Jig (theatre): History and Key Facts

In theatres, beginning in Elizabethan London, a jig was a short comic drama that immediately followed a full-length play.

By the Pop Culture Files editorial team•Updated September 30, 2026•2 min read•✓ Fact-checked

Image from frontispiece to The Wits, showing theatrical drolls (characters taken from different Jacobean plays, including Shakespeare, played together) in Restoration Theatre in England — attrib. Francis Kirkman · Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

In theatres, beginning in Elizabethan London, a jig was a short comic drama that immediately followed a full-length play. This phenomenon added an additional comic or light-hearted offering at the end of a performance. A jig might include songs sung to popular tunes of the day, and it might feature dance, stage fighting, cross-dressing, disguisings, asides, masks, and elements of pantomime.

These short comic dramas are referred to by historians as stage jigs, dramatic jigs, or Elizabethan jigs.

The term, jig, at the same time maintained its common definition, which refers to a type of dance or music. In the various primary sources the term appears with a number of different spellings: jigg, jigge, gig, gigg, gigge, gigue, jigue, jeg, jegg, and jygge.

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