Gradually jigs disappeared from the stage.  Even in 1632, when Shirley wrote his comedy of “Changes, or Love in a Maze,” jigs had been discontinued at Salisbury Court Theatre, and probably at other private playhouses.  Shirley complains that, instead of a jig at the end, a dance in the middle of the piece was now required by the spectators.  Possibly that dance of all the dramatis personae with which so many of the old comedies conclude is due to the earlier fashion of terminating theatrical performances by a jig.

With Sir William Davenant as patentee and manager of the Duke’s Theatre, stage dancing and singing acquired a more distinguished position among theatrical entertainments.  It was Davenant’s object, by submitting attractions of this nature to the public, to check the superiority enjoyed by Killigrew, the patentee of the Theatre Royal, and the comedians privileged to call themselves “His Majesty’s Servants.”  Davenant, indeed, first brought upon the English stage what were then called “dramatic operas,” but what we should now rather designate “spectacles,” including Dryden’s version of “The Tempest,” the “Psyche” of Shadwell, and the “Circe” of Charles Davenant, “all set off,” as Cibber writes of them, “with the most expensive decorations of scenes and habits, with the best voices and dancers.”  Sir John Hawkins describes these productions as “musical dramas,” or “tragedies with interludes set to music.”

But as yet the ballet, or rather the ballet of action—­which may be defined to be a ballet with a plot or story of some kind told by means of dancing dumb motions, and musical accompaniments—­was not known upon our stage; and when an entertainment of this kind did make its appearance it was promptly designated a pantomime, and so has become confused with the distinct kind of performances still presented under that name at our larger theatres at Christmas time.  “When one company is too hard for another,” writes Cibber, “the lower in reputation has always been forced to exhibit some new-fangled foppery to draw the multitude after them;” which is, however, only a way of saying that managers need the stimulus of opposition to induce them to provide new entertainments.  In 1721 there was great rivalry between Drury Lane—­Cibber being one of its managers—­and the theatre then newly erected in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  Of the “new-fangled foppery,” which it now became necessary for the one theatre to resort to as a weapon of offence against its rival, singing and dancing had been effectual instances.  But singing was not to be thought of under the circumstances; as Cibber writes:  “At the time I am speaking of, our English music had been so discountenanced since the taste of Italian operas prevailed, that it was to no purpose to pretend to it.  Dancing, therefore, was now the only weight in the opposite scale, and as the new theatres sometimes found their account in it, it could not be safe for us wholly to neglect it.  To give even dancing, therefore,