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The Moralization of the Dance in Elyot's Governour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

John M. Major
John M. Major*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Extract

Amid reflections on time and motion and the evanescence of earthly things, the poet of Four Quartets brings forth out of the past a charming scene wherein men and women move together harmoniously to the strains of the country pipe and drum, ‘In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie’. These lines which Mr. Eliot has so effectively adapted are from a treatise on dancing contained in The Book Named the Governour (Book I, Chapters 19-25), by his sixteenth-century namesake, Sir Thomas Elyot. What is unusual about the treatise, and what must have been its principal attraction for Mr. Eliot, is the author's theory that the dancing together of a man and a woman ‘betokeneth Concorde’ and, further, symbolizes virtue.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 5 , 1958 , pp. 27 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1958

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References

1 ‘East Coker', 1, 30.

2 “The body counted for less with Erasmus than with the great teachers of Italy; he was after all a monk, and a student’ (Woodward, William Harrison, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance, 1400-1600, Cambridge, 1924, p. 116)Google Scholar.

3 See Woodward, William Harrison, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (Cambridge, 1921), pp. 117, 241, 245Google Scholar

4 SirElyot, Thomas, The Boke Named the Gouernour, ed. Croft, H. H. S. (London, 1880), 1, 203–204 Google Scholar. All other references to the Governour will be to this edition.

5 Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius, The Vanity of Arts and Sciences, translator unknown (London, 1676), p. 60 Google Scholar. The De vanitate et incertitudine scientiarum was first published in 1527. For its relationship to Sidney's and Harington's essays on poetry, see Gregory Smith, G., ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), 1, 182–183, 393Google Scholar; II, 199 ff.

6 Governour, 1, 204-232.

7 The source was first noted by Croft.

8 Governour, I, 224-227; Lucian, tr. A. M. Harmon (Loeb Classical Library, 1913-1936), V, 265-267.

9 Lucian, V, 219.

10 Governour, I, 230; Lucian, v, 227.

11 1, 233-236. Compare Paradise Lost, IV, 295-298

12 I, 236-238.

13 See SirElyot, Thomas, The Defence of Good Women, ed. Howard, Edwin Johnston (Oxford, Ohio, 1940), p. 35 Google Scholar. A similar notion appears in the Courtier (see Castiglione, Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Sir Thomas Hoby, Everyman's Library, 1948, p. 198 Google Scholar). The idea was probably a commonplace. On the likelihood of Elyot's having known Castiglione's famous work, see Pearl Hogrefe, ‘Elyot and “The Boke Called Cortegiano in Ytalion“', MP XXVII (1929-1930), 303-311.

14 Govemour, 1,238-239.

15 The base dance, to which Elyot is referring, was apparently introduced into England some time during the late middle ages. See Vuillier, Gaston, A History of Dancing (New York, 1898), pp. 93, 383Google Scholar; Dolmetsch, Mabel, Dances of England and France from 1450 to 1600 (London, 1949), p. 1 Google Scholar.

16 1, 240-241.

17 Actually, there are only four basic steps in this dance, but for his purpose Elyot is assuming there are eight. (See Vuillier, p. 93; Dolmetsch, p. 2.)

18 1, 241-242.

19 1, 242-269. The base dance—a dance in which the feet did not leave the ground—was particularly suited to Elyot's purpose, being ‘grave and slow’ in character and, originally at least, ‘a monopoly of the aristocracy’ (Vuillier, p. 93). It is not exactly the lively country dance pictured in Four Quartets. (For a detailed description of the base dance, see Vuillier, pp. 93-99; Dolmetsch, pp. 1-54.)

20 1, 235.

21 See Schroeder, Kurt, Platonismus in der englischen Renaissance vor und bei Thomas Eliot (Berlin, 1920), pp. 85–115 Google Scholar; also Dannenberg, Friedrich, Das Erbe Platons in England bis zur Bildung Lylys (Berlin, 1932), pp. 192–216 Google Scholar. The influence of Plato on Elyot is also the subject of three chapters in the present author's unpublished thesis in the Harvard University Library, ‘Sir Thomas Elyot: Studies in Early Tudor Humanism’ (1954).

22 Plato, Laws, ii. 655D, tr. R. G. Bury (Loeb Classical Library, 1926), 1, 99.

23 Laws, ii. 664B (Bury, I, 127).

24 Laws, vii. 814E (Bury, II, 91).

25 ‘The art of dancing … is intimately entwined with all human tradition of war, of labour, of pleasure, of education, while some of the wisest philosophers and the most ancient civilisations have regarded the dance as the pattern in accordance with which the moral life of men must be woven’ ( Ellis, Havelock, The Dance of Life, Modern Library, 1929, p. 35 Google Scholar).

26 I, 238-239 (quoted on p. 30).

27 I, 218. Whoever are meant by ‘the interpretours of Plato', Croft thinks the idea may have arisen from such passages as those in Epinomis, 982E, and Titnaeus, 40C.

28 See Murray, H. J. R., A History of Chess (Oxford, 1913), pp. 529–563 Google Scholar.

29 Murray, , A History of Chess, pp. 540–541 Google Scholar. The modern editor of the Caxton translation, William E. A. Axon, identifies Cessolis’ source as the De regimine principum of Egidio Colonna, a work composed about 1285. Murray, however, points out that Cessolis’ work would have been written about the same time as Colonna's,.or even earlier.

30 Caxton's Game and Playe of the Chesse, ed. William E. A. Axon (London, 1883), pp. 177-178.

31 Govemour, I, 284-285.

32 One of the reasons why chess was invented, according to Cessolis, was to ‘kepe the peple from ydlenes… wherof cometh ofte tymes many euyllys and grete synnes’ (p. 15). Equally conscientious is Robert Copland, who, in an afterword to the short treatise, The Manner to Dance Base Dances, appended to his French grammar of 1521, wrote: “These dances have I set at the end of this book to the intent that every learner of the said book after their diligent study may rejoice their spirits honestly in eschewing of idleness the portress of vices.’ (The whole of Copland's treatise is printed in Dolmetsch, pp. 2-4.)

33 Governour, 1, 282-284. We are reminded of the game played by the Utopians ‘wherin vices fyghte wyth vertues, as it were in battel! array, or a set fyld’ (Sir Thomas More, Utopia, tr. Ralph Robinson, ed. J. H. Lupton, Oxford, 1895, pp. 144-145).

34 Tillyard, E. M. W., Five Poems, 1470-1870 (London, 1948), pp. 36–37 Google Scholar.

35 1, 218 (quoted on p. 33).