Pleasures and Pastimes in Tudor England by Alison Sim

Author:Alison Sim
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Pleasures & Pastimes
ISBN: 9780752475783
Publisher: History Press (Perseus)
Published: 2011-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

Dancing and Music

Dancing and music were important in the social lives of the sixteenth-century English. A knowledge of dancing in particular was essential. It didn’t matter whether you were poor or rich, male or female; if you were going to have a good social life, you needed to be able to dance. Most social occasions included dancing. Great court entertainments could be followed by literally hours of it. George Cavendish describes an occasion in the reign of Henry VIII when the dancing went on ‘from five of the clock until two or three after midnight’.1 Much smaller private celebrations so frequently included music and dancing that the high chamber, the most important room in the house, was often decorated with themes appropriate to both.2

Dance manuals of the time emphasise the social role of dance. Thoinot Arbeau, a Canon of Langres in France, wrote such a manual. It is called Orchesography and was first published in 1589. It takes the form of a dialogue between Arbeau and a young person called Capriol who wishes to learn to dance. The reason Capriol has come to Arbeau is because he has found his social life to be lacking. ‘I much enjoyed fencing and tennis and this placed me upon friendly terms with young men. But, without a knowledge of dancing, I could not please the damsels upon whom, it seems to me, the entire reputation of an eligible young man depends.’3

This explains the great popularity of dancing, as it was the way that the sexes were allowed to meet one another. People in the sixteenth century were certainly not coy about sex and even Puritan writers of the time, like the Elizabethan Thomas Becon, openly mentioned the subject in the books they printed. Young unmarried girls, especially better-off ones, were expected to have no experience of it and they were usually kept away from temptation. There were, of course, illegitimate births in the Tudor period, as at all times in history, but the sexual behaviour of Tudors was not quite as free as modern people often think. Young men wishing to socialise with prospective wives could only easily do so through dancing. Dancing not only allowed them to show off their grace and good health, but it also allowed them to get physically close to someone of the opposite sex in a way that good manners simply did not permit otherwise. Arbeau puts it this way:

Dancing is practised to reveal whether lovers are in good health and sound of limb, after which they are permitted to kiss their mistresses in order that they may touch and savour one another, thus to ascertain if they are shapely or emit an unpleasant odour as of bad meat.4

The courting aspect of dance is very clear in the sixteenth century. Arbeau himself describes a dance called the gavotte, which is basically a kissing game. Fabritio Caroso, a well-known Italian dancing master who wrote two books on dancing, Il Ballerino and Nobilita di Dame, gives several of his

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.