7. The jig is up, for now

Series round-up

Substack Intro:

This round up of loose ends and a look at the ballad-jigs that ended plays in the 1590s-1612 brings to a close, for now at least, my foray into ballads, Bob and Will being an offshoot form my book, Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It.

There are three “it’s all been done before” segments, plus a neat coincidence in the use of the word “conscience” and then an exploration of the hugely popular jigs and a look at Shakespeare’s clowns, especially Robert Armin.

A) It’s all been done before; it’s all been written in….German

Reader Paul Sutcliffe, in reply to article number 4 in this series: Voices of the People, wrote: “Recommended for those who can read German. Heinrich Detering's 'Bob Dylans Mysterienspiele', München 2016 and then even more helpfully added: “Full title is "Die Stimmen aus der Unterwelt: Bob Dylans Mysterienspiele'. He looks at the possible influences of a whole range of earlier genres/concepts and works, which include mystery plays, Shakespeare, minstrelsy, danse macabre, courtly love, mysticism, and both epic and heroic poetry.” So, the hunt was on to obtain The Voices from the Underworld: Bob Dylan's Mystery Games, to give its title in English.[i]

My lack of German means this was always going to be frustrating, but below I follow up Paul’s lead as best as I have been able to, thus far.

In the second post in this series, “She Died Singing It”, I noted that: “From “Pretty Polly” to “Murder Most Foul”, 59 years later and arguably on through Shadow Kingdom and The Philosophy of Modern Song, (see outro to last post), murder ballads feature throughout Dylan’s canon. From Time Out Of Mind onwards, though, the emphasis has been on those ‘sickos disguised as Romeos’. For lengthy explorations of these, see my In The True Performing of It[v] and Graley Herren’s Dreams and Dialogues[vi]. In my book, I concentrate on “Moonlight” and “Soon After Midnight” in the context of looking at Shakespeare and Dylan together.”

Detering traces the actions of a male slayer of women in isolated spots in the latter of these two. Detering has no doubt at all that this character would fit as one in the series of killers disguised as lovers. An “unmistakable serial killer” (or similar phrase) is how Detering refers to the narrator of “Soon After Midnight.” As previously noted, I am not one of those who can read German, sadly, and so I am going on partial information here.

Detering’s book is listed on JSTOR (the digital storage service for academic journals), but, most unusually, has proved inaccessible even in attempts from the libraries of Cambridge and Harvard Universities. JSTOR does provide chapter introductions, however, and the automatic browser translation of the chapter entitled: “Prospero's Nightmare, Shakespeare's Blues: Tempest”[ii] goes as follows, (referring initially, I think, though the interview to which Mr. Deterring refers is not fully clear on this, to “Beyond Here Lies Nothing”):

“The ego of his role monologues, Dylan wanted to impress on the astonished Bill Flanagan, is his own, not that of a "character" as in drama. It is not a film hero or villain, and "not a serial killer". That was in 2008. Just four years later, Dylan lets a monologuing self have its say in a song that is unmistakably just that: "a serial killer". Only one notices it gradually, and with macabre pleasure. Because the sugar-sweet languishing lover, who can't wait for the longed-for rendezvous on Tempest’s (2012), “Soon After Midnight”, seems to be only looking for the expected one.”

I apologise for using no-doubt poorly written translation, but it is all I can give you as a representation and it does contain the core point of our convergence.

Taking the song’s imagery, setting and atmosphere as “pop-Shakespeare”, Detering seemingly goes on to investigate further Dylan and Shakespeare parallels. Again, like Herren and myself, he traces the blackface elements, in Masked and Anonymous as well as in various songs, especially on “Love And Theft”. A far as I am aware, Richard Jobes was the first to provide an in-depth exploration of this connection in Judas #3[iii]. Scott Warmuth then contributed specifically on the links with George Griffin’s Othello: A Burlesque in his usual precisely detailed and ever-helpful manner.

I built on both of these[iv] and it seems, from my attempts to glean what I can from the German text and references that Warmuth pointed Detering on the route for his exploration of Dylan’s Po’ Boy, highlighting how Dylan’s lyrics, like minstrel performances, play with exaggeration and distortion, and potentially also on the recurring theme of artists and entertainers throughout history transforming originals into something new, yet connected.

Richard Jobes’s timely and brilliant depiction of how Shakespeare’s plays circulated in popular adaptations such as George Griffin’s - and how these, in turn, influenced Dylan’s work - established, over twenty years ago, the thread that runs from Jobes to Warmuth to myself, and from Warmuth to Heinrich Detering (presuming I am reading all this correctly). Scott’s work may have arisen completely independently of Jobes’s, which makes it all the more impressive, given his remarkable track record of uncovering fruitful sources.

Whichever backstory is the complete one, both Deterring and I refer to Warmuth, and I would have loved to have been in contact with him ten years ago. There was a long period of writing for me, about Shakespeare and Dylan, followed by a protracted phase of publishing a book that swung from academic to popular, before settling somewhere in between. In 2014 -2015 I wrote a book on an outdoor annual Shakespeare Festival, “Shakespeare in Cambridge”. As I had just finished the updated book on Dylan’s live performing, One More Night, the two subjects fused in my mind. Inevitably, as I was writing the Shakespeare book, I kept taking notes of Dylan echoes. I wrote two early prefigurations of my eventual book around this time. One was put on my then active website and another version appeared in ISIS.

Bob Dylan - Soon After Midnight (Official Audio)

Mr Detering would already have written on “Soon After Midnight” by this point, and he easily preceded me into book format on the subject. I sincerely hope that one day I can read an English. The whole book looks fascinating and, along with Shakespeare, the Homeric allusions so wonderfully written about by Richard Thomas catch the eye as exciting avenues of interpretation. For example, Jstor, and the patchy automatic web translation again, gives us for chapter 5:

“5. The Mysteries of the Minstrels: Masked and Anonymous (pp. 131-168)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1168g0s.7

Minstrel show and mystery play, world literature and the tradition of popular American music: what the song poetry of Workingman's Blues #2, the great Tempest ballad or the Homeric Lennon epitaph inventively unfolds, Dylan first had – and starting with the title – in 2001 in the album "Love And Theft" formulated. Here he had let the voices from the underworld speak through and with each other in all their fullness and heterogeneity, here he had made them audible anew in his own voice. Far less well known was an attempt made only a year and a half later to provide the poetological program for practice, so to speak – albeit only 'to a certain extent', because...”

Even in this garbled form, it certainly whets one’s appetite and picking my way through the German and typing portions in for online translation just whets it even further.

B) It’s all been done before; it’s all been written in….Germany

In searching around for a translation of Detering, I came across another useful discovery and one which frequently mentions Detering, perhaps unsurprisingly, as it is entitled:

Come gather ‘round people, Bob Dylan and the Street Ballad: Diplomarbeit from zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Magisters der Philosophie an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.

This was submitted by 2David SAMITSCH at the Institute of English Studies, reviewer: Ao. Univ. Prof. Mag. Dr. phil. Hugo Keiper Graz, 2018” and can be downloaded here. Come gather 'round People: Bob Dylan and the Street Ballad.

I had intended, were this series to become a book, to investigate Dylan’s use of rhetorical ballad techniques, and the comparative ways Shakespeare employed similar devices in his plays. However, Mr Samitsch has already done this work on the Dylan side. His academic thesis begins by detailing the history, forms, and stylistic features of traditional and broadside ballads, including their oral composition and common themes.

As I do in this series, he draws on the fine work of Alan Bold, but, understandably for his academic submission, Samitsch goes deeper and wider in his source material. Consequently, if you want more on the evolution of broadside, street, and traditional ballads, then you will find much to interest you here.

The paper then explores Dylan's immersion in American folk music, which drew heavily from the ballad traditions already described. This is where I was going next, but there is little point now that you can read it all here. Samitch has already demonstrated how Dylan’s ballads directly reference, or incorporate, the themes, and stylistic elements of traditional and street ballads and you can read all about that here, too.

C. It’s All Been Done Before; It’s All Been…. Said In A Lecture

I keep coming across more and more useful material. Just the other day I stumbled on this talk-performance, which is well worth sharing:

broadside ballads of 17th century england lucie skeaping gresham college lectures 240p - YouTube

Here you can hear more on broadside ballads and how they functioned as both pop songs and tabloid news and provide insight into the daily lives, attitudes, politics, and social customs of the 17^th Century. Shakespeare’s era is only in the first part of the talk, but it remains fascinating throughout and, naturally, Dylan resonances do not end with the passing of The Bard. Tales of itinerant peddlers and broadsheet production are retold here and close attention is paid to the music to which these ballads were set, highlighting the challenges of identifying tunes from titles alone. When I first envisaged this series as a book, it was going to include the eighteenth century, Robert Burns, plus the rise of literacy leading to the eventual decline of broadsides as printing techniques evolved and new forms of entertainment emerged. This lecture moves in that direction as it approaches its conclusion.

D. An incidental aside, worth noting.

I meant to include this in the last posting. One of those coincidences that appeals to me, and which naturally occur to you when you are working on two artists at the same time.

I quoted Stephen Scobie writing about the conclusion to “Visions of Johanna.” Stephen also wrote that: “And so, at the climax of the song, the singer’s ‘conscience explodes.’” Conscience is used here, surely, as in Hamlet’s soliloquy, in its sense as “consciousness”, “rather than as ‘moral guide’.” I initially heard the word in “Visions of Johanna” the same way as Scobie, but now hear it as containing both meanings, albeit with “consciousness” predominating.

The coincidence that struck me, however, was that Shakespeare and his contemporaries used the word “conscience” for both modern meanings, and so the pun was almost in-built, as it were. Act V of Richard III is one of various places you can find this happening. There are well over a hundred uses of the word “conscience” in Shakespeare, but not a single use of “conscious”, far less “consciousness”. The word “conscious” only began to emerge in its own right at the time Shakespeare’s career was first taking off, and was yet to become commonly used. Due to this, “conscience” could convey either or both meanings at that time.

There are a number of uses of “conscience” in Hamlet alone (and Richard III for that matter), mostly unambiguous. An example of this occurs in the famous lines: “The play’s the thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King which clearly utilises the “moral guide” sense.

In Shakespeare’s time “conscience”, was carrying two connected but distinct meanings, for which we now use “conscience” and “consciousness”. This allowed Shakespeare to almost effortlessly employ the word in such a way that both meanings could resonate simultaneously, as Dylan, it seems to me, does so adroitly at the close of “Visions of Johanna”.

(Dylan singing the closing lines to “Visions of Johanna” in 1966)

E. Always end with a jig, at least until they are banned.

In this series of articles, I have drawn your attention to the closely interwoven world of ballads and plays in Shakespeare’s time. I have saved to the end, appropriately enough, the most prominent, consistent and direct irruptions of ballads into plays as staged in that era – that is, the production closing “jigs”.

To produce these alone, far less songs which might be interwoven with the dramatic action and interludes planned, or suddenly necessary as the play unfolded, each company had to have its own resident balladeer. Most commonly this was the clown/fool who were incredibly popular and famous in their day. Shakespeare had two contrasting stars in this role in his time with the Lord Chamberlain’s, later King’s, Men companies: William Kempe (often referred to as Will Kemp) and Robert Armin.

Will Kemp on his Morris dance-walk from London to Norwich. (Credit: Alamy)

As I wrote in In The True Performing of It: “Much has been read into the original clown Will Kempe leaving the company and his improvised tom-foolery being replaced by the sophisticated and witty Robert Armin. Critical orthodoxy holds that Shakespeare had tired of Kempe taking centre stage with improvised tomfoolery and extensive ad-libbing. Certainly the comic turn was the big attraction for many. It was the clown’s name that appeared on cover of the first, pirated, printings of Shakespeare’s plays, not the playwright’s. Their on-stage dynamic when Shakespeare acted alongside him must have been compelling viewing.”[v] Shakespeare has prince Hamlet air some of dramatists’ ongoing dissatisfaction with their clowns:

Hamlet: And let those that play
your clowns speak no more than is set down for
them, for there be of them that will themselves
laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators
to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary
question of the play be then to be considered.
That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition
in the fool that uses it. Go make you ready.[vi]

Hamlet Act II scene ii

In an effort to contain the runaway improvisations of the clowns during the drama itself, dramatists gave the coveted closing slot in the evening’s entertainment wholly over to them. The idea being that the clowns, who many in the audience had specifically come to see, would save their own work for those slots and concentrate on the author’s words while acting in the play itself. These afternoon ending “jigs” grew to feature not just music and dance, but also comic dialogue, sketch-like acting, and even acrobatics. A large part of their appeal lay in their frank embrace of bawdry; they were often spectacularly rude.

Though often overlooked in literary analyses, the jigs were more than mere epilogues or musical afterthoughts, these comic, bawdy, and often improvisational segments played a central role in shaping how audiences received and remembered the drama they had just witnessed. Typically set to familiar ballad tunes, jigs forged an immediate link between playhouses and the broader ballad culture of the streets. They recalled the dance origins of ballads themselves, blurring the line between performance and popular entertainment.

As John Astington put it: “Training in improvisation is something of a contradiction in terms; one must absorb the principles, but then be original. The famous Elizabethan fools, it seems, did so on their own account during their formative years, turning to the stage as creative adults. A great deal of developmental activity must have gone on in the teens of Tarlton and Armin in particular, but a good part of it must have depended on their contact with the popular culture of London, which surrounded them, including song, dance, ballad making, and singing, as well as common forms of social humor: jokes, mockery, and irony, both sweet and bitter. The fool's training was rooted in vernacular and communal life, and partly ‘picked up on a street.’ ”[vii]

Crucially, even after the most harrowing tragedies, the jig sent audiences home laughing; restoring a sense of festivity and communal levity that counterbalanced the emotional weight of the preceding play.

As the jigs developed into something more than a mere addendum, they grew in popularity and subsequently put the dramatists and theatre-lovers’ noses out of joint once more. A trend developed where audiences turned up at the end of plays to catch the jigs, missing out the main action altogether. This trend kept growing and tensions over this came to a head in 1612, near the end of Shakespeare’s career and only four years before his death, when an official act was passed to suppress such jigs, a clear indication of their vitality, popularity and disruptive nature.

To return to Shakespeare, his two clowns were Kemp, for approximately his first decade, and Armin for the following decade plus a few more years. There are often misappraisals of Kemp, because he suffers by comparison to his even more talented successor. However, like Armin Kemp was also a writer and his, too often now disdained, physical prowess had led him to performing on the continent, an invaluable experience that he could later share with Shakespeare. One wonders what he told Shakespeare of his travels, especially performing for the Danish King in Elsinore. Like Armin, who is much praised for this, Kemp came with an existing persona that crowds were used to and responded to with great enthusiasm.

Nonetheless, Armin was a more sophisticated, complex character and even more of a writer in his own right. His influence on the development of Shakespeare’s art was profound; the Bard recognised in Armin, talents and perceptions that he could integrate into his own creations, raising them to an even higher level of expression. This reached an apex in the figure of the Fool in King Lear whose attitude and forms of expression cleave closely to an Armin model. The roles of all the “intelligent fools” in Shakespeare from around 1600 onwards were played by Armin and as such he sang the majority of the songs in Shakespeare’s plays in these years. Armin was a “song and dance man” par excellence and he brings Dylan to mind in many other ways.

I wrote in the previous article in this series of the ballad-selling Autolycus from The Winter’s Tale and his similarities to Bob Dylan. The art of Autolycus was written for, and played by, Armin. To add to those shared characteristics, I have collected a list of comments taken from reports and appraisals of Shakespeare’s second “clown”, who was far more than what that word conveys todays. I list these below, inviting you to see how many would be applicable not just to Robert Armin, but also to Robert Allen Zimmerman:

The ability to improvise in verse

An aptitude for verbal wit and inventiveness

Robert, diminutive but dominates the stage

Balladeer

Caustic

Trickery was his constant pursuit

Constantly challenges audiences

Sang in a variety of voices

Coruscating paradoxical humour

An uneasy mixture of the wise and nonsensical

Relentless quibbling and disputation

Sing (in) different voices and accents

To varying degrees wise, witty and cynical

The sardonic, witty air of the diminutive Armin

Cruelty, insanity, and absurdist poetry would—with increasing complexity—become an element in the drama that Shakespeare produced

The Fool would be a role unlike any Shakespeare ever wrote before or after – witty, pathetic, lonely, angry and prophetic in turn, a part rich in quips and snippets of ballads and the kind of sharp exchanges for which Armin was famous. [viii]

A pervasive mood of dark comedy, paradox, and purgative judgment

Armin’s range was extraordinary

it strikes me that the answer is: “all of them apply”.

Robert Armin was apparently missing from Shakespeare's last play, Henry VIII (All is True) in 1613. This would have been one of only two plays of Shakespeare’s, both co-written with John Fletcher, after the edict to ban the closing jigs and it features only one song. The missing Armin’s popularity was such that an apology for his absence appears in the prologue via a description of his distinctive coat:

That come to hear a merry, bawdy play,
A noise of targets, or to see a fellow
In a long motley coat guarded with yellow,
Will be deceived.[ix]

A fitting tribute to an extraordinary man.

Robert Armin, stock image

With thanks to Richard Thomas.

© Andrew Muir, 2025

Substack Outro

That’s All Folks, as they say as far as this series goes. I hope it has been informative and entertaining.

There will be another post next week on an entirely different matter. As with my first Substack post, this will concentrate on one Dylan song, though not written by me, this time, and from some forty years after The Ballad of Donald White.

After that? Well, we will see what happens in the fullness of time.

---

[i] Detering, Heinrich Die Stimmen aus der Unterwelt: Bob Dylans Mysterienspiele. C. H. Beck, 2016

[ii] https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1168g0s.5

[iii] Jobes, Richard “Po’ Boy Dressed in Black” Judas 3 Text.qxd pp 29-46.

[iv] From,Muir, Andrew Muir, Andrew Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It Red Planet (2019 and 2020) (the original text includes full footnotes to this passage, as you would expect. I’ve not reproduced them here as footnotes within footnotes might trigger rebellion in my readership):

“There is also a hint in this passage of Dylan having already noticed that referencing more than one play, explicitly or implicitly, cheek by jowl, can have impressive effects. It is something he knows all about from an

earlier strand of American popular song, minstrelsy, as is made clear in his 2001 album, “Love and Theft”. Dylan commented on minstrel shows in an interview just before the album came out:

“...And ‘Desolation Row’? That’s a minstrel song through and through. I saw some ragtag minstrel show in blackface at the carnivals when I was growing up, and it had an effect on me, just as much as seeing the lady with four legs.”

And the album title, enclosed by quotation marks, appears to be alluding to a 1993 book by university professor Eric Lott, about minstrelsy, entitled: Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. The connections of minstrelsy to “Love And Theft” is an extensive subject which myself and others have pursued elsewhere, but here we are focussing on the Shakespearean connections to both.

One of these is evidenced in ‘Po’ Boy’ where the poisoned wine appears to come straight from the last scene of Hamlet to appear in a rewritten Othello where killer and victim are reversed:

Othello told Desdemona, “I’m cold, cover me with a blanket,
By the way, what happened to that poisoned wine?”

She said, “I gave it to you, you drank it.”

Drinking poisoned wine is how Gertrude dies in Hamlet, while Desdemona is choked to death by Othello. The writers of the burlesques knew this but enjoyed conflating more than one Shakespeare scenario with another, and Dylan enjoys doing the same. In these short lines, with a deft twist, the slain women here emerge in triumph. Romeo also dies from drinking poison, and Juliet attempts to do so before stabbing herself. Those star-crossed lovers also appear in another song, ‘Floater (Too Much To Ask)’ on “Love and Theft”, where we have the marvellously colloquial:

Romeo, he said to Juliet, “You got a poor complexion
It doesn’t give your appearance a very youthful touch!”
Juliet said back to Romeo, “Why don’t you just shove off
If it bothers you so much”

There is a rich musical and dramatic history to the blending of Shakespeare and blackface minstrelsy and one that is also steeped in the history of America, of ‘the South’ and the tortuous and tortured Afro-American experience. Writing on ‘Po Boy’, Richard Jobes stated that:

“The same song borrows its opening verse directly from an 1866 minstrel performance of Othello, written by George Griffin. ‘If for my wife – your daughter – you are looking,’ Othello says to Brabantio, ‘you’ll find her in the kitchen busy cooking.’ Dylan takes these lines, and with very little variation, transports them into ‘Po’ Boy’ … Productions of Othello were highly popular amongst blackface minstrelsy’s audience, unsurprisingly because of the play’s racial themes. Jobes also quotes relevant passages from William J. Mahar: “Having transformed the dramatic elements into comic situations, Griffin replaced Shakespeare’s text with the rhyming couplets typical of popular verse and introduced every scene or action with melodies borrowed from contemporary American and Irish song.” And: “ Rather than transforming the principal characters of Othello, Hamlet, or Macbeth into plantation workers or urban characters living in social margins, the Ethiopian sketch writers reduced royalty to common folk and translated the grand tragedies of life into short sketches about courtship, mixed-race marriages, or conventional domestic life. Minstrel shows were mass entertainment and were ‘America’s first new form of non-elite culture.’”

Scott Warmuth follows the same trail as Richard Jobes and adds, regarding George Griffin’s Othello: a Burlesque, that “The full play, and other Shakespearean parodies, can be found in the book, This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage.” This, I discovered, is also available online and noted, among other things, that for Act 1 scene ii the characters enter to the melody of “Dixie” which Dylan performs in his film, Masked and Anonymous. The lyrics they sing to this are a burlesque of Shakespeare’s Othello. I reproduce them here, with a warning that the language of the time is most offensive to today’s eyes and ears. However, they give you an important taste of how Shakespeare’s scripts were re-cast in these extraordinary blackface minstrel shows that form one of the many tributaries that contribute to the mighty river of song that is “Love and Theft”.

The opening scene ends with Desdemona’s father moaning: “Just as I tink dat Barnum would take her/Dis n****r comes, and mit her runs away.” Then Scene 2 begins like this:

SCENE 2. A Room.

Enter OTHELLO and DESDEMONA, L., singing and dancing a walk

around.—Air, “ Dixie.”

I love you and you love me,

And all our lives we’ll merry be.—Away, away, &c. With you I’ll sport my figure, away, away—

I’ll love you dearly all my life,

Although you are a n*****r.—Away, away, &c.

You can hear a snatch of this segment, on a radio documentary that Scott Warmuth also tracked down and quotes, in the opening minute or so, the ‘looking/cooking’ couplet with which Dylan kicks off his song. As Warmuth writes:

“The radio documentary “Shakespeare in American Life” includes an episode by Richard Paul on the African-American experience with Shakespeare called “Shakespeare In Black and White.” It asks the question “Who ‘owns’ Shakespeare?” and Paul begins his piece by contrasting a straight reading of Othello with actors doing the very same lines from Othello: a Burlesque that Dylan uses in “Love and Theft”. This is a

rewarding listen and is of relevance to both Dylan and Shakespeare scholars as well as to anyone interested in the social history of the United States.”

[v] Muir, Andrew Bob Dylan & William Shakespeare: The True Performing of It Red Planet (2019 and 2020)

[vi] Hamlet - Entire Play | Folger Shakespeare Library

[vii] Astington, John H Actors and Acting in Shakespeare's Time: The Art of Stage Playing Stage and Picture in the English Renaissance: The Mirror up to Nature. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017

[viii] Shapiro ,James The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 Faber & Faber, London 2015

[ix] Henry VIII - Entire Play | Folger Shakespeare Library