The Dance Profession of Early Stuart England: A Story of Success and Failure
The select band of English court dancing masters were strictly teachers, enjoying high status within the court musical establishment c.1600. The post did not require them to perform as dancers. Jacobean innovations for the court masque fostered a new profession of dancer in England, as a specialism of the companies of players. First identified as ‘antimasquers’, organised by court dancing masters, their numbers expanded across 30 years up to 1640, demonstrating increasingly skilled ability to portray character and action in mute dance. Alongside seasonal antimasque bookings, dancers found other sources of income in the commercial theatres. There is evidence of collaborative practices, likely to have led to formal institutions by 1640. This period is also characterised by initiatives to found royal academies and educational institutions for the arts and sciences to include dance. The English nobility was aware of French establishments of this nature, both by repute and direct experience in their travels abroad. This paper will argue that there was potential for an English royal academy of dance to have been founded by the end of the seventeenth century, as in France. However, the disruption of the Civil War and profound changes in royal finances imposed by Parliament at the Restoration of 1660 destroyed any possibility of state patronage of a dance institution.
Anne Daye pursues documentary research and practical reconstruction of dances and dancing of the past, with specialist study of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her doctoral thesis examined the antimasque of the Stuart masque, exploring its development as a political and artistic concept, alongside the emergence of the professional dancer in England. Post-doctoral research is centred on the dance theatre of the Jacobean court. Recent publications include ‘The Revellers Are Entering: Shakespeare and Masquing Practice in Tudor and Stuart England’ in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (OUP 2019); ‘Dancing at Court: ‘the art that all Arts doe approve’ in Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge 2019); ‘Morris dancers from Germany’ in The Museum of Renaissance Music (Brepols 2022); ‘Measure: moving in and out of time’ in Tanz und Musik (Basel 2024).