Just had to share this fascinating article from History Today, on the history of sexually-explicit ‘jigs’ on the Elizabethan, Restoration and Jacobean stage: http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=33819&amid=30301516
Makes you wonder what this form of song / dance/ music / pantomime had on jigs in the Irish tradition, such as Cailleach an Airgid, etc.
Cheers,
Mark
is it bad or good that im laughing at some of those five hundred years later?
Henry’s court songbook contains several part-songs which naturally lend themselves to being acted out, while his daughter Elizabeth I was said to have danced a galliard every morning to keep herself fit.
I can just imagine the DVD now. “Jig-Bo: Dance your want to health and fitness. Only minutes each morning for a tighter tummy and firmer buns. Princess Bess shows you how!”
It’s always interesting to identify tunes from this era and genre that are still in circulation. In the very early English farcical comedy “Gammer Gurton’s Needle” (1553), there’s a musical interlude on the song “I Cannot Eate but Lyttle Meat”. The tune pops up nowadays in ITM as “The Old Stage” slide. When I first stumbled across the Patrick Street setting on “Made in Cork”, I nearly fell off my chair.
http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/9835
There’s also the New York Irish-American stage jig, which isn’t a jig at all. The best known of these is probably “Kitty O’Shea’s Champion Jig”, which is preserved in the Ryan’s/Cole’s collection. It’s a “sand jig” or soft shoe, danced on a sanded stage; [u]thesession[/u] has it as a procrustean barndance. Good article about it here:
And then there’s The Boarding School, or the Sham Captain, a 1733 operetta. Hinted in the title (if you know the reputation of English schools of this century and the next), is the fact that the operetta dealt largely with the subject of flagellation. It was written and composed by one Charles Coffey (1700-1745), a real-life schoolmaster from Dublin who became a London impressario. Coffey is better known for another opera entitled The Begger’s Wedding.
A sample verse of one song:
While she is stripping to get a good whipping
I’ll away, dance and play,
Yes I will, that I will;
While she is stripping to get a good whipping,
I’ll go and romp with the girls and the boys, etc.
It is unknown whether the actual whipping was performed nightly on stage.
The operetta was staged by the king’s theatre company at the celebrated Drury Lane Theatre in London.
I see Shakespeare’s clown Will Kemp gets another mention, so we may as well add Will Kemp’s Jig to the tally.
While she is stripping to get a good whipping
I’ll away, dance and play,
Yes I will, that I will;
While she is stripping to get a good whipping,
I’ll go and romp with the girls and the boys, etc.
Oh my. Well, they certainly don’t make them like that any more - theater is so tame these days. Perhaps a Riverdan$e-style revival would be the Next Thing, complete with step-dancing gimps, a flagellant’s chorus, and mad trad musos flogging their instruments.
Then again, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, perhaps that is a revival for which the world is not yet prepared. 
This is excellent, Malanstevenson, and thanks for posting it! I particularly like the idea of Henry VIII got up like Robin Hood…
That was the young Henry. The old Henry had to play Friar Tuck.
“I can just imagine the DVD now”
Unfortunately you don’t have to imagine, it’s been done: