The Jig

The public stage in London, with its professional companies of actors, does not exhaust the possibilities of dramatic material for suits for libel in the Court of Star Chamber during Shakespeare's lifetime. There are two further types of dramatic literature, which are hardly mentioned in histories of what might be called official literature, but which were widely practised, both in the provinces and in London, and from time to time emerged from their obscurity to exercise the minds of the Judges in that Court, and so to come upon record. The Jig and the May Game, indeed, in one way or another, were evidently a source of continual trouble to the officers of government and of justice throughout the Tudor period.

The Jig was a kind of entertainment whose history is at least as obscure as that of the May Game, but which is better known in a general way because of its close relation to the Elizabethan stage in London and to the literary drama. All readers of Shakespeare know, for example, how the play of Twelfth Night ends with a song sung by the Clown or jester, Feste, and how this song, probably accompanied by a dance, is taken as an example of the Jig which frequently followed a play as an after-piece on the public stage, just as in later centuries a pantomime came after the serious play to conclude the evening's entertainment.