ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a somewhat snobbish critic of the drama, deplored Polonius’s taste: ‘He’s for a jig or a tale of bawdry’, he scoffs, and later, accused of obscenity, he deprecates himself ironically as ‘your only jig-maker’. A jig was an afterpiece, not a real play at all, and contained smut, or worse. And Hamlet was not the only one who claimed superiority: Christopher Marlowe promised to lead his audiences away from … jigging veins of rhyming mother wits And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay. Lewdness, rhymes and clownage. But one German visitor to England, Thomas Platter, having seen a performance of Julius Caesar at the Globe Theatre in 1599, wrote of the jig which followed with notable warmth: ‘They danced, according to their custom, exceedingly gracefully: two attired in men’s clothes and two in women’s performed wonderfully with one another’.
