Shakespearean
Dance
• Resource Guide
• Primary Sources
• Research Papers
• Teaching, Performing &
Choreography
• Renaissance Dance Pictures
• Renaissance Dance Links -
Elizabethan history, the plays, where to study
historical dance, etc.
Definition:
It is difficult to settle on a term to denote the
dancing in England from about 1550 to 1650.
"Shakespearean dance," a term of my own coinage,
refers specifically to the dances in the plays and
time of Shakespeare (1564-1616), and more generally to
dancing during the heydey of the English public
theatres. Historians refer to this period as "early
modern", but in dance circles, "early modern dance"
refers to early twentieth-century dance. Similarly,
dance reconstructors refer to the style of dance in
this period as "Renaissance dance," but for
historians, "Renaissance" is strongly associated with
the politics, scholarship, and artistic achievements
of Italy in the fifteenth century. Some literary
scholars use the term "English Renaissance" in
discussing the time of Shakespeare.
Mission:
The goal of this website is to stimulate Shakespearean
dance scholarship by providing a multi-disciplinary
array of relevant sources and resources. Although many
of Shakespeare's plays, including Romeo and Juliet,
As You Like It, and Macbeth, have
dances in them, as do plays by Ben Jonson, John
Marston, and their contemporaries, dancing has almost
entirely escaped the attention of dramatic and
literary scholars. Similarly, although dancing was a
common activity at all levels of early modern society,
and played a role in key political, religious, and
cultural controversies in Tudor and Stuart England,
few historians have addressed it. Finally, there is a
growing number of professional and amateur historical
dance reconstructors working on this period, but they
tend to focus on interpretting dance manual
instructions rather than examining dance within its
historical context.
This
site includes excerpts from and links to dramatic and
literary texts, court records, and other primary
sources; bibliographies of secondary scholarship; and
links to performing groups and workshops, as well as
summaries of my own research in several of these
areas. As the very concept of Shakespearean dance is
still in its infancy, I welcome all reactions,
comments, and questions regarding both content and
presentation. You are invited to e-mail me at: 
--
E. F. Winerock
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