dancing at court and in the country as diametrically opposed…But this picture is oversimplified.…Dance and celebration have always gone hand in hand’.⁹⁰ In the summer of 1591 when the court was welcomed by Lord and Lady Montague to their Sussex residence of Cowdrey, we learn that the queen ‘dined in the priuie walkes in the garden…In the euening the countrie people presented themselues to hir Maiestie in a pleasant daunce with Taber and Pipe. And the Lorde Montague and his Lady among them, to the great pleasure of all the beholders, and gentle applause of hir Maiestie’.⁹¹ Even in the last months of her life, in 1602, the Earl of Worcester might be found recording that

we are frolyke heare in Cowrtt mutche dawncing in the privy chamber of Contrey dawnces before the Queene maiestie whoe is exceeding pleased therwith Irishe tunes are at this tyme most pleasing but in winter lullaby an owld song of Mr Birdes wylbee more in request as I thinke.⁹²

Frances Rust makes the telling point that ‘As she grew older, the Queen became more and more interested in “English” dances as opposed to those of Continental origin’ and draws attention to the Sidney Papers dating from the final years of the Elizabeth’s life where it was reported, ‘Her Majestie is in very good health and comes much abroad these holidayes; for almost every night she is in the presence to see the ladies daunce the old and the new Country dances, with the taber and pipe’.⁹³

Shakespeare’s comedy urges audiences again and again to consider the ways in which dance might enhance, challenge and/or thwart social exchange in a dramatic world subject to a host of contrary motions. In the midst of this densely lyrical text, dance offers an alternative possibility for narrative encounter, conflict and/or resolution as well as proposing quite different perspectives for understanding the development of communal experience. Indeed, Claire Gwendoline Hansen points persuasively to the potential of dance to effect ‘a nonlinear, disruptive, and transformative act’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, highlighting the text’s propensity not only to signal convergence, but also these stage inhabitants’ propensity to err and lose their way – a motif evoked repeatedly (both physically and metaphorically) as the intrigue unfolds: ‘The nine-men’s morris is fill’d up with mud, / And the quaint mazes in the wanton green / For lack of tread are undistinguishable’ (2.1.98–100).⁹⁴

As the mechanicals’ performance is brought to a close, Bottom enquires of his elite audience, ‘Will it please you to see the epilogue, or to hear a Bergomask dance between two of our company?’ and he is answered by his sovereign, ‘come, your Bergomask; let you epilogue alone’ (5.1.344–5, 351–2). Once again we discover movement being privileged above spoken word and, in a now familiar dramatic mode for this play, those both on- and off-stage are thus rendered audiences to the dance.⁹⁵ Moreover, if we are minded, like Shakespeare’s Hippolyta, to dismiss the peasant theatricals (and even the fairy shaming of Bottom) as ‘the silliest stuff that ever I heard’ (5.1.209), it is timely to remember that the early modern ecclesiastical courts were not wholly unfamiliar with the antics of Puck and the clowning mechanicals. Shakespeare’s Theseus endeavours to reconcile the company, submitting ‘The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them’ (5.1.210–1), but again and again the courts of the time might take a different view. It was reported to the Bishop’s Court at Bathampton, Somerset, in 1604, for example, that there was

a man arayed vpp in a Surplice and that vppon his head there weare two thinges, which weare called Asses eares [who] went from house to house this Christmas last, in Bathampton to steale Cob loaues. And y^t amongest other houses he went to Thomas Powles house, & that there he did thrust his head at Thomas Powles wiffe as if he had hornes to bush her

In his defense, the defendant subsequently reported to the company that the ‘wiffe seemed to be in noe sorte displeased therwith a prettye while’.⁹⁶

Concluding thoughts – the invitation to the dance continues

Shakespearean dramaturgy invites us repeatedly to consider figurations of human experience under the terms of dance. The would-be (and oafish) suitor Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, for example, reminds us that he can still ‘cut a caper’ (1.2.108), and at the close of As You Like It, the Duke trusts that the final gathering will end as it begins ‘in true delights’ – and then dancing commands the stage (5.4.189). Even when we retire from comic worlds, we discover that the witches in Macbeth ‘hand in hand, /…Thus do go about, about’ (1.3.33, 35), the beleaguered Antony remembers that at Philippi the novice commander Octavius ‘kept / His sword e’en like a dancer’ (Antony and Cleopatra 3.11.35–6) and the angst-ridden Leontes in The Winter’s Tale confesses, ‘I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances, / But not for joy, not joy’ (1.2.110–11). However, as was appreciated at the beginning of this discussion, A Midsummer Night’s Dream draws more variously upon the resources of dance than any of its counterparts in the Shakespearean canon, and this discussion has sought to evoke how contemporaneous expectations of festivity and social integration, mutuality and (in)subordination, government and human failing, eloquence and agency might serve to account more satisfactorily for the playtext’s multiple invitations to the dance – invitations which all too often appear in abbreviated form, locked in brief quotations in critical discussions or in italicized stage directions at the edges of edited texts.

At the denouement of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the thematic emphasis falls upon a host of different exchanges, restitutions, performances that must be brought to pass through movement. On the eve of Theseus’s wedding day, the fairy king reminds his consort of the rituals to be enacted and the higher powers to be invoked in order to consecrate the forthcoming nuptials:

Come my queen, take hands with me,

And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be.

Now thou and I are new in amity,

And will to-morrow midnight solemnly

Dance in Duke Theseus’ house triumphantly,

And bless it to all fair prosperity. (4.1.84–9)

If this appeal signals reconciliation in the midst of what has been a highly volatile, very diversely populated environment, Oberon also speaks to a regeneration in the converging worlds of monarch, noble and artisan through mutually choreographed measures between the fairy couple. In this way, we may like to see the benevolence of the comic world communicated in word, deed and movement – yet, it must be remembered, such a social vision insists upon a profound sense of priority, hierarchy and, indeed, its limits. Some must remain shamed buffoons or subject to enchantments in order to remain within it.

In this closing movement of Shakespeare’s comedy, Theseus calls for revelries to celebrate his nuptials: ‘Come now; what masques, what dances shall we have [?]’ (5.1.32). Strikingly, this query seems to have been voiced by theatre directors, producers and audiences down the centuries in anticipation of a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One of the earliest recorded accounts of the play’s performance dates from 26 September 1662 when, in the early years of the Restoration, Samuel Pepys attended a production staged by Thomas Killigrew’s company in London:

To the Kings Theatre, where we saw ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, which I have never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure.⁹⁷

This revival for the 1662–63 season was to be its only appearance for Restoration audiences who more frequently sought out urban confusion and urbane raillerie for their comic fare.

Nonetheless, one of the ways in which a version of Shakespeare’s dramatic narrative did later gain access to the stage was through the visual splendour of Purcell’s opera, The Fairy Queen (1692), produced by Thomas Betterton at Dorset Garden Theatre.⁹⁸ Here, even the introductory music included four dances. At its opening, Titania declares, ‘Now we glide from our abodes, / To Sing, and Revel in these Woods’⁹⁹ and, in due course, the production offered a broad selection of interventions in song and in dance: for example, ‘a Fairy Dance’, ‘A Dance of the Followers of Night’, ‘A Dance of Hay-Makers’, ‘A Dance of the Four Seasons’. This most ornate production (including ‘a Prospect of Grotto’s, Arbors, and Delightful Walks’ and ‘a great Wood…Two great Dragons make a Bridge over the River’) clearly met with greater approval in some quarters than the dramatized version that Pepys had witnessed in the opening years of Restoration. The Gentlemen’s Journal duly recorded, ‘The Drama is originally Shakespears, the Music and Decorations are extraordinary. I have heard the Dances commended, and without doubt the whole is very entertaining’.¹⁰⁰

Interestingly, the drawing together of adaptations of Shakespeare’s intrigue with the arts of music and dance continued to figure prominently in any staged version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for well over a century thereafter. In the eighteenth century, there was a rendering of the mechanicals’ ‘most lamentable comedy’ (1.2.11) by Richard Leveridge (himself playing both ‘Prologue’ and ‘Pyramus’) as The Comic Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe (1716). This afterpiece, presented for London audiences at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, sought to burlesque ‘the exalted performances’ of Italian opera (‘high Recitative and buskin airs’) accompanied by periodic interventions from Mr. Semibreve (‘If this won’t fetch a Subscription, I’ll never pretend to compose Opera, or Mask again, while I live’¹⁰¹), Mr. Crotchet and Mr. Gamut. The music for the staging has since been lost, but the tantalizing query (echoing that of Bottom’s) from Semibreve indicates that the artform still might find its place on the stage: ‘Will it please you to have the Epilogue, or a Dance?’.¹⁰² The Comic Masque clearly enjoyed a good measure of success and continued to be warmly received in Georgian London.

Choosing to stress the interventions of music and, more centrally on this occasion, of dance to meet the prompts signalled in Shakespeare’s text, Garrick’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane offered in the mid-century The Fairies (1755) by Christopher Smith (the Younger). This production eschewed the broad comedy of the Comick Masque, yet, as R. A. Foakes underlined, ‘retained fewer than 600 lines of the original text, omitted all characters but the lovers and fairies’.¹⁰³ In these years, Garrick was working closely in London with the dancer-choreographer-dance theorist Jean-Georges Noverre, whose work continued to reflect upon the narrative functions that dance might hold for the stage.¹⁰⁴ Moreover, the impressario’s engagement with adaptations of Shakespeare’s text continued into the next decade when he staged a poorly received production in 1763. In the days that followed the unsuccessful première, George Colman confected a shorter spectacle entitled A Fairy Tale in Two Acts. Taken from Shakespeare. This concluded with ‘A Dance of Fairies’ that had also been present in the original. If it was in the second half of the eighteenth century that complete dance productions of Shakespearean plays began to be staged, as that century yielded to a new generation of theatre producers in the nineteenth, more interest came to be invested in reclaiming Shakespeare’s original texts for the stage. In 1816, for example, the dramatist Frederick Reynolds offered an operatic version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with music by Henry Rowley Bishop, but this did not meet with approval. In 1840, if a Covent Garden production by Madame Lucia Vestris promoted a more faithful version of the source text, as Foakes stressed, ‘it still treated [the play] largely as an operatic spectacular, with antiquarian settings, crowds of female fairies dressed in white gauze in the romantic tradition of ballet’.¹⁰⁵ Three years later, the 17-year-old Mendelssohn would compose his overture for Shakespeare’s comedy and, in later life, at the age of 34 would complete the incidental music which would continue to serve as the main inspiration down the decades for choreographers at both home and abroad.

By the mid-century, Charles Kean’s production of Shakespeare’s comedy catered, as Trevor R. Griffiths points out, to the tastes of the time for opulent spectacle: ‘In return for more than 40 per cent of Shakespeare’s text that Kean omitted, he provided a wealth of dances and tableaux conceived on a monumental scale’.¹⁰⁶ In the second half of the century, the narrative of Shakespeare’s comedy attracted choreographers internationally. Marius Petipa created a version for the Imperial Russian Ballet at St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Theatre set to Mendelssohn’s overture, and this production was revised at the turn of the century, in 1906, by Mikhail Fokine for the city’s Maryinsky School in which Nijinsky danced the role of the principal elf.¹⁰⁷ Unfortunately, both versions have since been lost. However, Tyrone Guthrie’s 1937 production of Shakespeare’s comedy at London’s Old Vic (now most frequently celebrated for images of Vivien Leigh as Titania) included dance interludes set to Mendelssohn’s music and choreographed by Ninette de Valois. Directly after the Second World War, the Sadler’s Wells company (both opera and ballet companies) offered yet another multi-medial (rather than spoken text-centred) performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, drawing upon Purcell’s music from The Fairy Queen supplemented by dances choreographed by Frederick Ashton.¹⁰⁸ The latter also created a dance interlude set to Mendelssohn’s music for a 1954 production of the play again at the Old Vic.

During the post-war period, the appeal of setting Shakespeare’s comedy for dance, notably the classical ballet, was most pronounced in the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears collaborated on the libretto for an operatic version of Shakespeare’s comedy at Aldeburgh, drawing on approximately half of the original text. If the production’s Oberon discovers a sleeping ‘Tytania, sometime of the night, / Lull’d in these flowers, with dances and delight’, dance is later allowed to command the stage momentarily in the spectacle when a ‘Bergomask’ is called for: ‘The other Rustics come in and arrange themselves for the dance. They dance. Midnight sounds. The rustics stop dancing, bow deeply to the Duke. Hippolyta and the court, and leave’.¹⁰⁹ Nonetheless, in terms of fully fledged classical ballet adaptation, the French choreographer George Ballanchine created his first full-length ballet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for the New York City Ballet in 1962, devoting its second act wholly and, for some critics, controversially to Theseus and Hippolyta’s nuptial celebrations. Two years later, in 1964, Ashton created a one-act ballet The Dream for the Royal Ballet in London. Both productions drew upon Mendelssohn’s music and Ashton’s Dream was conceived as one element in a billing of three – namely, a revival of the company’s Hamlet ballet and another new ballet created by Kenneth MacMillan and inspired by the Sonnets to mark the Royal Ballet’s celebration of the Shakespeare quatercentenary. While Rudolf Nureyev danced in the first two elements, the Royal Ballet promoted the young dancers Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell to interpret the roles of Titania and Oberon.

In the next decade, the American choreographer Jon Neumeier created Le Songe d’une nuit d’été (1977) for the Ballet de Hambourg. Interestingly, then dancing in the German company, Jean-Christophe Maillot would go on later as a choreographer himself to create his own ballet Le Songe for Les Ballets de Monte Carlo in 2005, drawing dynamically upon music from Mendelssohn, but also the percussive, and sometimes minimalist, scores by Daniel Teruggi and Bertrand Maillot. Here, Shakespeare’s narrative is reconfigured imaginatively into three soundscapes divided amongst the Athenian lovers, the fairy kingdom and the ‘artisans’.¹¹⁰ Among other innovative and challenging productions of Shakespeare’s comedy, Sukanta Chaudhuri draws attention to one staged in 1990 in ‘violence-torn Lebanon’ where ‘a dance version [was staged] in a cedar forest outside Beirut’.¹¹¹ For his own Shakespeare-inspired ballets, the dancer/impresario Maurice Béjart had created Le Songe d’une nuit d’hiver for his company Les Ballets romantiques in 1953 at the Théâtre de l’Étoile, Paris – this production was choreographed to the music of Chopin, rather than that of Mendelssohn.¹¹² Nonetheless, perhaps most strikingly, in his memoirs Béjart recalled learning about the distinguished performance of one of the Argentinian dancers in his company who in his youth in Buenos Aires had danced Puck in an open-air performance of Le Songe d’une nuit d’été:

[il fut] projeté sur scène en Tarzan au bout d’une liane. A la première, il s’électrocuta: la liane le dépose sur un fil electrique à nu et il continue de jouer sans se rendre compte de rien; il ne s’évanouira qu’à la fin de la scène, en coulisses, terriblement déçu parce que son père était dans la salle ! Et trois jours d’hôpital…¹¹³

Any account of the invitation of Shakespeare’s comedy to stage dance can never be exhaustive, but it remains remarkable how eagerly this invitation has been responded to down the centuries.

This discussion began with evocations of elite consumption of Elizabethan fairy entertainments and it is perhaps fitting that it should end in this way. Such spectacles were many and various as Elizabeth’s reign unfolded. Thomas Churchyard, for example, recalled that as an amusing entertainment for Elizabeth’s departure from Norwich in the summer of 1578 he arranged that

seauen Boyes of twelue, should passe through a hedge from the place of oure abode (which was gallantly trimmed) and deliuer seauen speeches,…dressed like Nimphes of the water…and to daunce (as neere as could be ymagined) like the Phayries. Their attire, and coming so strangely out, I know made the Queenes highnesse smyle and laugh withal.¹¹⁴

In addition, this discussion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has sought to demonstrate that the early modern world of the dance was characterized by vehement and often contrary motions of opinion – and all might find their response in Shakespeare’s dramatic narrative. To appreciate the breadth of opinion in the vigorous early modern debating of dance, the Elizabethan court’s delight, Elyot’s evocation of the natural cycles of experience embedded within dancing measures, or Arbeau’s Platonic allusiveness to the figurations of the universe, for example, must be counterpointed by the critical voices of Stubbes, who protested that ‘Euery leap or skip in dance, is a leap toward hel’, or that of Fetherston, who contended that ‘when as dauncinge was vsed, then men & women came abrode, and now they creep into corners, either to filtch or els to play the naughtipackes’.¹¹⁵

If the early modern cultural discourse of dance differed markedly in response to the allegiances of writer and the targeted readership as the early modern period unfolded, the irrepressibly passionate nature of the interventions in this debate in both word and deed remained evident for everyone to witness – as the Archdeacon’s Court in county of Kent was forced to acknowledge in 1580:

We present Elizabeth Brett wydowe an olde woman for keeping of naughty Rewle in her howse[.] continually she hath in her howse one of her daughters[,] whose name is Ioane wyllowes[,] a wydowe that sheweth her self to be of an yll Couersatyon[.] she hath ben seen vppon her mothers bed with Edward mylls the one in the others armes & the doors shut to them & made fast on the other syde, & no bodye in the howse to do y^t but her mother, And she hath also one christofer fforeman that doth resorte to her & hath done all this Sommer whome she sayth is her husband & is there sometimes to or three weekes together & lyeth in the howse susspycyouslye [together] but sheweth no lykelyhode of marryage…This olde woman doth also retayne Thomas mylles the pyper & Edward mylls the fydler in her howse, And if there by anye daunsynge in the Towne eyther by day or nighte the olde woman will be the first that shall begyn & the last that will leave. There were in our towne the weeke before whitesondaye a company of souldyers that were goyinge over the sea, whereof there were vj or vij of them that ran out of their hostes howse one eveninge starke naked in to the Streate having this mylls & his sonne to pype & to fyddle & there daunsinge, this oulde woman & her daughter Ioane wyllowes without all shame wente & daunsed wyth them.¹¹⁶

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

The author would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to my colleagues Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin and Florence March for their inspiring enthusiasm for this field of research.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was completed under the auspices of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellowship (2016–18) at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’Age Classique et les Lumières, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France (MSCA no. 702104).