"The English Mummers as Manifestations of the Social Self"
Christine Herold
Ödense, 1998
To begin my discussion, I offer Roger Renwick's definition of the Mummers' Play,
that seasonal part-celebration, part-drama, part-ritual, part-display of aggression, part-seeking for a handout, part many other things, [that] was once a common traditional activity over most parts of the British Isles whose cultural heritage is chiefly Anglo-Saxon rather than Celtic.(1)
A variety of names have been applied to this activity. Besides Mummers' Play, it has been called "Folk-Play," "Life-Cycle-Play," folk "mime," "luck-perambulations,"(2) "Ritual Drama," "men's ceremonial,"(3) and "Traditional Drama,"(4) Likewise, a variety of scholarly perspectives have been applied to the study of this activity, among them, the typological approach of Halpert; the cultural evolutionary and comparative methods of Chambers, Brody,(5) Tiddy,(6) Dean-Smith, Cawte, Peacock and Helm (et al.(7)); Pattison's functional approach; the semiotics of Glassie and Weidlich;(8) the contextual analyses of Pettitt;(9) and the socio-psychological studies of Renwick, Szwed and Faris.(10) Of course, one needs a text, or to witness a performance in order to analyze; and since the majority of performances accessible to modern scholars have been revivals, and since most written records of performances date from as recently as the eighteenth century,(11) scholarship has been limited in its attempts to extrapolate its observations into earlier historical periods. Nevertheless, although we have no texts of earlier performances of mummers' plays, we do have records and brief descriptions of seasonal activities called guisings or mummings in administrative, legal and ecclesiastical records stemming from the Middle Ages.(12) Thomas Pettitt has done scholarship a service in his thorough examination of these records as well as in his enthusiasm in pursuit of "the living traditions behind" the records.(13) Neville Denny considers that "the remarkable persistence of formal elements and character-types in the folk-plays (fool, champions, quack-doctor, man-woman, comic devil; presentation, vaunting, combat, death, `cure', and quête or collection) argues for the antiquity of these plays."(14) I think that few will dispute either a connection between the play as we have it in revival today and its ancestral guisings, or the antiquity of the character-types--not specific identifications of characters, as William Wallace, etc.--but the types of characters represented in the mummings. These generic, so to speak, types are the subject of my analysis. For I would like to add to the fruitful approaches to the Mummers' Play mentioned previously that of Neo-Jungian Feminist Critical Theory.
My paper attempts an explication of some of the recurring mythological, or archetypal, figures which make up the cast of characters in the Anglo-Saxon British Mummers' Play. The paper's title, "The English Mummers as Manifestations of the Social Self," announces my speculations as to the social meaning of the dramatic and comic public ritualization of these archetypal elements. I apply Jungian theory for an understanding of such stock characters as Saint George, Father Christmas, the Doctor, the Fool and the Man-Woman as collective projections of unconscious contents of archetypes central to the medieval English Folk Identity. I explore, in particular, the representations of the Feminine, and of the masculinized Ego in the figures of the Man-Woman and the Champions. Male Mummers and Guisers appear in overtly gender-cross-dressed form. Female characters such as Bet, Little Dame Dorothy, Miss Funny and the Old Woman were, and are, traditionally played by men, in dramatic contrast to the exaggerated masculinity of characters such as Saint George, the Turk, Bold Slasher, and Valiant Soldier. Such reversals, as well as the use of alcohol to lower inhibitions, seem to indicate a semi-ritualized encounter between an aggressive masculine persona and its more feminine aspects. In this way, the mummings function as mirrors, or collective projections, if you will, of various psychological characteristics of the social groups which perform and support these plays. In analyzing what I call the Psyche of the Folk Play, I hope to increase our understanding of the persistence of the mumming tradition in England.
Most scholars accept E. K. Chambers'(15) identification of three main types of British folk play: The Hero-Combat form (commonly identified as The Mummers' Play), The Wooing Play (also called the Plough Play), and The Sword Play. Chambers explains their relationship:
The Mummers' Play, the Plough Play, and the Sword Dance, . . . are closely linked by common features: by attachment to the festivals of the rustic calendar, to Christmas or to the resumption of agricultural work, which follows upon Christmas, or to Easter; by the inevitable quête or `gathering'; by the omnipresent Fool; by the Man-Woman, that unquiet spirit, for whom there is no obvious function, but for whom a place always has to be found; above all by the persistent theme of the Mock Death and the Cure which is its almost invariable sequel.(16)
I am most interested in examining the characters involved in the Mock-Combat, and especially in "that unquiet spirit," the Man-Woman. I hope to show how archetypal theory is able to enlighten our understanding of these recurrent figures and their functions in this traditional drama. In response to the need for conciseness, I will concentrate my attentions upon these figures as they typically appear in the Hero-Combat form of the Mummer's Play, henceforth referred to as the Mummer's Play. I quote from Renwick as to "the essentials of its dramatic action" which
consist of a battle between two warriors, such as St. George and the Turkish Knight; the felling of one by the other; the latter's cure by a comic Doctor, often assisted by his equally comical servant or apprentice, Jack; and then some semiautonomous cavorting by characters who play little if any part in the observed plot--characters like Beelzebub, Miss Funny, Big Head and Little Wit, Little Devil Doubt, Humpty Jack, and others.(17)
This action is performed traditionally exclusively by men. Herbert Halpert, whose attempt at a typology of mumming in all its world-wide and trans-historical manifestations, yields valuable insights into what he terms the "mumming complex," comments on a significant characteristic of this gender-exclusive tradition:
In the long history of mumming in Great Britain and America, and probably elsewhere, a common pattern is evident: the rowdiness and dangerous (sometimes criminal) behaviour of the disguised mummers have been met by repeated civic bans on the practice. These bans have a curious habit of repeating themselves in time, suggesting the deep-seated nature of the custom of mumming, which has been suppressed only to rise again in the old or a new form.(18)
Prohibitions and official disapprobation concerning mummings are noted by Charles Read Baskerville in documents from as far back as the Anglo-Saxon period, by such as Bede, Aelfric and Edgar.(19) Venetia Newall tells us that a group posing as mummers attempted the assassination of Henry IV, and that "Henry VIII issued a decree against mumming," the penalty for which was "arrest as a vagabond and three months in prison."(20) Mumming, as persistently popular as it seems to have been, and, indeed, continues to be, has, at the same time, been viewed as a threat to society. Halpert suggests that the eventual sponsorship of medieval guilds protected this formerly purely folk custom from being banned completely.(21)
John F. Szwed, in "The Mask of Friendship: Mumming as a Ritual of Social Relations," explains this persistence as a result of the important social function of mumming practices. He sees in mumming a mechanism for providing "disguised gratification" of "in-group hostility" which has been repressed--a "cathartic expression of repressed motives" in the relatively safe arena of ritual, the ultimate purpose of which is "the direct gratification of forbidden hostilities . . . and the subsequent recreation and renewal of the social order."(22) James C. Faris sees mumming as fulfilling social needs in the ways described by Szwed. According to his observations, however, the custom particularly represents a traditional community's ritualized expression of its reactions to the Stranger, the Other: "To settlements displaying a "marked lack of social change, . . . the stranger, is unpredictable, unreliable, not to be trusted, deviant, and, . . . potentially dangerous and malevolent."(23) This category of "potentially dangerous and malevolent" individuals includes women. Faris observes, in a community with a "rigidly virilocal marriage and settlement pattern, . . . women are" in fact, "most often the `strangers'."(24) The custom, then, affords acknowledgment of the fear of, and mimetic demonstration of, the deviant behavior associated with strangers, as disguised neighbors take liberties with the rules of physical social restraint, while it affords the recipients of such treatment the opportunity to exercise hospitality to such a degree that they assuage the sense of threat and dread such characters arouse.(25) Szwed's and Faris' hypotheses, drawn from observations of mumming practices in Newfoundland, point towards socio-psychological explanations of the persistence of the folk custom of mumming. I would like to take this approach to an even deeper level of "cognitive complex,"(26) that of the underlying mythological or archetypal bases of the types of characters which serve to represent the fears and attractions of the people who mime and who witness them. Faris' recognition of the Woman figure as Other is a good beginning.
Szwed's and Faris' pioneering socio-psychological approaches to English mumming customs open folk customs to new and immediate investigations, where they had for so long been the provenance of detectives of ancient ritual. I certainly value the work done by such ritualists as Chambers, who provides one of the rare full-length studies of dramatic folk traditions. His conclusion, however, that the "English ludus . . . can hardly be anything but survivals of ceremonies intended to promote agricultural fertility,"(27) would shut the door on further investigations. As would Helm's remarks that,
in the so-called Mummers' Play, the action is confined to a mock death and revival, there is no suspense or uncertainty, the participants in the ritual have come to illustrate an ancient belief and nothing else,(28)
and that, "by the time it was considered worth reporting, the observance had decayed to such an extent that it was meaningless."(29) Cawte, Helm, and Peacock, have said,
We believe that the basis of the Play is an action . . . around which texts have grown in an effort to rationalise what had become inexplicable with the passage of time. The basic theme of this action is bringing fertility to the places and people visited. . . . We have therefore classified the cermonies in terms of their basic action, and have ignored not only the nonsense of the text, but also the local names used by the performers and witnesses.(30)
Ritualists often find the supernumerary characters inexplicable. Helm, for instance, says of what he terms the "extraneous characters," characters such as the Presenter, Father Christmas, the Fool, Beelzebub, and the Man-Woman, "There is no adequate explanation for these beyond local whim."(31) R. J. E. Tiddy writes of the Man-Woman, "The only purpose of this character to-day is that of a grotesque."(32) Tiddy goes on, however, in his brief discussion of the historical manifestations of this figure, to make the following significant speculation: "The practice is so common among primitive tribes that it is certainly based upon some trait of primitive psychology."(33) Tiddy's idea unwittingly leads in the direction of contemporary socio-psychological studies, if one accepts the continued existence of so-called primitive psychological forces and responses in the modern human mind. I acknowledge the debt owed to ritualist scholars for their evidence of the ritual origins of the mummers' activities. But I cannot accept the notion that any enactment or accretion post-dating conscious belief in fertility-ritual efficacy is without significance or meaning. The ritualist's position leaves him to wonder, with Chambers, at "the pervasive Woman, whose dramatic function is so obscure,"(34) and to limit himself to the speculation that the figure of the Man-Woman "may carry on some recognition of the original dominance of women in agriculture."(35) While I do not dispute a possible folk representation of Woman in this way at some historical point, medieval descriptions and contemporary reproductions of the Man-Woman figure are too parodic and yet too numinous to be nothing more than an empty vestige of an ancient belief.
Various theories have arisen concerning the Male-Female figure. Newall, discusses "sexual reversal, in the form of a man dressed as a woman" as reflecting "the lowly status of women in society."(36) She records this figure as it appears in surviving or revived performances:
The Allendale guisers often wear female costume. A man dressed as a woman appeared with the Hooden Horse of Kent. . . . The Padstow Teaser often appeared in female dress. Bill Thomas wore pink dresses and `lovely bonnets'. His garters and pink satin underwear seem a little unnecessary and one wonders whether masking in this case provided an opportunity to wear drag, without adverse comment.(37)
Newall explains the exclusion of real females as due to patriarchal repression of the gender:
The customs being considered inevitably reflect the attitudes and mores of the society from which they sprang, for the most part a very traditional male-dominated society. All the customs, without exception, are male-dominated. Players, participants, performers and dancers are men. Women are either excluded altogether, or play a very minor, subsidiary, supportive role, usually preparing costumes and food for the male participants.(38)
She views the social function of the plays as "safety valves," that "provide excitement, release from care and restraint, opportunities for realizing personal fantasies, and outlets for repressed hostilities and drives." Bill Thomas' transvestitism would certainly fall into this category. Furthermore, "apart from the individual satisfactions obtained," Newall observes in the effects of the mummings a "feeling of achievement shared by the community, an affirmation of its attitudes and values."(39) For Renwick, this female figure fits his proposed variation on the interpretive theories of Szwed and Faris by which he views the Mummers' Play as dramatizing "the theme of the interdependence between social Self and Other."(40) He sees each of the subsidiary characters, Beelzebub, Big Head and Little Wit, Humpty Jack, and Miss Funny as embodying the "idea of Self/Other interdependence." According to this schema, the character, Miss Funny is intended to be at once familiar, an "everyday village stereotype" representing Self, and "strange," a "woman of questionable morals," representing Other.(41) In postulating an understanding of the Man-Woman figure as representing Self and Other, Renwick begins to account for the dual nature of this character, though his theory does not account for the exclusively male portrayals of female characters.
What we have, in fact, in the men's ceremonial known as the Mummers' Play, is a masculine portrayal of the feminine, or, in Jungian terms, projections of feminine archetypal contents. The Woman figures, created and presented by men, manifest the unconscious psychological impressions of the female resulting from personal and collective encounters with the feminine. They represent a type of personified image that Jung calls an "anima projection." Jung says of his discovery of such psychic images:
Investigation of the products of the unconscious yields recognizable traces of archetypal structures, . . . among them certain types which deserve the name of dominants. These are archetypes like the anima, animus, wise old man, witch, shadow, earth-mother, etc., . . . It is evident that knowledge of these types makes myth interpretation considerably easier and at the same time puts it where it belongs, that is, on a psychic basis.(42)
Jung defines "archetypes" as "universal and inherited patterns which, taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious."(43) Archetypes typically manifest themselves in myths, rituals, symbols, fantasies and dreams. With the Mummers' Play owing its existence to myth and ritual, I believe we are on the right track in applying psychological archetypal theory in our interpretations of these actions. The Mummers' Plays are, in fact, so thoroughly archetypal in nature, that I have come to view them as psycholudi. Just as dreams, fantasies, and myths compensate the conscious, so the ceremonial folk-drama supplies what is lacking in everyday, conscious existence. Since the Mummers' Play is a purely masculine activity, what we must be witnessing is a manifestation of masculinized archetypal figures and actions, the contents of the male psyche. I propose then, that the exaggeratedly female figure of the Man-Woman in the English Mummers' Play, is an anima-figure, a manifestation, not of a conscious idea of actual Woman, but rather of the feminine aspect of the male psyche itself. Jung describes the anima in this way: "The feminine belongs to man as his own unconscious femininity, which I have called the anima."(44) I must stop here for a moment to second Demaris Wehr's observation that Jung seems never to have distinguished the characteristics of the male anima, which often include stereotyped responses to the idea of the feminine, from the real, originating feminine. She, and I, are quick to acknowledge, however, that, in Wehr's words, "Jung's concept of the anima represents an important first step in [the] recognition of a `feminine' side in men, and in the effort to enable men to come to terms with this side of themselves."(45) And, indeed, Jung himself viewed his theories as beginnings--ideas to be built upon and expanded by future theorists. What has been, for long, the puzzling and persistent presence of the Man-Woman can be explained as a visualization of the dual-gendered psychic reality of the actors.
The entire cast of characters of the Play can be viewed as the constellation of archetypal figures that make up the unconscious content of the minds of the performers. No traditional character, according to this psychological interpretation, is extraneous or meaningless. Each one manifests some important aspect of the psyche of the traditional players. As the Play moves through time, the costuming and details of the characters, their names and their language change, as the cultural context, the socially- and individually-influenced contents of the particular archetypes change. These projections reflect the changes over time of the particular society which recreates and upholds the tradition. The underlying archetypal patterns, the archetypes themselves, reflecting elemental human responses to the elemental experiences of human existence--Birth, Mother, Spirit, Father, Desire, Fear, Death--do not change. The Hero, The Doctor (Magician-Healer), the Fool or Clown (Trickster), the Old Man (often Presenter, or Father Christmas, representing the Wisdom of Spirit), Beelzebub (mysterious Shadow, which in a Christianized context becomes a representation of the Comedy of Evil(46)), and the Woman (appearing as Hag-Witch, or Maiden, or both--the two sides of the Feminine as represented in the male psyche) are archetypal figures who appear in the earliest human ceremonials and myths. But, however constant and universal these types may be, it is important to remember that, as the society changes in its responses to the archetypes, so the archetypal contents--the cultural and individual representations/figures/images of the archetypes change. Thus, in a culture that devalues women, we find exaggeratedly parodic representations of the Female in folk customs where we might have found wise healing-women, truly formidable witches, and fertility goddesses. Indeed, what may have begun, in days long ago, as a ritual celebration of fertility, may have evolved into a ritualized expression of "fear of fertility," even "fear of the fact of sexual difference."(47) We find, for example, in some mummers' plays, instead of the direct appearance of a Woman figure, simply a comic reference to the Female as one of those insatiably hungry dependent creatures whom Johnny Jack is doomed to carry on his heroic back. Here is the sad situation in the revival, Compton Tipteerers Play:
Although my name is Saucy Jack,
Wife and family at my back,
Out of eight I've got but five,
And they are almost starved alive.
Some in the workhouse all alone,
And these at my back must be helped before I get home . . .(48)
Other versions portray the Old Woman as a domesticated, though Puckish, Sweeper, as in this play from Bovey Tracey, Devonshire:
In comes I Mother Dolly.
Drinking gin is all my folly.
Before I begin I likes to make room;
I'll sweep it away with my little broom.(49)
Burghclere, Hampshire provides a heavily Christianized version in which the Old Woman overtly illustrates the mixing of genders. "She" recites lines usually attached to a subsidiary male character, such as Belsey-Bob, or Big Head and Little Wit, whose job it is to conduct the quête (collection) at the end. I believe we even see evidence, in this speech, of pre-Christian ceremonial, or witchcraft:
Ah Ah Ah, in comes I as aint been it. With my big head and little wit, my head so big and my wit so small I brought my fiddle to please you all. All blue sleeves and yellow lace now old boys we dance apace. Then we give a step dance and finish up by singing Carol Carol Christmas carol joyfully carol for the coming of Christ Nativity go into the Forest when the myrtle grows where the pine and orle bends beneath the snow.(50)
The interchangeability of genders, characters and lines has puzzled, even annoyed, some scholars. We even have a "female" Be-elzebub at Burntwood, Staffordshire:
Here am I, old Lady Be-elzebub,
Under my arm I carry my club;
Over my shoulder my dripping pan,
Don't you think I'm a jolly old girl? [in place of "jolly old man"](51)
Multiplication of characters has been viewed as a problem as well. Multiplication of the Combat characters appears to be especially disturbing to ritualists seeking an identifiable and coherent core-ritual-action. Helm complains about this state of confusion:
Multiplication is meaningless, only one death and revival is needed to complete the revitalisation ceremony. The elaboration of the fight is clear evidence of lack of understanding of the ceremony.(52)
Halpert says, on this subject:
While it is true that our three chief texts refer to St. George, or, thanks to the Hanover dynasty to King George, it should be observed that though George appears frequently in the Hero-combat plays, other characters may replace him. Other characters, too, shift and combine in bewildering ways; historical characters, figures from popular tradition or chap-books, and contemporary notables are often introduced.(53)
Chambers records the following interchangeable male character names: St. George is found to be interchangeable with King George the Third, King George of Paradise, Prince George, Prince George of Ville, and Great George.(54) Turkish Knight is interchangeable with Turkey Snipe, Morocco Dog, Morocco King, Black Morocco Dog, Black Prince of Paradise, Paradine, and Paladine.(55) And Valiant Soldier represents an array of interchangeable characters, including, Captain Slasher, Valiant Slasher, Bold Slasher, Beau Slasher, Bull Slash, Stacker, Bold Slaughterer, Bold Stiker, Bold Captain Rover, Bold Roamer, Bold and Handy, Cuterman Slasherman, Cutting Star, Whip Him and Slash Him, Swish Swash and Swagger, and Tall and Smart.(56) These hero-figures interact by means of nearly identical Anglo-Saxon-style vaunts. I offer the following examples from the Compton play:
St. George.
In come I, St George, that man of honour and courage stout and bold;
With my sword and spear all by my side I have won twelve crown of gold;
It was I who fought the Fiery Dragon and brought him to great slaughter,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Turkish Knight.
In come I, cuts and scars,
Just returning from those wars;
Many a battle I've been in,
Many a battle I have seen.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Twice through the head I've been shot,
Which makes my brain boil like my old pot.
What more can be bolder?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Valiant Soldier.
In come I, a valiant Soldier, Bold and Slasher is my name;
With my sword and spear all by my side, I hope to win this game.
Now I am a soldier stout and bold,
I make many a man's blood run cold.
Now I am returning from those wars.
I am a man like you, full of cuts and scars.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Johnny Jack.
In come I, little Johnny Jack,
Wife and family at my back.
Though I am so little and small
I am the biggest rogue among you all.
If any man offend me I bring him to a stand
Cutter and Slasher is my name,
From those blessed wars I came, . . .(57)
Even more confusing is the fact that, as noted by Chambers, any of these characters is equally likely to play the part of Antagonist (He Who Conquers) or Agonist (He Who Falls).(58) Tiddy comments on this phenomenon:
It should be observed that in the Mummers' Play, although the victor is sometimes a national hero and his antagonist a foreigner, it is by no means an invariable rule for more sympathy to be shown for the victor than for the vanquished.(59)
Tiddy also calls our attention to "the occasional indications of the idea that the victim is the son of the conqueror."(60) Renwick remarks on the fact that "the slayer himself will [sometimes] call for--and, indeed, himself pay--someone to resuscitate the antagonist he had just slain."(61) What are we to make of this bewilderment of interchangeable heroes? First of all, they are all heroes. And why need we attempt to apply logic to such a manifestation of types? The archetypal world of psychic projections that is the Mummers' Play, is like the world of myth and dreams in that figures merge and multiply as the intensity of the participants' responses dictate. In dreams, myths and mummers' plays, friend and foe alike represent different aspects of the dreamer's-believer's-mummer's own unconscious mind. As Jungian Mythographer William G. Doty explains, "our myths are fictional, to be sure, but . . . fictional need not mean unreal and certainly not unempirical; myths are `mysterious,' . . . but they are not incomprehensible." (62) Multiple variations on recurring themes and images indicate a rich and intense encounter with archetypal materials. And the one constant, that all the characters are interchangeable and related, indicates to me that the entire cast of characters in the Mummers' Play is the result of a collective projection of unconscious psychic contents on the part of the community of male participants. The archetypal Hero-Myth, as described by Jung, could be a description of the Mummers' Play:
To the intellect . . . it presents an almost insuperable difficulty, particularly as regards logical exposition. The reason for this lies in the fact that no part of the hero-myth is single in meaning, and that, at a pinch, all the figures are interchangeable. The only certain and reliable thing is that the myth exists and shows unmistakable analogies with other myths. . . . Modern psychology has the distinct advantage of having opened up a field of psychic phenomena which are themselves the matrix of all mythology.(63)
The psyche of the collective folk-male is seen, in the Hero-Combat form of Mummers' Play, to be overwhelmingly "heroic." And yet the projected desire to be heroic is overwhelmed by the dramatic antagonists' desire to bond with and heal one another. This appears very much like a dramatization of the psychic process of self-awareness, Individuation, as identified and described by Jung. Indeed, the play as a whole represents the masculinized Self in its acknowledgement of all its psychic "parts." According to Jung,
The archetype of the self has, functionally, the significance of a ruler of the inner world, i.e., of the collective unconscious. The self, as a symbol of wholeness, is a coincidentia oppositorum, and therefore contains light and darkness simultaneously. . . . The hero symbolizes a man's unconscious self, and this manifests itself empirically as the sum total of all archetypes and therefore includes the archetype of the father and of the wise old man. To that extent the hero is his own father and his own begetter.(64)
Completing our analysis of the English Mummers' Play, we may look upon the
action of revitalization in the play, the bringing to life of the slain-hero by
the slayer-hero, as a psycholudic action representing the integration
of the psychic elements of the collective masculine psyche in its quest for
Individuation. It embodies an ongoing unconscious attempt on the part of the
folk to answer the question, as expressed by the Mythographer, "What are the
possible ranges of human becoming?"(65)
This folk-tradition reveals itself to be a living, mythic drama whose meaning,
and attraction, lying at a deep, unconscious level, cannot be explained in
conscious, logical terms even by the performers themselves. I suggest that
Jungian theory can further our understanding of the English Mummers' Play and
its players.
1. 1 Roger deV. Renwick, "The Mummers' Play and The Old WivesTale," Journal of
American Folklore, 94, 374 (1981) 433-55.
2. 2 Margaret Dean-smith, "The Life-Cycle Play or Folk Play: Some Conclusions
Following the Examination of the Ordish Papers and Other Sources," Folk-
lore 69 (1958) 237-253.
3. 3 Alex Helm, "In Comes I, St. George," Folklore 76 (1965) 118-136: "We still
believe that the Play is best considered as an action, that it has its origins
in primitive religious beliefs, and that it is the most wide-spread men's
ceremonial custom which survived into this century" (118).
4. 4 Thomas Pettitt, "Early English Traditional Drama: Approaches and
perspectives," Research opportunities in Renaissance Drama: The Report
of the Modern Language Association Conference (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 25 [1982] 1-30, 1.
5. 5 Alan Brody, The English Mummers and Their Plays (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1969).
6. 6 R. J. E. Tiddy, The Mummers' Play (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923).
7. 7 For example, Geoff and Fran Doel, Mumming, Howling and Hoodening:
Midwinter Rituals in Sussex, Kent & Surrey (Rainham, Kent: Meresborough
Books, 1992), trace the origins of English mumming to the Roman
Saturnalia (4); Frederick B. Jonassen, "Lucian's Saturnalia, the Land of
Cockaigne, and the Mummers' Plays," Folklore 101, 1 (1990) 58-68: "The
proximity of Lucian's lines to the Saturnalian custom of giving hospitality
to poor Romans and the proximity of the Cockaigne lines to the British
custom of giving hospitality to poor mummers together lend support to
the contemplation that the basic framework of the Mummers' Plays dates
back, along with the Cockaigne motif which many versions contain, to the
ancient world where a type of `mumming' existed in the form of the
inversive Saturnalian custom in which masters changed places with slaves
by serving them food and drink when they visited" (65); Gareth Morgan,
"Mummers and Momoeri," Folklore 100, 1 (1989): "We can say that
Western mummers' plays come from Greek mummers' plays; and that the
likeliest time and place for this borrowing was in thirteenth-century
Flanders" (87).
9. 9 Pettitt, "English Folk Drama and the Early German Fastnachtspiele,"
Renaissance Drama 13 (1982) 1-34.
10. 10 Pettitt, Early English, 2.
11. 11 Pettitt: The "earliest complete text" is that of the "Hero Combat Play from
Islip, Oxfordshire, 1780"; the "earliest fragment of a text" is in "reference
to Christmas customs at Exeter in 1737"; this is also our "earliest reliable
account of a performance" (Early English, 4).
12. 12 Pettitt, 7-9; Craig Fees, "Mummers and Momoeri: A Response," Folklore 100, 2
(London: Folklore Society Publication, 1989): "Although the earliest
appearance of `mumming' recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is
1440, Thomas Pettitt writes (personal comment, 31.8.1989): `My earliest
record of "mummer," "mumming" or the like is the charter of Richard II
(undated but necessarily ante 1390 exempting "mommers and our
minstrels" from regulations banning citizens of London from going to law
with each other outside the city walls. Ref. Ian Lancashire, Dramatic
Texts and Records of Britain (Cambridge, 1984), 224'" (246 n.12).
14. 14 Nevill Denny, ed., Medieval Drama, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 16 (London:
Edward Arnold, 1973) 15.
16. 16 Sir Edmund Kirchever Chambers, The English Folk-Play (Oxford: Clarendon,
1933) 153-54.
18. 18 Herbert Halpert and G. M. Story, eds., Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland:
Essays in Anthropology, Folklore, and History (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1969) 51.
19. 19 Charles Read Baskerville, "Dramatic Aspects of Medieval Folk Festivals in
England," Studies in Philology 17 (1920) 19-87, 21.
20. 20 Venetia Newall, "Masking in England," New York Folklore 11, 1-4 (1985) 205-
226, 219.
22. 22 John F. Szwed, "The Mask of Friendship: Mumming as a Ritual of Social
Relations," in Halpert, Christmas Mumming, 106-118, 116-17.
23. 23 James C. Faris, "Mumming in an Outpost Fishing Settlement: A Description and
Suggestions on the Cognitive Complex," in Halpert, Christmas Mumming,
129-44, 134.
28. 28 Alex Helm, "In Comes I, St. George," Folklore 76 (1965) 118-136, 126.
29. 29 Helm, English Mummers', 4.
30. 30 E. C. Cawte, Alex Helm, and N. Peacock, English Ritual Drama: A Geographical
Index (London: The Folk-Lore Society, 1967) 13.
31. 31 Helm, English Mummers', 30.
42. 42 C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen
Series 20 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956, rpt. 1976) 390-91.
45. 45 Demaris Wehr, Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes (Boston: Beacon,
1987) 113-14.
46. 46 I owe my understanding of such comic portrayals of evil figures to Charlotte
Spivack's The Comedy of Evil on Shakespeare's Stage.
47. 47 I am indebted, for these possible insights into the meaning of the Mummers'
Play as it has evolved, to Bruce Fleming's essay, "Gay Poets, Women, and
Other Threats to Group Loyalty at the Naval Academy," in The Chronicle
of Higher Education (January 30, 1998) B4-5.
48. 48 Doel, Mumming, Howling and Hoodening, "The Compton Tipteerers Play," 54.
62. 62 William G. Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Tuscaloosa and
London: University of Alabama Press, 1986) 4.