The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Who,” says Castiglione, “would learn to play, devote himself to music, learn to dance, or write so many verses and love songs, as most do, except for women’s sake, hoping by these means to gain their goodwill and win their favour?” We see this confirmed every day in our young women and wives. Those who, as unmarried girls, worked so hard at singing, playing and dancing, at such expense to their parents, to acquire those graceful accomplishments, will scarcely touch an instrument now they are married: they no longer care for it.

Constantine, in his Agriculture, book 11, chapter 18, makes Cupid himself a great dancer: as evidence, while capering among the gods, “he knocked down a bowl of nectar, which dripped onto the white rose and made it red ever afterwards.” And Callistratus, with Daedalus’s help, “made a group of young girls continually dancing” around Cupid’s statue, presumably to show that Cupid was very fond of dancing—as undoubtedly he was.

For at his wedding to Psyche, with the gods present to honour the feast, Ganymede poured nectar in abundance, as Apuleius describes it. Vulcan was the cook; the Hours decorated everything with roses and flowers; Apollo played the harp and the Muses sang to it; “but Venus stepped forward and danced to the sweet music”—his mother Venus danced to his delight and theirs.

Witty Lucian, in that moving love passage, his pleasing description of Jupiter’s abduction of Europa and swim from Phoenicia to Crete, makes the sea calm and the winds still. Neptune and Amphitrite ride in their chariot to break the waves before them; Tritons dance all around, each carrying a torch; half-naked sea nymphs keep time on dolphins’ backs and sing the wedding song; Cupid trips nimbly over the water; and Venus herself follows in a shell, strewing roses and flowers over their heads.

In all his representations of Love, Praxiteles depicts Cupid smiling and watching dancers; and in St Mark’s Garden in Rome, one of the most delightful pieces—I do not know whose work it is—shows a group of satyrs dancing around a sleeping girl. So dancing is always, as it were, a necessary accompaniment to love affairs. Young girls are never happier than when, on a holiday after evensong, they can meet their sweethearts and dance around a maypole, or on a town green beneath a shady elm.

Nothing is more common in France than for townsmen’s wives and unmarried women to dance in a circle in the streets, often, for lack of better instruments, making good music with their own voices and dancing to it. Indeed, love often makes old men and women with more toes than teeth dance to “John, come kiss me now,” take part in masques and go mumming. For Comus and Hymen delight immensely in masques and all such merriment: in some circumstances they will allow men to wear women’s clothes, and people of every kind to dance together—young and old, rich and poor, noble and low-born.