"We'll measure them a measure, and be gone"

Renaissance Dance Practices and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Abstract

Dance is an oft-overlooked, yet frequent feature in Shakespeare's plays. The playwright utilizes dance scenes, not only to convey general festivity and celebration, but also to advance plots, to display character traits such as grace and nobility (or their absence), and to highlight the development of romantic relationships. While there are no surviving records detailing the original staging of these dance scenes, there are extant dancing manuals from the period that explain how to do many of the dances that Shakespeare mentions. Moreover, references in a plethora of early modern literary, pictorial, and archival sources offer evidence of how these dances were understood and interpreted by dancers and spectators. Using Romeo and Juliet as a case study, this paper demonstrates how one can bring together these diverse sources, supplemented by the insights gained from the "experiential learning" of staging these dances for live audiences, in order to choreograph historically-informed dances, regardless of whether the production is set in the Elizabethan period or the present day. Finally, the paper argues that a better understanding of Shakespeare's dance scenes enables us to gain a better understanding of his plays' central concerns and questions overall.