“When that I was and a little tiny boy.”
Fletcher, in the Prologue to the “Fair Maid of the Inn,” says:
“A jig should be clapt at, and every rhyme
Praised and applauded by a clamorous chime.”
Among the allusions to this dance we may quote one in “Much Ado About Nothing” (ii. 1), where Beatrice compares wooing to a Scotch jig; and another in “Twelfth Night” (i. 3), where Sir Toby Belch says, his “very walk should be a jig.”
Lavolta. According to Florio, the lavolta is a kind of turning French dance, in which the man turns the woman round several times, and then assists her in making a high spring or cabriole. It is thus described by Sir John Davies:
“Yet is there one the most delightful kind.
A loftie jumping, or a leaping round,
Where arme in arme two dauncers are entwined,
And whirle themselves, with strict embracements bound;
And still their feet an anapest do sound,
An anapest is all their musicks song,
Whose first two feet are short, and third is long.”
Douce,[831] however, considers it to be of Italian origin, and says, “It passed from Italy into Provence and the rest of France, and thence into England.” Scot, too, in his “Discovery of Witchcraft,” thus speaks of it: “He saith, that these night-walking, or rather night-dancing, witches, brought out of Italie into France that dance which is called la Volta.” Shakespeare, in his “Henry V.” (iii. 5), makes the Duke of Bourbon allude to it:
“They bid us to the English dancing-schools,
And teach lavoltas high, and swift corantos.”
Again, in “Troilus and Cressida” (iv. 4), Troilus says:
“I cannot sing,
Nor heel the high lavolt.”