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PREFACE |
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jig has received scanty and inadequate treatment from historians of the English drama. A number of other genuine jigs are extant. First in importance is that preserved in MS. Rawlinson Poet. 185 under the title of "A proper new ballett, intituled Rowland's god-sonne. To the tune of Loth to departed There is a reference to this jig in the prologue to Nashe's play Summer's Last Will^ and a two-part moralization was registered on April 28 and 29, 15921. Almost as interesting is an unnamed jig preserved among the Henslowe papers at Dulwich College, which Collier misled scholars into believing to be a fragment of a play by Christopher Marlowe2. Still other jigs occur among the Roxburghe Ba//ads3> in Robert Cox's drolls4, and, from lost originals, in German translations5. By 1590 jigs were thoroughly established in London theatres as the usual conclusions to plays. In his Pierce Penilesse (1592) Thomas Nashe sneered at
the queint comedians of our time, That when their Play is donne do fal to ryme6;
and he threatened Gabriel Harvey that "Comedie vpon Comedie he shall haue, a Morall, a Historie, a Tragedie, or what hee will...with a Iigge at the latter ende in English Hexameters of O neighbour Gabriell, and his wooing of Kate Cotton1 " Comparatively few jigs were registered at
others accept Collier's definition and his specimen as genuine. W. W. Greg {Henslowe's Diary, 11, 189) says that "no undoubtedly genuine specimen [of a jig] is extant."
1 Andrew Clark's Shir burn Ballads, p. 354; Herrig's Archiv, 1904, cxiv, 326 ff.; R. B. McKerrow's Nashe, in, 235; Arber's Transcript of the Stationers' Registers, 11, 609 f.
2 Collier's Alleyn Papers, pp. 8-11; G. F. Warner's Catalogue of the MSS. and Muniments of Alleyn's College at Dulwich, pp. 60 f.; A. Dyce's Marlowe, Appendix.
3 E.g. 1, 125, 201, 249.
4 Actaeon and Diana, etc., 1656.
6 E.g. "Roland und Margareth, Ein Lied, von Englischen Comedi-anten albie gemacht" (F. M. Boehme's Altdeutsches Liederbuch, 1877, pp. 174 ff.), which appears to be a translation of the "gigge betwene Rowland and the Sexton" that was licensed on December 16, 1 591.
6 R. B. McKerrow's Nashe, 1, 244. 7 Ibid, in, 114. |
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