He gives very careful directions not only for performing the “reverence,” the “simple,” the “double,” the “réprise,” and the “congé,” but for performing the various movements of the basse-dance, the retour, and the tordion; as, for instance, when he remarks that “You begin the dance of the tordion, which is in triple time, just like the basse-dance: but it is (to give his own words) plus legiere and concitée.”
He describes the Pavane as “easy” to dance, and gives details of its performance, together with the music of that famous and lovely example, “Belle qui tiens ma vie captive,” the words being given in full, for four voices and tambour accompaniment.
The Gaillarde, he says, is so-called “parce qu’il fault estre gaillard and dispos pour la dancer,” and with much detail as to its performance explains that while danced somewhat like the tordion the latter is done “plus doulcement and avec actions and gestes moings violents.”
He gives nearly a dozen musical examples for the gaillarde, one called “La traditors my fa morire”; another “Anthoinette”; another, with the charming title “Baisons nous belle”; another, “Si j’ayme ou non.”
Capriol, by the way, remarks apropos after the second-named, that “At Orleans when we give Aubades we always play on our lutes and guiternes a gaillarde called ‘La Romanesque,’” but that it seemed so hackneyed and trivial that he and his companions took to “Anthoinette” as being livelier and having a better rhythm.
The Gaillarde was in triple time, and was made up of five steps (or four steps and a leap) and one “position”; the term cinq pas also being alternatively applied to it, hence the Shakespearean “cinque-pace” and “sink-a-pace.”
The Volte, from which is derived the modern valse, was described by Arbeau as “a species of gaillarde familiar to the Provençals,” danced, like the tordion, in triple time, and consisting of two steps and a leap. The Volte, or Volta, as it was as often called, was popular in England, as was the Gaillarde, and references to it are found in Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida) and in the one really great work on the Dance in English literature, namely, Sir John Davies’ richly imaginative and finely musical poem, Orchestra, or a Poeme on Daunciny, which was published in 1596, only eight years after Arbeau’s Orchésographie.
The Courante, Arbeau describes as very different from the Volte. It is also (in contrast to the Pavanes and Basse-dances) a danse sautée, but in twelve time, with running steps, requiring from time to time not the quick, light leaping of a volte, but the sort of slow soaring for which Vestris was famous in the eighteenth century and Volinin and Bohn can perform so superbly to-day.
Arbeau says that in his youth the dance was given as a kind of “ballet,” by three young men and three girls, with grace and dignity and he bewails its subsequent decadence. The old English term was “current traverse.” In Sir John Davies’ Orchestra one finds the following reference:
“What shall I name those currant travases