Jig (theatre)

Characters from various plays of this era (1662)

In theatres, beginning in Elizabethan London, a jig was a short comic drama that immediately followed a full-length play. This phenomenon added an additional comic or light-hearted offering at the end of a performance. A jig might include songs sung to popular tunes of the day, and it might feature dance, stage fighting, cross-dressing, disguisings, asides, masks, and elements of pantomime.

These short comic dramas are referred to by historians as stage jigs, dramatic jigs, or Elizabethan jigs.[1] The term, jig, at the same time maintained its common definition, which refers to a type of dance or music. In the various primary sources the term appears with a number of different spellings: jigg, jigge, gig, gigg, gigge, gigue, jigue, jeg, jegg,[2] and jygge.[3]

Richard Tarleton
  1. ^ Baskervill 2012
  2. ^ Clegg 2014, p. 55
  3. ^ Thurston Dart (2001). "jigg". Grove Music Online (8th ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0.