#thomas caverley

As it turned out, however, [John] Weaver was more than a run-of-the-mill comic dancer or schoolteacher.  He belonged to a small group of like-minded ballet-masters teaching and living in London, including one Isaac, who was Queen Anne's dancing-master, and Thomas Caverley, who ran an esteemed school in Queen's Square.  Like dancing-masters everywhere, these men closely followed developments in the French capital, and in 1706 Weaver translated and published Feuillet's treatise on notation.  Several years later he produced an ambitious, freewheeling (and freely plagiarized) reflection on his art: An Essay Towards an History of Dancing, In which the Whole Art and its Various Excellencies are in some Measure Explain'd.  The work was dedicated to Caverley and published by the Whig bookseller Jacob Tonson, who also published Milton, Congreve, and Dryden.  And this was only the beginning: Weaver later published (among other writings) his Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures on Dancing, and a polemical defence of his own life's work, The History of the Mimes and Pantomime..