Social dancing was more than a pastime for the Elizabethan courtier, conspicuous success could be a mark of accomplishment for a man or woman in London court society. Women especially might be judged on their grace and elegance, while they eyed the men for assurance and elegant control over bodily motion. In this society, music could be a sign of proper breeding and upbringing, and to have music dedicated to one a badge of honor. While once composers had only dedicated their works to kings, popes, and prelates, by the end of the sixteenth century it apparently became a popular status symbol, even for lesser nobility and bourgeois to have music written for them. An unknown "Mrs. Winter" thus entered the pages of history when world-famous lutenist and composer John Dowland wrote music that would bear her name.

Mrs. Winter's Jump, the piece in question, is no overt and ponderous "masterwork." It is, rather, a simple piece for dancing or for polite entertainment of an evening around a fireplace. Formally, Mrs. Winter received from Dowland a gigue, one of many continental dance forms appropriated by Elizabethan England; it falls easily into two repeated strains of music, each leading through regularly structured phrases in a rollicking compound meter to a predictable cadence. The manuscript copies of the piece that survive include some graceful ornamentation to the repeat of the first strain. Yet even in such a simple construction, the musical mind of Dowland cannot rest. He invests the bare 16 measures of the gigue with its own musical character, perhaps in emulation of Mrs. Winter herself. The close of the second strain both times does in fact jump, with an uncharacteristically nimble set of arpeggios in place of his more common running passages. As if seen in a painted portrait, Mrs. Winter's Jump may reflect a hint of the historical human being.

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