“I shall stay here the forehorse to a smock,
Creaking my shoes on the plain masonry,
Till honour be bought up, and no sword worn
But one to dance with.”
In “Titus Andronicus” (ii. 1), too, Demetrius says to Chiron:
“Why, boy, although our mother, unadvis’d
Gave you a dancing-rapier by your side.”
Tread a Measure, to which the King refers in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), when he tells Boyet to tell Rosaline
“we have measur’d many miles,
To tread a measure with her on this grass,”
was a grave solemn dance, with slow and measured steps, like the minuet. As it was of so solemn a nature, it was performed[839] at public entertainments in the Inns of Court, and it was “not unusual, nor thought inconsistent, for the first characters in the law to bear a part in treading a measure.”
Trip and Go was the name of a favorite morris-dance, and appears, says Mr. Chappell, in his “Popular Music of the Olden Times,” etc. (2d edition, vol. i. p. 131), to have become a proverbial expression. It is used in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (iv. 2).
Up-spring. From the following passage, in Chapman’s “Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany,” it would seem that this was a German dance:
“We Germans have no changes in our dances;
An almain and an up-spring, that is all.”
Karl Elze,[840] who, a few years ago, reprinted Chapman’s “Alphonsus” at Leipsic, says that the word “up-spring” “is the ‘Hüpfauf,’ the last and wildest dance at the old German merry-makings. No epithet could there be more appropriate to this drunken dance than Shakespeare’s swaggering” in “Hamlet” (i. 4):