Tag Archives: Entr’acte Dances

Scenery for Dancing on the Early 18th-Century London Stage

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Visiting the theatre in early eighteenth-century London was a very different experience from that of the theatre-goer in the twenty-first century. There were very few theatres and all were small and intimate by modern standards. The entertainment offered was likely to include a variety of genres, which today we would expect to be rigidly separated by venue. On a single evening in any one theatre, the playgoer might see a mainpiece tragedy or comedy, followed by an afterpiece which could be a farce, a masque with singing or a pantomime with dancing. Between the acts of the first as well as before and sometimes after the second there would be music, dancing and occasional speciality acts. There was a great deal of dancing on the London stage during the early eighteenth century. What was the scenic context for this dancing? Were the danced afterpieces provided with new scenery, suitable to their action, or could and did they draw on the theatre’s stock scenery? Were the entr’acte dances performed against whatever scenery was in place for the play they interrupted? How might the scenery have affected playgoers’ perceptions of the choreographies they saw?

Afterpieces

The first wholly danced afterpiece on the London stage was John Weaver’s The Loves of Mars and Venus, performed at Drury Lane on 2 March 1717. Weaver published a detailed scenario to accompany performances which tells us that The Loves of Mars and Venus has six scenes, most of which have a specific location. Scene one, which introduces Mars, is set in ‘A Camp’. In scene two, ‘the Scene opens and discovers Venus in her Dressing-Room at her Toilet’, while scene three ‘opens to Vulcan’s Shop’. Mars and Venus meet for a love tryst in scene four in ‘A Garden’, after which scene five returns to Vulcan’s shop. The setting for scene six is unspecified, but it may return to the garden of scene three, or perhaps an interior as Mars and Venus are described as ‘sitting on a Couch’. The subsequent descent of several gods and goddesses to resolve the quarrel between Vulcan, his wife and her lover, would not have looked any less surprising in either an interior or exterior location.

All of these scenes, with the exception of Vulcan’s shop, are recognisably from Drury Lane’s stock. The shop may have used a generic interior with suitable freestanding props, including Vulcan’s anvil, a forge and a ‘Grindlestone’. Colley Cibber, in his Apology published in 1740, indicated the use of existing scenery when he wrote of Weaver’s The Loves of Mars and Venus that ‘from our Distrust of its Reception, we durst not venture to decorate it, with an extraordinary Expence of Scenes, or Habits’. The familiarity of the scenery may have helped with the success of the ballet, countering its ‘Design so entirely novel and foreign’ as Weaver himself put it.

A few years later, the pantomime Harlequin Doctor Faustus was advertised with the enticement ‘All the Scenes, Machines, Habits and other Decorations being entirely New’ when it was first performed at Drury Lane on 26 November 1723. The afterpiece, which had a great deal of serious as well as grotesque dancing, included such locations as ‘The Doctor’s Study’, ‘The Street’ and ‘A Room in the Doctor’s House’, all of which sound suspiciously like stock scenery which must have domesticated the action for audiences who would have recognised the scenes from use in mainpiece plays. However, the concluding ‘Grand Masque of the Heathen Deities’ (a divertissement of serious dancing) was provided with ‘A Poetical Heaven. The Prospect terminating in plain Clouds’. Finally ‘the Cloud that finishes the Prospect flies up’ to reveal ‘Diana standing in a fix’d Posture on an Altitude form’d by Clouds, the Moon transparent over her Head in an Azure Sky, tinctur’d with little Stars’. The scene must have surprised and charmed, perhaps even awed, audiences before Hester Booth as Diana danced a step.

Entr’acte Dances

The scenic context for entr’acte dances must have been quite different. On 11 April 1728, The Provok’d Husband was performed at Drury Lane for the benefit of Theophilus Cibber and his wife. The play, adapted and completed by the actor’s father Colley Cibber from Sir John Vanbrugh’s unfinished A Journey to London, had proved extremely successful following its first performance on 10 January 1728. Its initial run of 28 performances was cut short only by the overwhelming popularity of The Beggar’s Opera, which opened at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 29 January. The 11 April performance of The Provok’d Husband was the first for which entr’acte dances were billed in detail. Here is the advertisement in the Daily Post for 11 April 1728:

The information about the dancing allows us to explore the scenes the dances may have been performed against.

Much of the action in The Provok’d Husband is set in either ‘Lord Townly’s House’ or ‘Mrs Motherly’s House’, that is in rooms within their houses, they being two of the principal characters. Presumably these locations were distinguished from one another by differences in the wings and shutters (which may have been minimal) and by onstage props placed within the scenic stage area. So, the Harlequins duet could have been performed either in front of the scene representing ‘Lord Townly’s Apartment’ (for act one) or before ‘Mrs Motherly’s House’ (the scene for act two). Either scene would have placed a grotesque dance against an interior scene which was intended to remind audiences of a room familiar to them from either their own town houses or those of their family, friends or neighbours. The dance given in this performance against such a backdrop might have suggested the idea of an entertainment, more specifically a masquerade ball, thus anticipating a later scene in the play.

The use of scenes behind dances, and the relationship between the two, is shown by the engravings in Gregorio Lambranzi’s Neue und curieuse Theatralische Tantz-Schul published in Nuremberg in 1716. Although it was printed in one of the German states and was the work of a Venetian dancing master, Lambranzi’s book shows many parallels with what we know of entr’acte dancing in London at this period, including the titles and themes of many of the dances he illustrates. The stage sets in the engravings are formed of wings and shutters with a variety of interior and exterior scenes. The backdrop to the duet of male and female Harlequins, seems to be decorative rather than realistic although it could represent an interior hung with tapestries.

Other engravings apparently show rooms in houses, and not all of these are associated with the serious dances portrayed by Lambranzi.

Of course, it may have been standard practice in London’s theatres to close the downstage set of shutters behind the entr’acte dancers, providing them with a neutral backdrop against which to perform. Such an effect can be seen in a painting by Marcellus Laroon the younger.

The scene has many fanciful touches and, although it does seem to show dancers on stage, it cannot be securely linked to any of London’s theatres. Nevertheless, it provides a glimpse of how entr’acte dances may have been presented. Decorative but otherwise neutral scenes can also be seen in some of Lambranzi’s engravings.

The effect is to present the dancers in their own space, focussing attention directly on them and distancing them and their choreography from the action of the play which they interrupt.

The dances ‘In the Masquerade Scene’ within The Provok’d Husband as well as that given at the ‘End of the Play’ on 11 April 1728 raise some more questions. The masquerade, a key part of the play’s dénouement, takes place in act five. The scene is ‘another Apartment’ in Lord Townly’s house and several stock masquerade characters are mentioned, including a ‘Shepherdess’, a ‘Nun’ and a ‘running Footman’. The action calls for ‘A Dance of Masks … in various Characters’ and it is here that the Polonese, probably a Polonaise by dancers who perhaps wore recognisably ‘Polish’ costumes, must have been performed as part of the play, against the wings and shutters in place for this scene. The other performers in the ‘Dance of Masks’ may have been actors rather than the company’s dancers. The Coquette Shepherdess, performed at the end of play, may have been a tiny scene as well as a dance. Could it also have been a mute commentary on the play’s moral as demonstrated by Lady Townly ‘Immoderate in her Pursuit of Pleasures’ at the beginning who has become a ‘Wife Reform’d’ by the end?

Later in the season, for a performance on 3 May 1728, the entr’acte dances were again billed in detail for a benefit with The Provok’d Husband as the mainpiece, this time for Mrs Brett and Miss Lindar. The differences between the two bills are interesting. Here is the advertisement from the Daily Post for 3 May 1728.

They were almost all inserted in different places from those of 11 April, and there was no mention of dancing in the ‘Masquerade Scene’. Acts three and four of The Provok’d Husband were also both set in interiors. The omission of any mention of the dance in the masquerade scene suggests that this was either left out or, perhaps, performed by the actors. This would have favoured the entr’acte dances performed elsewhere on the bill. The fact that any of them could plausibly have formed part of a ‘Dance of Masks … in various Characters’ may have affected its staging at this performance.

The differences between the bills of 11 April and 3 May make it obvious that entr’acte dances were not usually meant to relate to the action of the play. The performance histories of the respective dances given at the end of act one in each performance underline this. On 11 April, there was a Harlequins duet by two of Drury Lane’s youngest dancers, Master Lally and Miss Brett, whereas on 3 May Miss Brett danced a solo Saraband. Apart from the fact that the Harlequins duet was a comic (if not a grotesque) dance and the solo Saraband belonged to the serious genre, the former probably had its origin in a very different context. It may well have come from the pantomime Harlequin Happy and Poor Pierrot Married, which had been first performed at Drury Lane on 11 March ‘With new Scenes and proper Decorations’. Master Lally and Miss Brett had been billed as ‘Children of Love representing two Harlequins’ and their duet seems to have been so popular that it quickly became an entr’acte dance to allow for more frequent performances. During the 1727-28 season, the two youngsters also danced Harlequins at the end of act three of Farquhar’s  The Recruiting Officer (7 May 1728) and on the same bill as both Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (8 April 1728) and Macbeth (Davenant’s version, 8 May 1728). Miss Brett performed her Saraband once in 1727-28.

Conclusion

The advertisements for danced afterpieces, as well as other evidence, show that these made use of stock scenery but could also be provided with new and lavish individual scenes when such expense could be justified. There is insufficient evidence to allow a definitive answer to the question about the background scenery for entr’acte dances. Were they danced before the scenes in place for the mainpiece play or before decorative but neutral shutters? We don’t know. Entr’acte dances were such an integral part of the theatrical bill, and audiences were so familiar with the conventions surrounding them, that the backdrops must rarely have attracted notice. Audiences undoubtedly picked up the subtext provided by choreography and the dancers, quite independently of the scenes that framed them. Given that dancing in London’s theatres mostly took place on the forestage, whatever was behind them dancers had in any case stepped out of the frame provided by the proscenium arch into a space shared with their audience.

This post was originally a conference paper, given several years ago but never published, which I have both revised and amended.

Reading List

John Weaver, The Loves of Mars and Venus (London, 1717)

Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Mineola, NY, 2000)

An Exact Description of the Two Fam’d Entertainments of Harlequin Doctor Faustus (London: [1724])

Colley Cibber, The Provok’d Husband (London, 1728)

Gregorio Lambranzi, Neue und curieuse Theatralische Tantz-Schul (Nurnberg: Johan Jacob Wolrab, [1716]). I use the modern English translation of this work, New and Curious School of Theatrical Dancing, transl. Derra de Moroda (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002)

The Music Party. Paintings, Drawings & Prints by Marcellus Laroon (1679-1772), comp. James Miller [London?, 2011]

Moira Goff, The Incomparable Hester Santlow (Aldershot, 2007)

Season of 1725-1726: An Epilogue

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Although I mentioned the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in my first post on the 1725-1726 season and occasionally referred to it subsequently, I didn’t really include it in my survey of dancing in London’s theatres.

The Little Theatre was built late in 1720 on a site immediately beside where the Theatre Royal, Haymarket now stands. So far as we know, it was unlicensed, although this did not prevent it from offering short seasons of drama and other entertainments by foreign and amateur companies of players. In three of the five seasons between its opening and the 1725-1726 season, the Little Theatre provided a venue for companies of French comedians who offered an extensive repertoire of commedia dell’arte pieces alongside comedies by Molière and, in 1721-1722, tragedies by Corneille and Racine. In the first season of 1721-1722, the company included Francisque Moylin as Arlequin and Monsieur Roger as Pierrot. Roger returned to the Little Theatre for the 1724-1725 season and in 1725-1726 he joined the Drury Lane company as a dancer and choreographer. Dancing was offered each season at the Little Theatre, although the proportion of performances with entr’acte dancing ranged between 85% and only 24%. The concept of ‘entr’acte dancing’ does not really fit with the repertoire presented by these French companies, so the statistics may not be as significant as they appear.

Usually, the French companies appeared from December to March but in 1725-1726 they played only from March until May 1726. Their repertoire was entirely pieces from the commedia dell’arte, apart from Molière’s Le mariage forcé (which seems to have been a favourite with these troupes).  Sixteen of the twenty-three performances were billed with dancing and the bills name eleven dancers (7 men and 4 women). Among the men were Poitier and Lalauze, the former would become a leading dancer in London in the years to come. There is some doubt about the identity of the Lalauze who danced in London from the 1730s. Between them, these dancers gave thirteen entr’acte dances – 7 group dances, 1 trio, 3 duets and 2 solos. Choreographies for commedia dell’arte characters predominate, closely followed by those for other characters, not least Peasants. Among the other dances was Le Cotillon, given at Poitier’s benefit on 9 May 1726 by twelve dancers . He may well have been the choreographer.

The Little Theatre in the Haymarket in the early 1720s was the place where the Paris forains met London audiences and influenced London’s dancers and theatre managers. They, and their repertoire, await the detailed research that will uncover their place within the eco-system of the 18th-century London stage. These paintings by Watteau evoke their many-faceted performances.

Dancing in London’s Theatres, the 1725-1726 season

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Since October 2020, I have written more than 15,600 words in a total of twelve posts devoted to dancing in London’s theatres during the season of 1725-1726. This survey covered the capital’s four theatres, who gave nearly 460 performances between them. No dancing was advertised at the King’s Theatre, while both Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields billed entr’acte dancing at about half of their performances. Drury Lane offered afterpieces with dancing about 25% of the time and Lincoln’s Inn Fields did the same at nearly 45% of its performances. There was little overlap between entr’acte dancing and afterpieces – bills at Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields generally included either one or the other, but rarely both – so at least 70% of that season’s bills (other than at the King’s Theatre) must have had some sort of dancing. That amounts to more than 330 performances.

So much dancing called for a group of specialist dancers at London’s two theatres royal. Drury Lane had thirteen dancers (seven men and six women), while Lincoln’s Inn Fields had sixteen (nine men and seven women). Among the women, several were also actresses (Drury Lane’s leading dancer, Hester Booth, was also one of the company’s leading actresses). At both playhouses, these dancers formed a company within the theatre company which brought together performers with different backgrounds as well as of various ages and experience. Several seem to have had quite extensive training in the French serious style (several more did not) and some had skills in speciality dance techniques. All the dancers, in both companies, seem to have been expected to dance in a range of styles and genres. Far more research is needed into the careers and repertoires of both leading and supporting dancers at this period to help us to understand how dancers were recruited and deployed. Such knowledge is closely linked to any attempt to analyse the repertory of dances at the two theatres.

This season, as in many others during the late 17th and 18th centuries, there were a number of French dancers on the London stage. Some, like Marie Sallé at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, were ‘guest artists’ while others, like her brother Francis and Monsieur Roger at Drury Lane, became members of the theatre’s dance company. Attention has been focussed on visitors from the Paris Opéra, but dancers from the Opéra Comique and the Paris fairs (the forains) were equally if not more influential. ‘French’ dance on the London stage is another topic that awaits detailed research and analysis.

As explained in my earlier pieces, 28 entr’acte dances were given at Drury Lane and 43 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The majority of these were duets. There seem to have been around eight choreographies which (on the evidence of their titles) were performed at both playhouses. The lack of music as well as other sources makes it difficult to distinguish between dances with the same, similar or otherwise related titles. A study over a longer period than a single season might help us to resolve some of these queries, as well as providing insights into the entr’acte dance repertoire at each of the two patent theatres.

Even this one season of 1725-1726 gives us some clues about the popularity of individual dances. For example, many of the duets given at Lincoln’s Inn Fields were, or would become, staples of the repertoire with stage lives extending over many seasons. The same was true at Drury Lane, although to a lesser extent. It is difficult to assign many of these dances to a single, specific genre, although the editors of The London Stage made an attempt at a list of categories (Introduction to Part Two, pp. cxxxiii – cxxxv) and so did I in chapter three of my PhD thesis ‘Art and Nature Join’d: Hester Santlow and the Development of Dancing on the London Stage, 1700-1737’ (2000). I won’t set out details of these categorisations here, although I make some use of them in what follows.

At Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1725-1726, the most popular dances fall into the ‘National’ genre – French, Dutch, Irish and Spanish foremost among them. Many of these dances overlap with the ‘Character’ genre, dances performed by particular character types of which the most popular were Peasants. The ‘National’ dances were followed quite closely by choregraphies titled according to their dance type – Passacaille, Chacone, Saraband, Minuet, and so on. There were, relatively speaking, few dances linked to commedia dell’arte characters, who were being steadily absorbed into the pantomime afterpieces, and not as many ‘Pastoral’ dances as might be expected although the longevity of group dances like Myrtillo and Le Badinage Champetre (which was new in 1725-1726) suggest that over time the hierarchy of popular dances might look different. There is also the question of the number of performances enjoyed by each entr’acte dance, which might change the pecking order. One factor, which needs detailed research, is the influence of the dancers themselves (more specifically the dancer-choreographers) over their own and their theatre’s repertoire. And, there were the theatre managers who had the final say on each evening’s bill. John Rich at Lincoln’s Inn Fields is known to have favoured dance, while at Drury Lane Colley Cibber, Robert Wilks and Barton Booth thought it detracted from the serious drama.

All but one of the afterpieces with dancing given at the two theatres royal this season were pantomimes, still a new and emerging genre. These brought together comic and serious dancing, by commedia dell’arte characters and figures from classical mythology, in productions that made full use of scenes, machines, tricks and transformations to entertain and amaze audiences. In 1725-1726, Drury Lane revived three pantomimes that had been successful in earlier seasons, notably Harlequin Doctor Faustus, while Lincoln’s Inn Fields revived five (including The Necromancer) and put on one new production. Drury Lane used dancers for the serious plots in its pantomimes, while Lincoln’s Inn Fields preferred singers. The Lincoln’s Inn Fields Apollo and Daphne was an exception to this rule, since it responded to the Drury Lane pantomime of the same name by casting Francis and Marie Sallé in the title roles. Both versions of Apollo and Daphne seem to have had affinities with John Weaver’s earlier dramatic entertainments of dancing – a link that remains largely unexplored, although the lack of detailed evidence about these pantomimes makes this difficult.

How much time was devoted to dancing each evening? Entr’acte dances must have varied in length, but one or two minutes is a reasonable average for solos and duets while group dances might take five or six minutes (or longer in those cases where there was a narrative thread to the choreography). So, the entr’acte dances might take up ten to fifteen minutes in an evening, more or less. Pantomimes are thought to have lasted around 40 minutes altogether, with varying amounts of comic and serious dancing depending on the production. Around fifteen to twenty minutes of actual dancing might be a reasonable guess. This is another area that needs research and analysis.

The 1725-1726 season fell within a pivotal period for dancing on the London stage. Pantomimes had just begun their long reign, dancers from France were bringing new choreographies that would be influential as the dancing in London’s theatres changed. Throughout the 18th century dancing was an integral and far from negligible part of most performances in London’s principal theatres, yet, in the absence of surviving choreographies and even their music, it remains intangible and unintelligible to all but those dance historians specialising in the period. I hope that this will change as more research is done.

I have still to look at the dancing at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, which I will do in a separate piece by way of an epilogue to this lengthy investigation.

A Season of Dancing: 1725-1726

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I have written quite a number of posts on individual dances or groups of dances performed on the London stage during the 18th century. I thought it would be interesting to look in detail at just one season, to get a more rounded view of dancing in London’s theatres. I have chosen, not quite at random, 1725-1726. London’s theatre seasons ran from September to the following June and during the earlier 1700s there were often summer seasons at one or more of the playhouses that extended into July or August. The information I will set out is mostly taken from the calendar of performances provided by The London Stage, 1660-1800.

In 1725-1726, London had four theatres offering stage performances. Chief among them were the Theatres Royal in Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Only they were allowed to present serious drama, under the patents granted by King Charles II following his restoration in 1660. Drury Lane is shown on the left and Lincoln’s Inn Fields on the right, both depictions are later than the period I am looking at.

Although there is an illustration of the Drury Lane auditorium, following the changes made for David Garrick by Robert Adam later in the 18th century, there is no such image for Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The Little Theatre in the Haymarket presented a variety of entertainments even though it was, to all intents and purposes, unlicensed. The King’s Theatre, also in the Haymarket and almost opposite the Little Theatre, was London’s opera house. The Little Theatre is on the left and the King’s Theatre is on the right. Again, both images are later.

The following images show the auditoriums of both theatres. The Little Theatre is on the left (this image is much later) and the King’s Theatre on the right (this image is dated 1724 and shows a masquerade in progress).

It is interesting to note that the present Drury Lane Theatre occupies the same site as its much smaller predecessor, while today’s Theatre Royal Haymarket is right next to the site of the Little Theatre. Her Majesty’s Theatre is where the King’s Theatre once stood. The Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre has entirely disappeared – it was finally demolished to make way for the Royal College of Surgeons of England in the early 19th century – but its successor is the Royal Opera House, on the same site as the new Covent Garden Theatre built for the Lincoln’s Inn Fields company in 1732.

The 1725-1726 season opened at Drury Lane on 4 September 1725 and closed at the King’s Theatre on 7 June 1726. There was also a summer season at Lincoln’s Inn Fields which ran from 17 June to 23 August 1726. Apart from two isolated performances in December 1725 and February 1726, the Haymarket Theatre hosted a company of French players from 24 March to 7 May 1726. In total, there were 186 performances at Drury Lane, 193 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (including the 16 performances of the summer season), 53 at the King’s Theatre and 25 at the Haymarket Theatre.

At this period much of the dancing was given in the entr’actes and in the newly popular pantomime afterpieces. A little straightforward statistical analysis provides an indication of the amount of dancing at the various theatres. At Drury Lane, 91 performances (around 49%) included entr’acte dancing and 44 (about 24%) included afterpieces with dancing. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields there were 97 performances with entr’acte dances (around 50%, although every performance during the summer season had dancing) and 85 (around 44%) included afterpieces with dancing. At both houses far less music was advertised explicitly in the entr’actes, but there would have been a great deal of music associated with the performance in general as well as in the plays and afterpieces – this was taken for granted and not mentioned in the bills. About 13% of performances at Drury Lane and 26% at Lincoln’s Inn Fields had entr’acte music advertised. No dancing of any sort was advertised at the King’s Theatre this season. At the Haymarket, the repertoire of commedia dell’arte pieces was quite different from the fare at the other theatres. The distinction between mainpieces and afterpieces, with or without dancing, is not meaningful. Nevertheless, 16 performances (64%) were advertised with entr’acte dancing. Such analyses for individual seasons can be revealing – the patterns that might emerge over longer periods are yet to be investigated.

How many dancers did Drury Lane, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Haymarket Theatre employ? The short answer is, we don’t really know. It is possible to chart those dancers who performed regularly in the entr’actes, as well as those who appeared in the pantomime afterpieces, but without the company’s accounts (which rarely survive) it is difficult to be sure of their status.  The leading dancers in the afterpieces were usually those who appeared most frequently in the entr’actes and may have formed ‘a company within the company’. However, some of these professional dancers (usually the women) were also actors. The afterpieces also employed minor players within the company as supporting dancers. In 1725-1726, 19 dancers (12 men and 7 women) were billed in the entr’actes at Drury Lane. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields, there were 21 entr’acte dancers (14 men and 7 women). At the Haymarket Theatre, 11 dancers (7 men and 4 women) were billed in the entr’actes during the short season given by the French comedians. I will come back to all of these dancers in a later post.

Then, there is the repertoire performed in the entr’actes by these dancers. How many and what sort of dances were performed each season in London’s theatres? This is another question which cannot be answered definitively. Dances with similar titles may or may not be the same (a clue sometimes lies in their performers). Dances with the same title but billed as solos or duets may be the same dance (if the billing is obviously inaccurate), or related versions of a dance, or different dances altogether (again a clue might be in the performers). Very occasionally, a dance with a common title might be attributed to a particular dancer, pointing to a specific choreography – although we do not know how much such choreographies made use of conventional elements. With these caveats in mind, I have interpreted the titles of the dances billed in the entr’actes, dividing them into solos, duets, trios and group dances.

At Drury Lane, 28 dances were billed in the entr’actes: 10 solos, 13 duets, one trio and 4 group dances. Only one dance, the Dutch Skipper, was billed as both a duet and a solo. Lincoln’s Inn Fields advertised 43 entr’acte dances: 12 solos, 22 duets, two trios and 7 group dances. At the Little Theatre in the Haymarket there were only 13 entr’acte dances: 2 solos, 3 duets, one trio and 7 group dances. There was, of course, an overlap in titles (and perhaps choreographies, too) between the three theatres. I will return to these dances in a later post.

In 1725-1726, the most significant dancing beyond the entr’actes came in the pantomime afterpieces. There were three pantomimes in repertoire at Drury Lane: The Escapes of Harlequin, Harlequin Doctor Faustus and Apollo and Daphne. All were by John Thurmond Jr and none were new. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields, seven afterpieces included dancing – one of these, St. Ceciliae; or The Union of the Three Sister Arts, was a masque and not a pantomime. The Lincoln’s Inn Fields pantomimes were Jupiter and Europa, The Necromancer, Harlequin a Sorcerer, Apollo and Daphne, The Cheats; or, The Tavern Bilkers and The Jealous Doctor. Only Lewis Theobald’s Apollo and Daphne was new. I will return to all these pantomimes in a later post.

There is one final element in this survey of dancing in London’s theatres in 1725-1726. Some 50 to 60 mainpiece plays, or more, were given each season at the two patent theatres. A small number of these included a significant amount of dancing (enough to be mentioned in the bills with the dancers listed) and were performed season after season over many decades. At Drury Lane, Macbeth (Shakespeare’s play, but with significant revisions and additions by Sir William Davenant) and The Tempest (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play by Davenant, Dryden and Thomas Shadwell) were part of the repertoire. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Macbeth (but not The Tempest), The Prophetess, The Island Princess and The Emperor of the Moon were given. In 1725-1726 there was also The Pilgrim, with the group dance The Humours of Bedlam (which I have written about elsewhere). The Capricious Lovers by Gabriel Odingsells was given with ‘proper Dances’ (that is dances within the play) but it did not last beyond three performances. I will continue to look at these mainpieces with dancing in separate blog posts.

As you can see from this brief analysis, dancing formed a significant part of the entertainments given each evening in London’s theatres but it is not straightforward to chart what was danced, when and by whom. It is safe to say, however, that although much of that dancing was very different to what we see today, it influenced many aspects of the enormous range of dance styles we have in the twenty-first century.

THE MILLER’S DANCE

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In my post exploring who may have performed the Cyclops in John Weaver’s The Loves of Mars and Venus, I promised to take a closer look at the Miller’s Dance occasionally given among the entr’acte entertainments in London’s theatres. Apart from trying to shed more light on the performances within Weaver’s dance drama, I’ll investigate whether it is possible to get some idea of the dancing within those pieces for which we know little other than the title and names of the performers.

Dances with the word ‘Miller’ in the title were given on the London stage from at least the first decade of the 18th century into the 1760s. For reasons as yet unclear (but probably to do with individual performers), they seem to have disappeared from the repertoire between the mid-1710s and early 1720s and for most of the 1730s. In this post, I will concentrate on the earliest period – from around 1703-1704 to 1715-1716. These are the dances in which some of the ‘Comedians’ who may have danced the Cyclops appeared.

The earliest Miller’s Dance recorded in advertisements is a solo given by William Pinkethman at Drury Lane on 5 June 1704, which he repeated on 10 August. There is nothing to indicate the music or the nature of the dance. A few seasons later, on 26 December 1707 also at Drury Lane, the advertisement specified that the dancing would include ‘an old English Dance call’d, Miller’s Dance’. This might suggest the use of a familiar tune and could, perhaps, link the dance to Miller’s Jig first published in the 7th edition of John Playford’s The Dancing Master in 1686. This tune appeared in every subsequent edition up to the 18th around 1728, so it must have been well known. Only three dancers were billed in the entr’actes that evening, so it seems the Miller’s Dance couldn’t have been a country dance. It is possible that Pinkethman reprised his solo, since he gave an ‘Equi-vocal Epilogue after the old English manner’ for the main play that same evening.

During the 1709-1710 season there were, ostensibly, three different versions of the Miller’s Dance at Drury Lane. On 25 March 1710, Leigh and Prince performed a Miller’s Dance which they repeated at least once, on 23 May. On 12 April, Leigh and Birkhead danced Miller and his Wife. Was the Miller’s Dance given on 25 April by unnamed performers performed by Leigh and Prince or Leigh and Birkhead? The Miller and his Wife was given at the Greenwich theatre in 1710-1711 and 1711-1712, when the company included Leigh. This dance may well have been the same as the one he performed with Birkhead.

The third dance was the Whimsical Dance between a Miller, his Wife, and a Town Miss, first given at Pinkethman’s Greenwich theatre on 5 August 1710 and repeated at five more performances before the end of the summer season there. The only performer billed for this trio was Leigh as the Miller’s Wife. In 1714-1715 and again in 1715-1716 a Miller’s Dance was given at Lincoln’s Inn Fields by James Spiller, his wife Elizabeth and Leigh. Could this have been the Whimsical Dance of a few years earlier? Elizabeth Spiller performed with the Greenwich company in 1709-1710 and her husband may well have done so too. The title Whimsical Dance between a Miller, his Wife, and a Town Miss suggests some characterisation and comic action, including the low comedy associated with a cross-dressed Miller’s Wife. Spiller was adept at playing old men (in 1710 he was, apparently, only 18) and he presumably danced the Miller. Hogarth’s benefit ticket shows him some 10 years later.

Spiller Benefit Hogarth

William Hogarth. Benefit ticket for James Spiller [London, 1720] © British Museum

Despite these clues, there is no way of knowing what any of these Miller’s Dances were like. No music survives for any of them. The dancing would surely have been the antithesis of la belle danse, although it is unlikely to have had its own vocabulary of steps.

How did audiences recognise that it was a ‘Miller’s Dance’? Was the advertisement of the title in the evening’s bill enough? Was the dance familiar from earlier (but unrecorded) performances? Were there very obvious mimed actions? Did the music provide a strong clue? The dance is likely to have been performed against whatever scenery was in place for that evening’s play, which might even have conflicted with the piece on offer. There are many things we simply don’t know about entr’acte dancing on the London stage in the 18th century.