Brody

Brody, Alan. The English Mummers and Their Plays: Traces of Ancient Mystery. Phila: U Penn P, 1970.

PREFACE

vii

In his great and prophetic book, The Theater and Its Double, Antonin Artaud speaks of the need to cut through the tyranny of language and rediscover the true relationship between ritual and drama.

No matter how fragmented, modernized, expanded, or overlaid with literary accretions there is invariably a figure who dies and is resurrected.

viii

There are three distinct types of men’s ceremonial: the Hero-Combat, the Sword Play, and the Wooing Ceremony. These three types represent the development of drama out of a single ritual at three different stages of development.

… because of the careful attention figures such as Harrison, Cornford, Murray, and Binney have given to dramatic theory.

The method, then, with all its dangers, is analogy. I am not trying to establish any kind of direct, causal relationship between Greek ritual and the mummers’ play. I have made no attempt to trace the play back to any concrete, historical source.

ONE

INVESTIGATING THE ACTION

There are only two elements that we can safely say all the hundreds of texts and fragments collected so far have in common. They are all seasonal and they all contain a death and resurrection somewhere in the course of their action.

There are two obvious points separating the Hero-Combat form the Sword Dance Ceremony. The first is the linked sword dance itself, never performed by fewer than five men. The second is the manner of death, which does not arise from a direct, hand-to-hand combat, but form the action of the community of dancers on a single character.

The other features worth noting here are the fact that all the Wooing Ceremonies are confined to the East Midland counties and the New Year season. The Hero-Combat, on the other hand, exists everywhere, including the East Midlands, and is found as the Pace Egg Play at Easter and the Soul-Cakers Play at All Souls.

The Ordish collection consists of over six hundred versions o the play, including many wooing texts which would probably have influenced Chambers’ attitude toward it. It would have been difficult for Chambers to dismiss the Wooing Ceremony as he does, calling it a simple variant of the Sword Dance Play (an awkward position to maintain even in the light of only the nine versions Chambers had at his disposal), and describing the wooing element itself as a late accretion of some independent literary play.

[nI Charles Read Baskerville, “Mummers’ Wooing Plays,” MP, XXI (February 1924), 230, has pointed out one reference to a play that could conceivably be construed as a wooing ceremony in The Taming of the Shrew. in the Introduction, the Lord says to the First Player,

This fellow I remember,

Since once he played a farmer’s eldest son:-

’Twas where you wooed the gentlewoman so well:

reference from play texts are tenuous at best ….]

TWO

PERFORMING THE ACTION

The members are strongly aware that they are the ones who have something to dispense—and that thing, in their own words, is “luck.”

Margaret Dean-Smith in her article “Folk Play Origins of the English Masque” makes a great deal of the visit as basic to the ceremonial.

It is only in the men’s dramatic ceremony that the action is set apart from the spectators yet made accessible to all of them by the drawing of the circle.

… the only two players who have direct contact with the spectators remain outside the circle.

The clearing of the circle for the stage can be viewed in a number of different ways, none of which is mutually exclusive. The first is the practical; the next is in connection with primitive ritual; still another is as a specific element of magic in the ceremony.

[nE In Upper and Lower Howsell, Worcestershire, were the play is performed outdoors, Little Devil Doubt clears a circle by brushing away the snow with his besom.]

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… Richard Southern … shows us how the circle evolves as the most primitive solution to the practical problem of sight lines not only in the mummers’ play but in the Tibetan festival dramas and the Mexican Flying Festivals.

Violet Alford … “The simplest figures show the clearest resemblance. The closed chain forming the sunwise (i.e., clockwise) moving circle is invariably used in ritual dances and has been inherited by recreational, social dances. This is deasil (from the Celtic). When traced counter-clockwise the Circle is Malificent and is called widdershins. It quite simply portrays the sun’s track across the heavens and form far distant times has been used to insure that, with this human aid, the sun will follow its appointed course.”

Alford’s analysis of the use of the circle in primitive dance is an extraordinarily packed one, bringing together the ideas of fertility, good and evil, the sun, and safety.

This has to do with the concept of the men as the priests, the primitive agents of magic.

It would be impossible for a character name to have any meaning in a costume like this. What is being enacted is conflict, pure and simple, conflict at its most elemental level, stripped to only the most basic essential: opposing forces.

There is no attempt at realistic representation in any of the traditional examples. Rather, the purpose seems to be one of insisting upon a total lack of identification and this leads us to what is a consistently documented purpose of traditional men’s ceremonial dress, the simple purpose of disguise.

[nH The original costume may have been one of leaves or green branches. But it is an error to try to view the costume as any kind of representation at all. It would be safer to view the original use of branches and leaves as likely simply because these were the most readily available materials for ceremonial dress ….]

In the play from Gander, Kentucky … “I reckon folks all knows hit air bad luck to talk with the dumb show folks or guess who they air.”

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This movement from non-representational ritual disguise through symbolic interpretation to realistic representation is a pattern similar to Theodor Gaster’s tracing [in Thespis] of the progression, on a much larger scale, form non-representational magical ritual to symbolic myth and the Cambridge scholars’ further tracing of that symbolic myth to the representational Greek drama.

The ritual would be performed whether there were spectators present or not. In the ritual drama, however, the action is no longer self-contained.

… the visit, the circle, and the disguise, as well as its seasonal appearance, lead us to believe it was simply the ritual performance of the action that was its raison d’être ….

“They wrangle in this way. At last they belabour the fallen King George with a bladder at the end of a stick. This is the great point form the rustics’ point of view.”

The performance is a purposeful visit; it is performed in a circular playing area which is newly made with each performance; the players are male’ they are traditionally costumed to disguise their identities rather than create a representational illusion; and, finally, they chant or improvise the words which always play a subordinate role to the action being played out.

THREE

THE HERO-COMBAT

[nB … it is a distortion to assume that the Hero-Combat is a direct outgrowth of the medieval mystery. This assumption of a direct relationship was prevalent in the nineteenth century before the discovery of the many primitive ceremonies on the continent, ceremonies which are directly analogous to the men’s ceremonial.]

[nC These divisions of the protagonist’s boast, challenge, and counter-challenge are not present in every play. All the fullest texts have them ….]

Dorothy Sayers, in her introduction to The Song of Roland, outlines the eleventh century chivalric Riles of Battle beginning with the Defiance followed by the Encounter, the Summons to Surrender, the Death Blow, and the Victor’s Boast.

Glynn Wickham traces the development of medieval Battle Training into the Tournament with its highly formal combat of troops, and combatants.

It is my belief that he formal structure of the medieval joust and tournament was taken by the folk and grafted on to the basic Men’s Ceremonial.

[nF It might also be pointed out here that this peculiar split between an early, formal agon and later, apparently looser form finds a direct analogy in the structure of Aristophanic comedy that has puzzled many scholars. See F. M. Cornford ….]

The important thing to note here is that when there is a Lament, the mourner invariably identifies the victim as his “son.”

…and I believe it is another clue to one of the ritual themes present in the ceremony.

The connection between the lamenter and the lamented is that between age and youth ….

… this folk figure of the diminishing “sons” is very likely connected with the loss of the months of the year.

… one of the themes of this combat is the ritual imitation of the death of the sun in winter and its rebirth in spring. There are versions, too, in which the victor compares the death of the antagonist to the dying of the sun.

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It is, in fact suspiciously like the Threnos (Lamentation) preceding the Anagnorisis (Discovery and Recognition) and the Theophany (Resurrection or Apotheosis) of the Greek ritual form.

E. H. Binney … “there is no need to suppose that Euripides deliberately put a popular mummers’ play into literary form when he wrote the Alcestis, still in dramatising the myth he may have consciously or unconsciously reproduced the various characters in their conventional aspect.”

He uses this theory to explain some of the peculiarities of he Alcestis, such as the happy ending and the burlesque Heracles whom he equates with the burlesque doctor of the mummers’ play. For supporting evidence, he also uses the Choral Lament and call for a doctor, which eh believes are analogous in the two forms.

It would be absurd to claim a direct relationship between the roots of the Greek drama and the men’s ceremonial.

Felix Grendon, in his study of Anglo-Saxon Charms, gives us the “distinct characteristics which severally appear in a number of the charms.” Among other, he cites a Narrative Introduction, the Writing Pronouncing of Patent Names or Letters, Methods of Dealing with Disease Demons, the Exorcist’s Boast of Power and Ceremonial Directions to Patient and Exorcist. These ancient elements of magic could easily account for some of the more incomprehensible cures which appear in otherwise fairly coherent versions of the play.

I do not claim that the words here are corruptions of the old Anglo-Saxon charms. That would be impossible to substantiate. What I do believe, however, is that the action of the cure takes its shape form the sequence which Grendon gives us, and which, he says, is common t o all Indo-European cultures.

[nM The Pyrenean doctor also connects the ritual and his role directly to the theme of fertility. The Pyrenean Bear Hunt takes place at Gédre, where a man-bear is hunted, killed, and resurrected.]

One drop on the titch bone of his heart

and one drop on the small of his arm.

In Symondsbury the hobby-horse dies and is revived by the laying-on of hands by Jan and Bet. Here it is apparently the heat that is the reviving agent. This idea of heat is connected with the seasonal aspect of the ceremony and the rejuvenation of the earth with the warmth of the sun in spring.

… the quête, we can find the remains of the primitive celebration analogous to the komos of the Phallic Song.

The Procession of Characters. The characters of the quête procession are generally figures who have not appeared before ….

… Beelzebub with his club and dripping pan and Little Devil Doubt, with a broom.

[nQ One might try to find all sorts of philosophic thematic clues in this name but it is, finally, only a corruption of the contraction, “D’out,” for “Do out,” which refers to the broom and the character’s sweeping out of the old year’s ashes.]

Douglas Kennedy … “With European analogies to guide us, especially primitive phallic examples in Rumania and Macedonia, the Clubman and the reproducing female are essential to the fertility cult. It is the basic cult and not the names of the characters that distinguish the real Plough Play from the Mummers’ Plays which depict only death and resurrection.”

… the mummers’ plays of he southern Balkans, we can find support enough for this view that Beelzebub’s club is directly descended form the phallus of the fertility ritual.

… idea of the Hero-Combat’s Beelzebub as a remnant of a central fertility figure who has become displaced by the combat once the magic of the ceremony has faded … their source in a single ritual.

… hobby-horse … number of appearances of animal disguise becomes astonishingly high.

[nU … Bighead …

My father killed agreat fat hog and this

you may plainly see is the old bladder

out of his old hundy gurdy dee.]

[nV Douglas Kennedy, “Observations of the Sword Dance,” JEFDS … (1930), 36-37, has worked out an ingenious thesis that Jack Finney, the doctor, and the hobby-horse were originally one and the same figure, the life-restorer ….]

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In Cheshire it is made out of a dead horse’s head which has been boiled and then used as the base of the ceremonial horse.

The Quête and the Komos

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In his study of the Phallic songs in The Origin of Attic Comedy … Cornford divides the scheme of the ancient ritual into three major sections: a procession to the place of sacrifice, the sacrifice itself, and the procession resumed with a komos song addressed to Phales. In its relation to Aristophanic comedy, Cronford sees the komos as a survival of the bridal procession and the Sacred Marriage and the ensuing feast as a survival of the Wedding Banquet.

[nAA Cornford … 64-66. This has been considerably modified by … Gaster with the recognition that the komos upon which Aristophanes was structuring the final sections of his plays was really no more than the equivalent of a collegiate binge. See Gaster’s Introduction … p. xxiv.]

… parallel emerges between the komos of the Phallic procession and the quête of the Hero-Combat.

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… it is difficult to dismiss the idea that the ancient figure of the leader of the Phallic Songs, the phallus-bearer of the Phallophoroi and Beelzebub of the men’s ceremonial did at one time serve identical purpose.

The modern men’s ceremonial is, in short, its quête. It is as possible to trace its evolution back to the ancient fertility ritual through the action of its final moments as it is through its action of death and revival.

FOUR

THE SWORD PLAY

Both Rantom Tom and True Blue, the second clown, are equipped with “toy” swords. Toward the end of his prologue song, Tom identifies his sword as “Come strike if you dare.” He then strikes at the air with it and follows the action with

So all you young lasses stand straight and stand firm,

Keep everything tight and close down,

For if anything happens in forty weeks’ time,

The blame will be laid on the clown.

The King then begins walking in a counter-clockwise circle and calls in each of the dancers with two lines, naming and characterizing them in some way. As they are called, they follow him in his circular movement and respond with two more lines of self-introduction until all six dancers are circling the dancing area counter-clockwise. This constitutes the true Calling-on Song, and through it we can still discern the shape of the familiar antiphonal song of the seasonal luck-bringing procession similar to the choral song of the komos.

When we look at the Wooing Version … we shall see how the Calling-on Song is transformed into the self-introductory verses of the wooers. In the Sword Ceremony itself we can see the emphasis gradually shifting form these fertility elements to themes of combat until, with verses like those of Papa Stour, all sense of courtship is gone and the Ceremony is interpreted entirely as a “war-dance.”

KING

Dance a dance! Hast thou come to see a king dance?

CLOWN

Lord ha’ mercy, crack a bottle: if

thou was only ’anged in t’ morn I’d

mak’ a better King mesel’

… the Clown makes his will …. He leaves his third son, Fiddler, his “backbone for fiddlesticks, small bones for fiddle strings,” and finally turns to the King and says:

And as for you, I’ll leave thee the

ringbone of my eye for a jack-whistle.

The dancers tighten the lock around the Clown’s neck, then draw their swords abruptly. With the sharp, sudden sound of steel against steel and the single, swift withdrawal the Clown falls.

The King blames Mr. Sparks; Sparks blames Mr. Stout; Stout blames the Squire’s Son; the Squire’s Son denies his guilt and claims his eyes were shut. Before any resolution is reached, all the dancers decide to bury the corpse in the churchyard mould. … “send for a doctor out of hand.”

He refers to his medicine as “white drops of life,” offering them to any young woman in the company and then goes on to claim

. . . when I was late in Asia, I gave two

spoonfuls to the great Megull, my grandmother,

Which caused her to have tow boys and three girls.

She was then the age of ninety-nine …

Two spoonfuls will cure the cuckle and take away its horns.

The Earsdon Dance: The Old Version and the Buophonia

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After the Captain has introduced all five dancers, he sings,

Now I’m going to kill a bullock,

Of that I’ll make sure;

We’ll kill it in Earsdon town

And divide it amongst the poor.

No bullock is killed in the Earsdon play, although one dancer dies in combat and is resurrected and the Bessie is “hung” with the lock.

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… this verbal figure helps to reinforce the idea of an analogous relationship between the ritual death and resurrection of the men’s ceremonial and yet another primitive fertility action: the Buophonia, or ritual ox-murder.

… Harrison describes this ceremony in some detail in her chapter dealing with the nature of sacrament and sacrifice in the totemistic period of Greek religion. In the Buophonia, an ox is murdered for a communal feast. Before the flesh can be eaten, however, the blame for the murder must be fixed. This shifts form participant to participant in exactly the manner of the Sword Ceremony repudiation sequence until the responsibility falls on the ax. Once the guilt of the ax is established, the ox is flayed, all the flayers taste the flesh and the fayed hide is then stuffed with hay and set up just as it was when it was alive. The participants then yoke a plough to it. In her analysis of the ceremony, Harrison says: “the ox is brought to life again, not because they want to pretend that he has never died and so to escape the guilt of this murder (though later that element may have entered), but because his resurrection is the mimetic representation of the new life of the new year and this resurrection is meant to act magically.” What we have, then, is the same death and resurrection we have been looking at and which we will see recur constantly throughout Europe. With the Buophonia, however, we have this action in the totemistic stage of a civilization’s religious development.

There is here, too, a clear analogy between the resurrected stuffed ox and the hobby horse who is so often characterized as “once dead, now alive” and whose base is the boiled head of a real horse.

The sense of the communal feast is suggested in the final two lines of the Captain’s verse. This, too, we shall see as a major element of the Wooing Ceremony in the Clown’s invitation to his wedding feast.

Despite the brief, rhythmic clashing and the making of the lock, then, the major function of the “sword” is simply as a link between the dancers who use it to form the enclosed dancing circle, that figure which plays such an essential role in the magical nature of any ceremony.

[nQ Alex Helm “… the fact that these implements are nothing like swords is conveniently overlooked. There is some evidence for thinking that the so-called ‘swords’ have some connections with trade tools used in the everyday work of the performers themselves.” Helm goes on to cite the Flamborough “sword” which is almost identical with the fisherman’s weaving tools and the double ended rapper which is similar to the primitive scraping tool.]

… its primitive significance has to do more with magical restoration than death. In one figure, in places like Ampleforth and Haxby, the lock is passed around the circle over the heads of the dancers as it is in the Olaus Magnus account. Douglas Kennedy has seen in this the mimetic rolling of the sun across the heavens.

Alex Helm … “it probably makes better sense, particularly if it is taken as a symbol of the female principle placed over the head of a male performer to complete the union.”

If, for instance, we take Helm’s concept as the most primitive, we can see in this the most basic form of magic using the most basic magic symbol, the circle. This later turns into the more representational kind of mimesis in the ritual imitation of the movement of the sun across the heavens. This only helps reinforce our concept of the ceremony as a seasonal ritual with the sun restoring the life of the dead year in spring. Finally, with the development of the links that form the lock into swords as the ceremony becomes more and more “explained” we get the representation of the execution as we have it today.

… we can place the Sword Ceremony in the direct flow of the fertility ritual celebrating the death of winter and the rebirth of the spring.

… it finally achieves the spectacular effects of the morris dance. In this form the links have turned into handkerchiefs in one case, and there are some Morris sides which still work with sticks.

[nT The analogies between the Sword Ceremony costume and those not only of the morris but of the Hero-Combat, Wooing Ceremony, and Balkan mummers are extraordinary.]

In an interview with one of the finest morris men in England today, I questioned him about the elements of magic involved in the morris. … “Don’t go looking for that magic nonsense in the morris,” he said. “It’s not like that at all. We only do it for a bit of luck.”

FIVE

THE WOOING CEREMONY

… involves every figure of the troupe, an action that is far more unified than anything we have looked at so far.

The Wooing Ceremony is confined to four East-Midland counties—Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and Rutland.

103

[nH … Ordish … deals specifically with the Hero-Combat’s St. George as a summer figure.]

104

For these early scholars, the combat was the crucial action of the dramatic ritual.

This was … before the bulk of the Wooing Ceremony texts were colleted and therefore before the significance of the findings of Wace and Dawkins on the mummers’ plays of Thrace and the Balkans could be fully assimilated.

The conflict between summer and winter becomes only one of a number of mimetic actions all of which spring form the same common, affective purpose: fertility.

The mummers’ plays of Northern Greece are far more sexually explicit than the “civilized” versions of Great Britain ….

105

In 1906, … Dawkins published his descriptions of some mummers’ plays he had witnessed in Northern Greece. On of these the Haghios Gheorghios play from Thrace is in the form of a luck –bringing perambulation. The procession is led by the two major actors, called kalogheroi. Both men wear goatskin masks which cover part of their faces and sheep bells tied round their waists and ankles. Their shoulders are padded and their faces and hands are blackened with ashes. One of the kalogheroi carries a phallus and one a cross bow. Following them come two boys who will later be the “brides” of the ritual, then a Babo, or old woman who carries a basket representing a cradle. Inside the basket is a doll wrapped in rags. Next come two gypsies with ash-blackened hands, carrying scourging rods and, finally, several more players carrying rods and whips. As the procession moves past certain houses, the Babo and the gypsies perform obscene pantomimes of copulation.

The action begins with a mime in which the Babo and the two gypsies froge a ploughshare. We see them build a fire and beat out the metal for it. After this, the rag doll is taken formt eh cradle. It grows up into the phallus-bearing kalogheros who develops a voracious appetite, demanding more and more food, and then calls for a bride. He is married to one of the boy-brides. After the marriage, the second kalogheros enters with his cross-bow. There is a fight. The phallus-bearer is killed. The bride laments and after a pause the victim revives. No doctor appears her. At the resurrection of the phallus-bearer, the completed plough is brought into the dancing circle. This is drawn by all the characters; seeds are scattered behind it and ther is a general cry for good crops.

A similar play occurs in Thessaly where twelve dancers, including a groom who wears bells around his waist similar to those of the morris dancers, go from house to house. Ther is also an Arab or Moor with blackened face and sheepskin mask and tail, a Bride, and a Doctor. The structure of the Thessalian action includes a dispute over the brode, the death of the groom, the call for the doctor and the cure. Here, too, the obscene sexual pantomime is an integral part of the proceedings as well as an antiphonal chorus.

[nL Wace, “Mumming Plays,” reports similar ceremonies form Macedonia, while Dawkins has recorded still others in his study. … Thespis … 406-435, discusses an ancient Near Eastern burlesque fragment. This is “The Canaanite Poem of the Gracious Gods,” which includes much ribald play, pantomimes of copulation, two bides, the birth of “the gracious gods” with abnormally voracious appetites.

The Rumanian Kalusari play, too, bears a strong resemblance to the Balkan mummers.]

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The essential characteristics of all the Balkan versions are the Bride, the groom, the interloper, the old woman with the baby, often an old man as well, and a death and resurrection. These, of course, are precisely the characteristics of the English Wooing Ceremony. In both cases the marriage is established between the “Female” and the leader of the procession, the Fool in Great Britain and the phallus-bearing kalogheros in Greece. This helps to substantiate our contention that the ribald clown as we know him in the Greatham Sword Dance, the club-bearing quêteur of the Hero-Combat, the Fool of the Wooing Ceremony and the ancient phallophori derive form the same ritual figure.

In both the English and the Greek examples, the major conflict is over the possession of the female. It is from this conflict that the combat springs in Greece.

… a ceremony, first and foremost, of fertility, whether it is expressed on the magical human level of copulation, the agricultural level exemplified in the dragging of the plough and the scattering of the seeds, or the cosmic level played out in the combat of the seasons.

The Corn Spirit

107

… Frazer … After dealing with the personification of the spirit of vegetation in double form as male and female in various cultures, he proceeds to describe its appearance in “a double female form as both old and young.”

A Scottish custom … The Maiden is invariably fashioned from the last stalks left standing while the Old Wife is made form earlier cuts.

… the Wooing Ceremony …. The double-female figure appears here as the Lady and Old Dame Jane. The Fool woos the young female. Old Dame Jane arrives with the infant in her arms giving evidence that the Fool has already wooed and won her.

108

… the [Scottish] farmer has retained the Maiden and passed the Old Wife on to his neighbor.

… in Greece the kalogheros must marry the Bride. There is still the “sacred marriage” to be performed.

[nP The analogy with Zeus and Demeter is of particular interest, for in another context Demeter and Persephone can be seen to comprise a mythic version of the double-female corn spirit.]

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… Cornford … with Aristophanic comedy, the protagonist is still found wearing an artificial phallus.

Both these observations, the previous animal nature of the divine bridegroom in the sacred marriage and the presence of the phallus, find correspondents in Greece and England.

… Yorkshire, in 1793 …

My name it is Captain Calf-tail, Calf-tail,

And on my back it is plain to be seen;

Although I’m simple and wear a fool’s cap.

I’m dearly beloved of a queen.

Cornford, Frazer … Gaster all deal with the concept of the communal feast as an integral part of the fertility ceremony.

110

But we find this concept of the communal feast even more clearly and consistently expressed at the conclusion of Aristophanic comedy with the final banquet, marriage celebration or invitation to the feast.

… the communal feast is by no means limited to that form of the men’s ceremonial [Wooing Play]. We have already seen it alluded to in the sacrament of the Buophonia which informs the Sword Play and the quête figures of the Hero-Combat which call for food and drink for all.

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What all these analogies suggest, simply, is that the Wooing Ceremony from the East Midlands is the form of the men’s ceremonial closest in structure and thematic focus to its primitive ancestor, the fertility ritual.

The Later Development

… literary influences … the folk wooing song and the Elizabethan jig.

These, however, do not enter clearly until the beginning of the sixteenth century.

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The use of ancient sacred wells and groves for church sites is only one example. The transformation of agricultural fertility festivals into seasonal Christian celebrations is another. Parts of the medieval mystery cycles spring form the is process, too. The processional nature of the performances, the coarse burlesque and the appearance of comic devils, complete with tails and clubs owe much to their popularity in the primitive fertility ceremony.

[nU … Ordish … held the belief that it was the Christian drama which diverted the stream of folk ritual into less rich soil.]

The Recruiting Sergeant

114

This is the figure of the Recruiting Sergeant. There are at least fifty-nine versions of the Wooing Play which include the Recruiting Sergeant as a principal figure.

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Nevertheless, what is so impressive is not so much the range of forms the play demonstrates in this complex history, but its ability to remain so extraordinarily coherent and unified.

SIX

TRACES OF ANCIENT MYSTERY

Myth, Ritual, and Drama

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it has been suggested that Macbeth contains all the elements of the archetypal winter king who must be slain by the figure of summer. This is a splendid insight, but no one would seriously think of performing the tragedy in order to insure a punctual thaw.

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… Gaster divides ritual into two types, kenosis, or emptying, and plerosis, or filling. The alternation of these two types corresponds to the rhythm of the cosmos, the constant evacuation of the life of the earth and its replenishment with the changing of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the animal processes of sleeping and waking, death and birth. The rites of Plerosis include “mock combats against the forces of drought or evil, mass mating, the performance of rain charms and the like, all designed to effect the reinvigoration of the topocosm.”

… ritual actions like the Dionysiac procession were, in fact, performed as preludes to the performances of the plays themselves in Greece. The medieval mystery cycles may have grown out of the church service, but even at the height of their achievement they only complemented Christian ritual; they never supplanted it.

…ritual, myth, and drama … three concepts are interdependent, with variations only in emphasis.

120

Harrison shows how the responsibility for ritual action tends to shift form the community to the individual in Greek religion until all magical power is invested in the figure of the king.

121

[nF Arthur Beatty, “The St. Geeorge or Mummers’ Play,” TWAS, xv (October 1906), 323-324 … “the myth or legend is a late invention to explain the ceremony. In all cases where both survive, the ceremony has all the marks of being the original.”]

The Wooing Ceremony: The Fertility-Daimon

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These are the rituals of the Mamuralia and Anna Perenna of March 14 and 15. March 15 was the day of the first full moon of the new year. On the day before, a man dressed in goat skins was led in procession through the streets of Rome, beaten with long white rods, and driven out of the city. This was Mamurius or Veturius, the embodiment of the Old Year, the Old Mars, Death, Winter driven out before the incoming New Year, the young Mars, Spring. On the following day, the festival of Anna Perenna was held and it is here that we can see most clearly the kind of seasonal ritual form which the Wooing Ceremony may have sprung.

But Ovid tells a story in his Fasti which is the mythic explanation of the festival of Anna Perenna. Mars wishes to marry. He asks Anna to help him have Minerva, but old Anna veils her face and takes the place of the bride. Old Anna comes to Mars instead of his promised bride and he does not realize the deception. Fortunately, the veil is stripped away and Old Anna is discovered before the marriage is consummated. She is rejected just as Dame Jane is rejected in the Wooing Ceremony.

[nH … Frazer … Fasti … Appendix, p. 397 … makes a strong case for Mars as a fertility god, citing Cato the Elder’s treatise on farming in which Mars is prayed to for the prosperity of the earth.]

124

… analogous to the English Wooing Ceremony as well as the Thracian and Balkan mummers’ plays with the appearance of the old woman, her rejection by the bridegroom and the divine marriage. Even the scapegoat ritual of the Mamuralia finds its counterpart in the rejection of the old man by the young lady who is to be the bride.

The Hero-Combat: St. George as Hero-Daimon

The principal factors of the festival of the Oschophoria are the agon or contest, the pathos, a defeat or death, and the triumphant reappearance or rebirth. Thse are, of course, the principal factors of the Hero-Combat as well. It is interesting to note, too, that it is the Hero-Combat which has the closest analogous relation to the Greek drama, with the sequence of Agon, Pathos, Threnos, Anagnorisis, and Theophany.

125 @@

In this legend, George of Cappodocia comes forward against King Datianus, who has been persecuting the Christians of Persia. Datianus commands George to sacrifice to Apollo, but George blasphemes against all pagan deities. He is tortured and imprisoned. While in prison, God tells him he is to suffer seven years, and that he will be killed three times. at his fourth death he will enter paradise. All this comes to pass, and in the apocryphal version each of the tortures and deaths is rendered in the most explicit detail.

At the first death, George is cut into ten pieces, but the Angel Michael collects all the pieces of the body. God touches them with His hand and revitalizes them. This kind of sparagmos places the figure of George directly in the tradition of Osiris, Dionysus, Orpheus, and Tammuz, all dying and reviving vegetation gods.

The Nature of the Ceremony Today

126

The action of the Sword Play seems to originate in totemistic ritual while the central figure of the Wooing Ceremony seems the more individualized expression of the community, the fertility-daimon. In the Hero-Combat there appears the even more individualized protagonist of the legendary hero.

127

What is so extraordinary is that the process has taken so long; for it is almost a thousand years since there was any reason for the men of the town to meet on one night of the year, to hide their faces, to move from station to station through the town and, in the center of the magic circle, to re-enact the death and resurrection of their earth, the eternal pattern of the seasons.

APPENDIX D

EXCURSUS ON THE ENTERTAINMENT AT REVESBY

148

The play was performed in Revesby Abbey, Lincolnshire, on October 20, 1779 ….

152

There are also a number of echoes of the Hero-Combat in the speeches of this section including such topsy-turvy images as,

As I was a-looking round about me through my wooden spectacles made of a great, huge, little, tiney, bit of leather, placed right behind me, even before me . . . (70-73)

Now, gentlemen, you see how ungrateful my children is grown! When I had them at home, small, about as big as I am, I put them out to good leaning: I put them to Coxcomb College, and then to the University of Loggerheads; and it took them home again this good time of Christmas, and I examined them all one by one, all together for shortness . . . (172-181)

155

… an entertainment very different from the spontaneous, traditional play peculiar to a particular festival, but able to draw on all of them for the delight of an audience whose recognition of those forms was taken for granted.

APPENDIX G

THE RUMANIAN KALUSARI PLAY

163

One mute begins to kill lice with his wooden phallus, the other meanwhile tries to saw the first mute’s head off using his wooden phallus as a sword. One mute takes his shirt off to de-louse it. Next comes a procession led by the Turkish overlord, wearing a white dress, a wide red cummerbund and fez.

164

… the Turk assumes occupation of the castle and looks for a bride.

Then enters the Russian, shown to be an obnoxious character ….

Whilst the priest is on the roof, a shot is fired, and the Turk is killed.

165

… later [the priest] carries out a perfunctory Christian burial service over the infidel Turk. The Russian insults the widow and finally, in the last details of the burial, sits on his victim’s head.

The next film from Falfani shows the mute disguised as a bull with horns, leading the procession in two instances with a great extended phallus. This is followed by the dancers dancing over the sick children.

From Bukovina comes a new Year’s Dance of village boys wearing masks. The characters include an old man carrying the broken wheel of the sun, a Hobby horse and Jew, a Bear Gypsy [sic], a Bride and Groom, and old men who act a mime of harvesting. The Bear and Gypsy dance together, the Hobby horse dances with the Jew, and the Bride with the Groom: the old men work with harvesting forks. The Bear dies, and the Gypsy strikes him gently with two sticks in an effort to bring him to life. He turns him round and tries to pull him up, but the bear falls again. The bear takes the broken wheel of the sun, and is finally turned in reverse to the sun and is revived.

Finally form Slobozia comes another film showing the mute with animal mask and carrying a wooden phallus and crook covered with red binding. The main company dace round their standard, the mute turning somersaults and dancing in his own way. He has taken a pot full of water form a house, and pours the water over his head, throwing the pot high in the air. This was supposed to kill drought. The dancers next form a pyramid, three men high, holding the post, to represent a good harvest with high stacks of corn.

166

This is repeated twice over. The men dance on all fours, face down, and the mute fetches a puppy which he castrates whilst the dance continues. This is not shown on the film. Finally the poles are thrown on the ground and the men dance with hands on each others’ shoulders. The mute drags women form the audience into the field.

The lengthiest action of all these filmed versions is also incomplete because there is no revival. Whether there ever had been in this particular village is not known, but on the evidence form elsewhere it seems a reasonable assumption that there once had been.

… filmed between the two world wars, it was performed by people who were, even at that time, still living in primitive conditions ….

… the enclosure of a space by a ring of linked performers as worthy of special mention. I referred to this particular performance when discussing the sword dance ceremonies, and suggested that the true origin of the linked dances of the north-east of England, might be found in some such action as the Rumanians performed. The space enclosed by there [sic] characters is clearly intended to represent a marriage house ….

The use of such a marriage bower dates form the earliest periods of history: for example, in the early kingdoms of Mesopotamia, a sacred marriage, with parts often played by the king and his daughter, took place inside a fragile ‘marriage house’ or ‘bower.’ The sacred marriage was also one of the rituals in the annual cycle of Dionysos, presumably the Roumanian example, and possibly our own sword dance ceremony, have their roots in this same primitive custom.

APPENDIX H

EXTRACT OF A LETTER FROM E. M. LEATHER

167

The first horse’s head was stolen, so two of the men went to Toole’s of Warrington and got another head and they boiled it in a boiler at the ‘Saracen’s Head’ and got all the flesh off it. They had to put it together again and glued the teeth in, painted it and decorated it and put it on a wooden leg and put a handle at the back to open its mouth and the man underneath the cloth worked it.

NOTES

NOTES TO PREFACE

169

2. Richmond Y. Hathorn, Tragedy, Myth, and Mystery ….

NOTES TO CHAPTER I ….

4. E. C. Cawte et al., English Ritual Drama ….

170

15. E. H. Binney, “Oxfordshire Mummers,” a transcript of a lecture in front of the Oxford Antiquarian Society ….

NOTES TO CHAPTER III: THE HERO-COMBAT

171

2. The Song of Roalnd, tr. Dorothy Sayers ….

172

9. Euripides, The Alcestis, tr. Gilbert Murray ….

24. Verrier Elwin, “The Hobby Horse and his Ecstatic Dance,” FL, LIII (1942), 209-213.

27. George Long, The Folklore Calendar ….

… CHAPTER VI: TRACES OF ANCIENT MYSTERY

1. Norman N. Holland, “Macbeth as Hibernal Giant,” Literature and Psychology, X (1960), 37-38.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

177

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Artaud, Antonin, The Theater and Its Double ….

179

Cawte, E. C., Alex Helm, and Norman Peacock. English Ritual Drama.

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Dean-Smith, Margaret. “Folk Play Origins of the English Masque,” FL, lxv (1954), 74-86.

180

Farnell, Lewis Richard. The Cults of the Greek States ….

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo ….

181

Holland, Norman N. “Macbeth as Hibernal Giant,” Literature and Psychology, x (1960), 37-38.

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182

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology.

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183

Matzke, John E. “The Legend of Saint George; Its Development into a Roman d’Aventure,” PMLA, xix, iii (1904), 449-478.

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184

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Utley, Francis Lee. “Folklore, Myth and Ritual,” in Critical Approaches To Medieval Literature.

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