Dancing Sailors and their Costumes on the London Stage

Dancing by sailors sometimes featured as an integral part of a play and was almost certainly the most popular genre for entr'acte dances and dancing in entertainments on the English stage in the eighteenth century. It was, of course, the century during which the British navy became a dominant force in world affairs and became a great source of national pride. Popular couple dances featured a sailor with his lass, his wife of his mistress, and the popular Dutch Skipper was sometimes accompanied by his 'Frau'. There were sailors' festivals and weddings, merry sailors, jovial Jack Tars and even the 'drunken sailor reclaimed'. In the danced entertainment The Wapping Landlady, or Jack in Distress, sailors were fleeced by the landlady and her daughter. And there were countless hornpipes, generally but not always danced in the character of a sailor and sometimes even by a real sailor from one of his majesty's ships. This paper will look at sailor costumes provided by the theatres and at the evidence of prints to trace how the popular idea of what sailors should wear on the stage changed during the century and beyond. 

Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson have written extensively on seventeenth and eighteenth century singers and theatre performers for musical periodicals and for New Grove and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. They edited facsimile editions of the complete songs of Richard Leveridge (1997) and of The Monthly Mask of Vocal Music, 1702-1711 (2007). Recent articles and papers include 'Watching the Maskers: Masquerade Dances int he London Theatre' (Oxford, via Zoom, 2021), 'Places for Dancing: Assembly Rooms in eighteenth-century Essex' (Oxofrd, 2022), 'A Hundred Years of the Funeral Procession and Dirge in Romeo and Juliet' (Theatre Notebook, 2022), 'Mistresses of Dancing-schools in Ediburgh, 1755 to 1814' (Historical Dance, 2022) and 'John Hindmarsh, 1758-1796, Violinist and Viola player' (Early Music Performer, forthcoming).