Singing Simpkin and other Bawdy Jigs

Lucie Skeaping is a celebrated musician and broadcaster and currently presents ‘The Early Music Show’ on BBC Radio 3.  Following her training as a violinist at the Royal College of Music, Lucie founded ‘The City Waites’ (www.citywaites.co.uk), an early music band specialising in 16th and 17th century English broadside ballads and popular tunes that has since recorded numerous CDs and toured worldwide (the Daily Telegraph dubbed her 'the bawdy babe of Radio 3').  She also spent several years as a popular BBC television children’s presenter.She has contributed to numerous soundtracks including the Oscar-winning movie ‘The Pianist’, ‘The Draughtsman’s Contract’ and Simon Schama's 'History of Britain' series; TV appearances include Jonathan Miller’s ‘The Beggar’s Opera’, ‘Early Music’, 'Rude Britannia', Songs of Praise, BBC Breakfast and ‘Sounds of London’ with Jools Holland.  Theatre roles include several pantomimes and 'The Beggar’s Opera', and, as a musician, she has worked with the Royal National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, Rambert Dance Company and the RSC. Lucie's publications include ‘Broadside Ballads’, winner of the Music Industry Award for Best Classical Music Publication 2006, and the schools book 'Let's Make Tudor Music' (Stainer and Bell 1999); she writes a column for the BBC Music Magazine, and has contributed articles for The Financial Times and History Today.  She has run jig workshops for the RSC and at Dartington International Summer School, and lectures regularly on the ballads of 17th century England.  More information can be found on Lucie's website at http://www.lucieskeaping.co.uk   Roger Clegg is Senior Lecturer in Drama Studies at De Montfort University, where his teaching includes Twentieth Century European Drama, Popular Theatre, Pre-texts and Contexts of Drama and Renaissance English Theatre. His research is in the politics and practice of Renaissance popular performance and the relationship between the stage and the culture and society which it inhabits.  He has researched and written on English jigs from the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, and has also investigated the staging of Singing Simpkin at Shakespeare’s Globe as part of Globe Education’s ‘Winter Playing’ research (2003). Publications include ‘He’s for a jig or a Tale of Bawdry: Notes on the English stage Jig’, with Peter Thomson, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2009. Roger is also particularly interested in popular humour, political satire and comic performance, and organises a conference and other events annually under the banner Playing for Laughs: On Comedy in Performance (as part of Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival) which invites academics and practitioners of comedy to come together to share ideas on just why and how people generate laughter through performance.    

List of illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and referencing conventions

A history of the dramatic jig

The scripts and tunes:


 




Wooing of Nan                                           

Rowland’s God Son 

Singing Simpkin 

Francis’ New Jig

The Black Man

The Jig of St. Denys’ Ghost

The Libel of Michael Steel

Fools Fortune

The Cheaters Cheated


 




Staging the jigs


 




Text 

Music 

Dance


 




Appendix: Dance instruction  


 




Bibliography