SPECIAL ARTICLE THE MUMMERS' PLAY.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18343, 28 March 1925, Page 11

SPECIAL ARTICLE THE MUMMERS' PLAY.

A CURIOUS SURVIVAL.

vived mediteval doctrine." (The Keturn of the Native.) The prime condition necessary for such a survival as this is isolation. "The plays must have grown up in small and almost isolated communities," is the conclusion drawn by our authority. The faintest breath of competition will kill so feeble a growth, and it is only in villages where no other form of amusement is available that the Play usually survives. During the 'eighties and 'nineties of last century I often visited such a place, and regularly for years formed a part of the Mummers' scanty audience. This is the village of Stanton St. Bernard, in Wiltshire, on the edge of the Marlborough downs, about five miles from the large village of Pewsey and seven from the market town of Devizes. The population was between two and three hundred souls. The whole conditions of the place were very primitive and almost mediaeval. There was' no shop, and all stores were brought by carrier's cart from Devizes; the carrier could not read or write, and all his accounts and his lists of commissions were kept in his head. The village was by no means typical: it had no squire, no pump, no inn nearer than about a mile, and no outstanding idiot. There were , two largish tenant farmers holding of the noble landlord (Lord Pembroke), to whom the whole surrounding country seemed to belong. The life of the villagers was almost incredibly narrow, and their intellectual state at best! crepuscular. The nearest railway station is three miles away, and many of the inhabitants, especially the women, had never travelled in a train, or even been as far as Devizes. The present. vicar tells me that he once took sixty of them on a day's excursion to the sea about 12 years ago, and only two of these had ever seen it. before. The average wages were from ten to fifteen shillings a week, and on this the labourer brought up his family. I gathered that all of them were always in debt to the town shops, and who can wonder at it? Their pretty thatched cottages were rented at about 2s 6d a week, and they gardened very industriously and successfully. There was one small farmer a little above the rank of the peasantry; he farmed the glebe. This' man might have walked out of a book. His name was really and truly Giles; he wore a smock-frock and leggings and a sunflower beard; he talked accordingly, and would tell how he once visited Lunnon and how the waiter at the eating-house whisked away his plate before he had fairly begun to eat; he would sit at table with his knife and fork held perpendicularly, their bases linn upon the cloth and their points directed to heaven; and in his house there was an ancestral spinet, upon which I (save the mark!) have played. He called his people thou and thee, and bo, on occasion, the other farmers The Mummers' arrived at 8 o'clock on Christmas Eve at the Vicarage, and the performance was given • in the kitchen. All the persons were enveloped in their mumming guise—long streamers of coloured paper covered them from top to toe. The shy boys would keep their faces hidden behind these as far as possible. There were five or six of them, village boys up to about 15 years old, with an older one acting Father Christmas. During the performance they continued to walk round and round the kitchen in single file, their hobnailed boots clattering cheerfully on the bricks. The good Vicar, who loved them all as if they were his own children, would playfully peep through their ribbons and identify Sammy Butter or Johnny Zebedee, to the general amusement. One character must always carry a sack on his back —the Spanish Doctor, I think it was—and the Vicar's fox-terrier, who strenuously objected to the whole performance, would leap up and seize the Doctor's sack and hold on while the unperturbed actor tramped on reciting his bit The "march round" is thought to be a remnant of the dance which was anciently a part of the ceremony. The whole play was done in the mechanical and lifeless manner described by Hardy. The words were spoken in a loud, graceless monotone without a trace of feeling, and in the broadest West County dialect, with strongly reverberant B's. The duel consisted of three exchanges of claps with long wooden swords—one, two, three, "by numbers"—after which one boy fell and the doctor was called upon to prescribe. No attempt was made here to bring the play up to date or to introduce fresh comic topical matter as has so frequently been done in the examples collected in Tiddy's book. The present vicar tells me that the play is now lost and had gone before he came to Stanton twelve years ago. One wonders how long it will survive anywhere as a natural growth; it would seem that the cinema must give it the coup de grace, though "revivals" and modified performances are already in vogue. The Mummers' Play has been very curiously and (variously modified and influenced from without since the 16th Century, and the rude artistio instincts of the peasantry have found fresh expression in it here and there. Scraps of real playhouse drama occur in it in some places; in one case, in Cornwall, a quite recognisable piece of Addison's Opera of Rosamund (1707) is incorporated in it, —an astonishing 'tiling, for Addison's work is so distinctly of the tcwn, towny. Other .examples show affinity with Elizabethan drama, especially with the comedy of Mucedorus (1598). Very many of them exhibit traces of contact or community of origin with the Miracles and Morality Plays of the 14th and 15th Centuries; some echo the drolleries of the ancient text-books of the 16th. On the other hand crude attempts aro made here and there to bring the form into relation with present-day life. The St. George of the original (or very old) form is now universally King George, and continues to fight with the Turkish Knight, who obviously ' belongs to the Crusades. Cromwell, Blake, Admiral Byng, Napoleon, and many other heroes appear in some versions as they do in folk-song. An extreme example, is quoted from a Yorkshire version where n character enters saying: "In comes I, a suffragette. Over my shoulder I carry jny clogs!" The conditions which produced the ceremonial rite of which our Mummers' Play is the degenerate descendant have, of course, long since passed away, and those which have kept it alive or halfalive down to these days are rapidly passing, so that it is evidently doomed. Eevivals, modified forms, and even genuinely literary offspring of it will probably prolong its thread of life, but the true survival, it would seem, must go. Ought we to regret it? The answer must be No! However interesting the thing may be as a link with a prehistoric faith or as a representative of true peasant art, the price demanded for its continuance is too high. We may be grieved to think that the cinema will usurp its place, but no thinking person can grudge the English agricultural labourer the happier times and brighter conditions which, we hope, are now dawning for Mm. If he cannot preserve this ancient traditional pastime without being and remaining as illiterate and stationary as one of his own cabbages, then it should join the other relics of paganism and superstition In the limbo of forgotten things.

(By Professor Arnold Walt..)

It is a little surprising that the ♦'Mummers' Play," which has been performed since time immemorial by jjnglish peasant boys at Christmas and jg so essentially of "the folk," should Jiave had to wait till 1923 for a literary expositor, because folk-song, folk-lore, folk-dance —everything which concerns the art of the English villager, has engaged the closest attention of many icholars for many years. The late J{. J. E. Tiddy 's work* was, indeed, well in hand by 1914: he had collected a great deal of material and was proceeding nith his full study when the call of duty came, and the book as now published, with a memoir and letters of the author, is due to the pious labours of fcis friends. Tiddy was born in the Cotswold tountry in 1880, his father being of Cornish, his mother of Oxfordshire ftock, and both of the "yeoman farmer" class. He was as fond of his I'folky" origin as another man might lie of his descent from the Conqueror >r from Sebastian Cabot. Educated at Jbnbridge he went up to University College, Oxford, as a Classical Scholar. Bis career was very brilliant; he became a Fellow of Trinity, Oxford, devoted himself after taking the highest possible honours in Classics to the study of English Literature, and was Lecturer in English and Classical

Literature at the time of the outbreak of the Great War. He threw himself with characteristic vigour and enthusi- '• asm into the study of folk-song and • Morris dances and did much to revive • these arts in rural England; he even taught the dances to the men in training for the • fields of France on Salisbury Plain, jnd familiarised the society of Oxford With "the spectacle of University Dons fa bells and baldric dancing these vigorous dances to the music of the pipe' ; And Tabor"—surely a very great feat. Tiddy was killed by a shell at lAventie in 1916 at the early age of 36. ' He was specially qualified by birth '' tad upbringing for the work he took in ■■ iand, being one of those happy people » irho not only love and admire '' the lolk," but have the power of winning | |heir confidence and entering into their ■ inmost hearts without effort—a rare gift in itself and especially rare in a treat and distinguished Classical Jcholar. His work consists of a collection of /hirty-three versions of the Mummers' ' play, one from Ireland, the rest from different parts of England, but chiefly from the South-West country, where he had the best opportunities. A memoir of Tiddy is prefaced to the work and there* is a very full and learned account of the play, its supposed origin, artistic characters, and literary affinities, with mueh illuminating comment upon the art of the peasantry in generaL The "Mummers' Play" exists in a great variety of forms and versions, but its main outlines are everywhere - the name. The central incident is a iuel between two swordsmen, one. of 'whom is killed or wounded, after which : he is cured or brought back to life by * doctor. It always begins with a kind . of indu.tion spoken usually by Father Christmas; this calls for room and the ■ indulgence of the spectators and Eromisea a fine performance. The dnelsts are generally St. George (or King George) and a Turkish Knight In addition to Father Christmas the dnellists and the doctor, there are certain comic characters, very variable in num- . ber —those include ai Fool or 01 own; the ' Doctor's Man, generally called Jack V Finney or Tiney; sometimes a Manwoman; and Beelzebub and other minor characters. The manner of presentation is in the highest degree primitive ' and almost lifeless, the words being V spoken with the least possible amount , ; »f expression and with no gesture or • action beyond the necessary minimum. Thomas Hardy has introduced the Mummere' Play with great artistic effect in - "The Beturn of the Native"; the . heroine, Eustacia Vye, joins the boys in >, the masquerade in order to get a sight ' »f Olym Yeobright, the man whose life ; > the is to ruin. Hardy's account of the performance is very faithful and vivid. Of the manner of delivery, he says: f . "Of mummers and mumming Eustacia the greatest contempt. The mumSnera themselves were not afflicted with - any such feeling for their art, though the same time they were not en- ; thnaiastic." A traditional pastime is to ,f be distinguished from a mere revival Sn no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excite- ' ment and fervour, the survival is cartied on with a stolidity and absence of Btdr which sets one wondering why a thing that is done bo perfunctorily ■houTd be kept up at all. tike Balaam suid other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to try and do their allotted parts whether they -will or no. This unweetkng mnaner of • performance is the . true ring by which, in , this refurbishing age, a fossilised sur—- .. vival may be known from a spurious * Reproduction." Anthropological science has dealt With the Mummers' Play and it has been quite conclusively shown that it is indeed, in Hardy's words, fossilised • tnrvivaL" Its origins are ritualistic; ' it has its beginnings in religious ceremonies. Both the Mummers' Play and the Sword-dance of the North of England have a certain symbolic significance, the death and bringing to life •gain in each case being the central theme or germinating idea. These two forms of peasant art stand in close relation to the tribal ceremonies of ■ primitive man wherein a representative '®f the spirit of life in the tribe is "put through a pretended death and '.v then restored to life," or a conflict is presented "between the old year and . the new, between the waxing and the Waning life of the Earth" —these are Regarded as means of securing fertility. Thus the play is doubtless of extreme Mtiquity, though it has been profoundly , changed in • detail in response to the • changing conditions of the ages and the stress of .varying local environments, It is very frequently referred to Sn literature from the Paston Letters of the Fifteenth Century onwards and many versions of it have been printed from tim© to time. The play is no doubt a survival from Pagan times. Here, again, Thomas ■' Hardy must be called upon. '' The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the ■ymbolic customs which tradition has Attached to each season of the year were yet a reality ,in Ijgdoii. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets Me pagan still: in these spots homage to . Nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, •eem in some way or other to have sur-

„) . The Mummers' Play." Clarendon ; , f'Hl, 1923.