That on a triple dactyl foot do run
Close by the ground in sliding passages?”
In Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth, too, is the following:
“Bourbon: They bid us to the English dancing-schools
And teach lavoltas high and swift corantos;”
and Sir Toby Belch, it will be recalled, asks: “Why dost thou go to church in a galliard and come home in a coranto? My very walk should be a jig ... sink-a-pace.”
There seems, however, considerable ground for question as to what the courante, or coranto, really was, whether a slow or quick dance. Arbeau’s directions are, for once, not quite clear. He speaks of it being a more graceful affair in his younger days; and he was an old man at the time his Orchésographie was published. In England it certainly seems to have become a fairly lively dance, of which the main feature was its “running” steps.
In France that characteristic seems to have been the same though the tempo may have been slower. Certainly it became slower there, for the courante under Louis Quatorze was considered a dull dance, disappearing in favour of newer types requiring a more developed and quicker technique.
However, dances alter in character, like everything else, in the course of time. The waltz or valse has considerably altered since it was first introduced into London drawing-rooms—and considered shocking!—in the first decade of the nineteenth century; and even to-day there is considerable difference between the valse as danced by Swiss or German peasants, and as seen in the London ball-room. It is probable that the courante of Arbeau’s day was as varied in performance as the tango of our later time.