Singing Simpkin and Other Bawdy Jigs: Musical Comedy on the Shakespearean Stage, Scripts, Music and Context ed. by Roger Clegg, Lucie Skeaping (review)

That dramatic performances in the Early Modern period were often, if not always, succeeded by some form of jig is well-known to every student. But in searching for information the industrious scholar is generally driven back to C.R. Baskerville’s 1929 study – surely one of the very few works of its period still to be regularly cited. Roger Clegg and Lucie Skeaping give new life and presence to this elusive genre in their study which, after a detailed introduction that synthesizes recently published scholarship, offers performance texts of nine surviving jigs.

As the Introduction makes abundantly clear, the jig is a genre that can only be loosely defined. It is “a meeting point of various branches of song, dance, slapstick, sword-play, satire, word-play and popular comedy, most characteristically taking the form of short musical dramas, and featuring ebullient stock characters and dialogue feathered with double entendre” (12). Furthermore, jigs were not necessarily confined to the London stage – two of the jigs printed here survive only in court records, as evidence in libel suits brought by those who felt they had been defamed in impromptu performances of tales adapted to particular local circumstances. Nor, as is often assumed, did jigs disappear with the closing of the theatres – the last in date of those printed here, The Cheaters Cheated, comes from 1660–63, and imitated pre-Commonwealth jigs. The jig then gave way to the afterpieces that were part of theatre history into the twentieth century.

All the texts printed here have been published before, although generally in quite obscure places. What makes the book particularly useful is the editors’ detailed commentary on the origins and analogues of the texts and especially, their suggestions of music and dances that might be used in performance. The editors are realistic in not claiming that they offer scripts for an unachievably authentic performance. Instead they suit words to contemporary tunes, and make suggestions about dramatic business, and about the kinds of dance that the jigs might have contained, together with useful comments on the likely mode of performance. No-one would make enormous claims for the sophistication of these texts which generally offer variations on familiar folk-tale and jest-book narratives, but this engaging edition allows one to imagine how these dramatic afterpieces might have functioned both on stage, and in Early Modern society more generally.