I had the opportunity recently of dancing the early English country dance Gathering Peascods with another dance reconstructor, though I don't think he had the slightest idea that I was one as well. Making polite conversation before the music started, I inquired idly whether he preferred to perform the dance with a clap on the third "into the center" move or not, that being a point of debate among those work with early country dances. He fairly blazed with passion as he told me, in a tone that suggested he was not open to any such debate, that he danced it without the third clap "exactly as it says in the book."
Well, that puts me in my place, eh?
The problem with that sort of strict-constructionist approach is that in early country dances, a lot of things are not actually in the book. So let's look at what the book actually says here.
Gathering Peascods appeared from the very first edition (1651) of Playford's book of dances, called The English Dancing Master through the eighth edition in 1690. Editions after the first were known simply as The Dancing Master. The instructions for the dance did not change over time. Here's a facsimile of Gathering Peascods from The English Dancing Master (complete facsimile available here):
The point of contention is the third segment:
Men meet and clap hands, We. as much, while the men goe back, men meet again and turne S. [symbol] We. meet, men meet, while the We. go back, We. meet again and turne S. [symbol]
A basic reconstruction of these figures is as follows:
2b Men go into the center and clap
2b Women go into the center and clap
2b Men go into the center [and may or may not clap]
2b Men turn single back to places
8b Repeat all of the above, reversing the genders
And here's a snippet of the relevant part of the music, taken from the album Silence Is Deadly
Reading through the instructions, the men are directed to clap, and the women's repeat is "as much," meaning do the same thing the men did. So that's two definite claps. The ambiguity comes on the phrase "men meet again and turne S." Does "meet again" mean "meet again in the same way as before," i.e. with a clap? Or does it mean simply to meet?
The strict-constructionist argument is that it means simply to meet, because it doesn't say either "clap" or "as much." "Again" is not considered equivalent to "as much." That's a reasonable enough argument if one takes those instructions in isolation. But if one goes on to the next sentence, in which the women lead the same set of figures, there's a problem:
We. meet, men meet, while the We. go back, We. meet again and turne S.
Notice that there is no mention of claps and no helpful "as much." It just says to meet. If one reads this in a true strict-constructionist way there should be no claps in the repeat at all.
Now, I don't know anyone who'd actually make that argument, since it seems obvious that the second sentence can be boiled down to what I wrote above, which is to repeat the figures with the genders reversed. But that leaves a strict constructionist making a logically-awkward distinction:
- In the first sentence, where it does not say to clap, don't clap.
- In the second sentence, where it does not say to clap, clap anyway.
It's certainly possible that that is what Playford meant, but one can hardly call it exactly as it says in the book. It's an interpretation, based on an intuition about how one interprets ambiguities in the instructions: that one sentence is complete and the other contains an elision. It is just as defensible to claim that both sentences contain elisions. And, contrary to my dance partner's air of certainty, we don't know which interpretation is correct.
So the object of this little discussion is not to argue with his interpretation, because that argument eventually boils down to "my intuition is better than yours," and while that may be a valid position in some reconstruction debates, I don't think this is one of them.
My quarrel is only with his certainty and his justification of it as exactly what the book says. His certainty is based on intuition, not evidence, and his justification of it is inconsistent with his reading of the second sentence. Making such definitive statements about things that are genuinely ambiguous does not fill me with confidence in his work.
In general, the further back in dance history one goes, the more such ambiguities crop up. It's something to keep firmly in mind when working with early material.
And as for my own position on the third clap? I'm in favor of it. I like the effect of the clap-and-turn-away-quickly. But I don't consider skipping it wrong.
The book just doesn't say.
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