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Fabio Ciambella
Sapienza University of Rome
Fabio Ciambella is full-time Research Fellow of English Language and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome. His privileged fields of research include the relationship between dance and early modern and Victorian literature and language, historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and Second Language Acquisition, topics about which he has published extensively. In 2013 he published a book about dance in nineteenth-century England (from Jane Austen’s novels to Oscar Wilde’s Salome). In 2016 his PhD thesis was awarded by the Italian Association of English Studies (AIA) and his study about dance and the Copernican Revolution in Shakespeare’s canon was published the following year. His latest book, Dance Lexicon in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: A Corpus-based Approach (Routledge, 2021), is a corpus-based analysis of dance-related lexis in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He is currently writing a monographic study about teaching pragmatics though Shakespeare’s play in the English as a Second Language classroom (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Making Pictures… Move! Teaching English Country Dances through Visualisation in John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (1651)
9 Giugno 2022
Sala Convegni - Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne
Given their intrinsic multisemiotic nature, dance manuals can be considered multimodal, instructional texts characterised by the combination of graphemes, i.e., letters (either used to create acronyms, abbreviations, or lexical items), symbols indicating steps, choreographies, or representing dancers, and sometimes graphic elements and pictures. The pedagogical aim behind these complex plurisemiotic systems is that of teaching dances at a distance, in case it is not possible either to afford face-to-face dance lessons or have more realistic pictures reproducing dancing couples and/or groups of performers in books. The first edition of John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, the earliest dancing manual ever written in English, is the case study for this paper. It is a collection of 105 English Country Dances collected from miscellaneous sources and oral traditions, published in 1651 during the Interregnum, printed by Thomas Harper, and sold by John Playford himself (thus it shapes up to be a self-promotional volume) at his bookshop near Temple Church, London.
Playford’s intent is overtly pedagogical since the very beginning of The English Dancing Master. In his dedicatory letter “To the ingenious reader”, the author uses the artifice of the ‘discovered manuscript’ to justify the publication of a volume whose nature does not “agree [with] these times” of political turmoil. Yet, the discovered manuscript does not provide any valuable content per se, unlike, say, in the case of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. On the contrary, Playford states he found a “false and surreptitious copy” of his manuscript “at the printing press” that he prevented from being printed, otherwise it “would have been a disparagement of to the quality of the professors thereof, and a hinderance to the learner”. Therefore, to guarantee a better educational standard, Playford printed his book before the ‘bad copy’ was published.
Reading through the book, one may observe that the dances mentioned by Playford are visualised thanks to a detailed multisemiotic description which takes into account sheet music in one-staff format (bass staff or treble staff), symbols representing male and female dancers and their spatial disposition at the beginning of each choreography (a sort of forerunner of such dance notations as Labanotation), graphemes reproducing both entire lexical items and abbreviated forms, and conventional, arbitrary symbols indicating “a strain played” once, twice, three times, etc. Thus, the pages of The English Dancing Master become speaking pictures aimed to teach Country Dances through an interwoven system of conventional signs suited to instruct “young gentlemen”, as Playford declares in his dedicatory epistle.
