Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama

Folklore Elements in the Medieval DramaAuthor(s): Arthur BrownSource: Folklore, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Jun., 1952), pp. 65-78Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1257716 .

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fol k HLore TRANSACTIONS OF THE FOLK-LORE SOCIETY

VOL. LXIII] JUNE, 1952 INo. 2

FOLKLORE ELEMENTS IN THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA BY ARTHUR BROWN

A paper read before a meeting of the Society on October x8th, 1950. IN treating this subject, one has to deal with a body of English literature -the Miracle and Morality plays of the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-

turies, and the interludes of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries -which has received appalling treatment from English scholars, or, perhaps mercifully, has been entirely neglected by these same scholars. It is

doing no grave injustice to the pioneers in this field, who did their best to preserve this kind of literature for posterity, to say that there is

scarcely an edition of any complete cycle, or single miracle or morality play, or interlude, which would not be improved by a thorough revision. What is more serious is that for the past 50 years paper and ink has been

employed to the extent of approximately 5oo books or articles of varying lengths on practically every aspect of these plays, and all these, with very few exceptions, based on unreliable texts. The present situation means, briefly, that all the work which has been, or is being done on the medieval drama must be suspect according to the degree to which it has relied upon unsatisfactory editions of the extant material.

The position with regard to the folk drama-the mummers' play in its various forms-is if possible even worse, for here one has to deal with very late, and in many cases very corrupt texts of something which has suffered many generations of oral transmission, often by people who were

incapable of understanding very clearly the nature of the thing with which

they were dealing. The result is that the extant versions of the folk play consist of several layers, all added at different times over a long period of years, and it is extraordinarily difficult to disentangle those elements which are significant for the present purpose, namely the characters and situations which can with some certainty be said to have originated in the Middle Ages or even earlier. And if English scholars have dealt badly with the regular drama of this period, it is fair to add that folklorists

65



66 Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama have been equally remiss in their treatment of the folk drama, and have not infrequently allowed enthusiasm to get the better of their scholarship.

Since the basic material is in so unsatisfactory a condition, it is not

surprising that there is a third difficulty to be faced, the question of

deciding, in those cases where it is quite clear that there has been borrow-

ing from one side by the other, or influence on one side by the other, whether the folk play has borrowed from the regular drama, or vice

versa, whether some relic of folklore was assimilated by the dramatist, or whether folk tradition has taken up and kept alive something which the dramatist in fact originated. Much will depend upon the antiquity which one is prepared to assign to the folk play, a matter which is referred to later in this paper. More immediately it must be emphasized that these difficulties are very real, and a source of grave dangers and misunderstand-

ings in a subject of this nature. It would be no bad thing for a halt to be called to all further books and articles on both the regular and the folk drama of the Middle Ages until, with the time and energy thus saved, adequate and accurate texts of all the extant material, the indispensable basis for all sound scholarship, had been prepared.

Meanwhile it is possible to show that although the greater part of the drama surviving from the English Middle Ages is religious in its inspiration and content, it did, either consciously or unconsciously, embody much that is of interest to the student of folklore, that it reflected many of the popular beliefs and customs of the people who formed its audiences, and that in some cases it even adopted the methods and forms of a more

popular and almost pagan drama, a genuine folk drama, which probably existed long before it, and which certainly continued to exist long after the miracle plays had been performed for the last time.

It is important to remember in this connection the origin and probable purpose of the religious drama. It began in the most intimate contact with the liturgy of the Roman Church, and only broke away from this connection when it had reached a very advanced and complex form. The actual process of development is far more obscure than most writers on the subject are prepared to admit, but the point need not be dwelt upon here. The purpose of the religious drama was almost certainly that of teaching and edification through amusement-in dealing with a largely illiterate population the ecclesiastical authorities very properly and very wisely made use of the methods most likely to appeal to the greatest number of people, and the instinct for drama has long been recognized as one of the fundamental instincts of the human race. Therefore the history of the human race from the Christian point of view, from the



Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama 67 Creation to the Day of Judgment, could most readily be appreciated by an illiterate population when presented in a dramatic form. Further-

more, all the best dramatists at all periods have been acutely conscious of the tastes and interests of their audiences, and have done all in their

power to cater for these. It is only to be expected, therefore, that the medieval dramatist will be found coating the pill of doctrine with the

sugar of a popular tale or belief, or pausing occasionally in the vast movement from Creation to the Day of Judgment to present a little farce or a scene of horseplay taken from the very life-stream of the people he was seeking to teach, thus ensuring their interest for a few more scenes as the less serious minded amongst them hoped that the devil or the clown would shortly appear again, or that Noah's wife would beat her husband once more. It is in such situations as these that the folklorist will most readily find the material of interest to him. It should also be borne in mind that from the earliest times religion and folk custom were

brought into intimate and even violent contact, and that the clerks and churchmen themselves made use of many pagan customs in the

religious festivities extending from Christmas to Epiphany; during the Feast of Fools in the twelfth century the clerks elected a mock bishop to preside over their activities, parodied the divine service and introduced dancing and disguising into the church itself, all of which proceedings undoubtedly derived ultimately from the Roman Saturnalia. There was also the Feast of the Ass, during which certain parts of the liturgy were concluded by a general braying, and a rubric stated that at the end of the mass the priest, instead of speaking the customary " Ite, missa est ", shall bray three times, and that the people shall bray three times in response in place of the usual " Deo gratias ". Probably it was through these and similar activities that the spirit of comedy, using for its material figures and incidents dear to the hearts of the common people, became part of the religious drama which grew up out of the service of the church.

With regard to the folk play, as far as it is possible to reconstruct it from extant versions, it can be shown how the authors of the religious drama not only borrowed some of its characters and phraseology, but also at times based the construction of their own plays upon the outline of its plot, hoping no doubt by this method to attract the attention of those for whom the folk play was a very popular amusement. For the purpose of this paper it is assumed, therefore, that the folk play is at least as old as the religious drama, and the question will not be discussed in detail. The most conservative opinion is that expressed by E. K. Chambers, who



68 Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama

suggests that in its present form at least the folk play did not exist before the sixteenth century. There is, of course, no doubt, that much of the material to be found in the extant and very corrupt forms was added in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but in his efforts to be strictly fair and scholarly on this point Chambers seems to have been unwilling to take much account of evidence, not always documentary to be sure, pointing to the existence of a very similar play, containing most of the essential characters and situations, at a much earlier date. In this

respect Chambers was perhaps wiser than Tiddy, another scholar in the same field, who, while bringing to light much valuable evidence and

material, seems to have permitted himself a breadth of interpretation which turned even the most unpromising material into a folk play, or at least into proof of the very early existence of such a play. Though we can never be too grateful for the work of these two scholars, it should be realized that the extreme conservatism of Chambers and the excessive enthusiasm of Tiddy may alike be dangerous in dealing with so obscure a

subject as the folk play. It would be tedious to recount the gradual collection of evidence that has been going on for many years, but the conclusion expressed by C. R. Baskervill as long ago as 1920 is probably as sound as any: " My feeling is that the greater part of the dialogue belonging to the complex forms of actual folk drama found amongst the modern mummers was the product of the centuries from 1200 to I500."

With this conclusion in mind, attention is drawn to the following parallels which occur between the folk play and the religious drama of the Middle Ages ; some of them may be accidental or the result of happy coincidence, but not all of them can be accounted for in this way, and the sum total of the evidence is significant. Practically all the mummers' plays opened with a call for silence on the part of the presenter, and a request for room in which the action could be presented :

Room, room, brave gallants all, Pray give us room to rhyme.

The miracle play writers followed suit, probably because a great deal would depend upon the way in which their audience became aware that something was going on'; so the Nuntius in the Chester play of the Nativity opens with the words,

Make roome, lordinges, and give us way, And let Octavian come and play,

an appeal which should have a familiar ring. This is but one example of



Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama 69 many, but it contains another characteristic of the mummers' play, namely the introduction of the actors by name by the presenter:

Step in, St. George, and clear the way,

says the presenter, and after St. George has been allowed to say a few words,

Step in, Bold Slasher,

and so on. Each character in turn is similarly introduced either by his predecessor or by the presenter. Common signals are " Step in ", " Walk in ", " Come in " or " I call in ". There are two occasions at least in the moralities where one may see the influence of this procedure. In Mankind, usually dated 1475, Mischief summons the monstrous Titivillus with a flute or a whistle, and Titivillus answers from outside

I come with my leggis under me.

When he eventually enters it is with the words

Ego sum dominancium dominus & my name is Titivillus,

following immediately upon the words of another character,

Make space and be ware!

Thus we have the appeal for room, the summoning of the character, and his entry and self-identification, all of which are folk play devices. Titivillus is also described as " a man with a head that is of great omni- potence ", a phrase which recalls the description applied to Beelzebub on his arrival in some of the mumming plays, " big head and little wit ", but an even closer parallel in phraseology to this occurs quite early in the play of Mankind when Mischief, making fun of Mercy, tells him,

Your wit is little, your head is mickle.

It has been plausibly suggested that the description appears to be the survival of the distinguishing feature of one of the original devils of the mummers' play, a head of unusual size, which was no doubt represented by some kind of mask. Titivillus is just the kind of " abominable presence " that would appeal to the folk of medieval England, and there seems to be little doubt that the form of his entry and the physical descriptions applied to him show that the author of the moral play of Mankind was here deliberately borrowing material from a more popular form of drama which he knew would appeal to his audience. An even more striking use of the calling-on device occurs in the morality play of Wisdom where the crews of allegorical villains are brought in one after



70 Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama another by their masters; the first group of six is introduced by trum-

pets, and the stage direction states quite clearly that each shall answer to his name, in exactly the same way as the mummers do. " Come in, Indignation, Malice and Sturdyness ", says their presenter, and precisely the same formula is employed to introduce the other groups, who come in with bagpipes and hornpipes. One recalls the words of Phillip Stubbs, writing a little later of the folk games and dances which were carried on even in the churchyard :

" Then have they their hobby horses, dragons and other antiques, together with their baudy pipers and thundering drummers to strike up the devil's dance withal, then, march these heathen company towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobby horses skirmishing amongst the rout. And in this sort they go to the church and into the church, though the minister be at prayer or preaching, dancing and swinging their handkerchiefs above their heads in the church like devils incarnate, with such a confuse noise that no man can hear his own voice."

Surely the author of the play of Wisdom had such a scene in mind when he introduced his villains, some with red beards, some with masks, led by bagpipes, and called on to the stage in the words used by the presenter of the mummers' play. The parallels in situation and language are too close to be the result of coincidence.

The play of Mankind has other features which seem to show that its

author, though concerned with inculcating a moral, had in mind the

necessity of appealing to an audience whose tastes ran on simpler and cruder lines. On one occasion Mischief offers to cure a wound incurred

by another character by cutting off his head and setting it on again as

good as new. This cure has many echoes in the mummers' play and in other folk literature. One of the boasts of Jack Finney and similar characters is that they can cure a jackdaw of the toothache by " twisting his old yud off ", and on another occasion the Doctor boasts that he is

Capable of head and hand; And if this man has got a cough, I'll cure him without cutting his head off. And if this man has lost his head I'll put a donkey's on instead.

The antiquity of this idea of beheading as a cure should be noted; it is undoubtedly the survival of the primitive ceremony symbolising the



Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama 71 annual death of the year or the fertilization spirit, and its annual resur- rection in the Spring. In some of the sword dances, which are closely related to the mummers' play, there are significant figures apparently reminiscent of the actual beheading of the primitive sacrificial victim. Later the idea of a cure seems to become associated with the decapitation itself, perhaps through the influence of common stories of disenchant- ment through decapitation. So it is suggested that Mischief's offer to cure his friend in this way in the morality play of Mankind is an echo going far back into folk history, but kept clearly in the minds of a medieval audience by its constant re-enactment in the mummers' play.

A further interesting parallel in Mankind is the collection of money in the middle of the action, an incident which occurs in no other religious play of this period, but which was an important part of the mummers' play. Before Titivillus is allowed to appear, the other characters tell the audience that they intend to collect money from them, the implication being apparently that unless a generous contribution is forthcoming, the amazing sight which they are all hoping for will be denied them. This incident seems to have been directly inspired by the lines of Little Devil Dout or Jack and Sweeper of the mummers' play:

In come I little devil dout, If you dont give me money I'll sweep you out. Money I want and money I crave, If you dont give me money I'll sweep you to the grave.

The miraculous cure effected by the Doctor in the mummers' play, by which he brings to life one of the combatants slain in the fight, is employed right at the end of the medieval period in a group of short interludes based on the morality tradition, but inculcating a love of learning rather than of virtue. The earliest of these, Wit and Science, was the work of John Redford, organist and master of the choristers at St. Paul's Cathedral. The hero, Wit, is slain by the monster Tediousness, whose boasting and bragging, incidentally, correspond very closely to similar vauntings on the part of the Turkish Knights and the Beelzebubs of the mummers' play. Wit is then brought back to life by the singing of a song, an incident which was completely misunderstood by one learned com- mentator on the play who came to the conclusion that Wit was not dead but in a stupor, and that the stage direction which clearly says that Wit is to die was a foolish mistake on the part of a scribe. But there was a very long tradition of a character being brought back to life in the folk play and it is clear that Redford was making use of this fund of folklore



72 Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama to make his moral play more attractive to the rougher element in his audience. Furthermore two later plays which employ the same plot and characters (The Marriage of Wit and Science and The Marriage of Wit and

Wisdom), retain the death of Wit-there is no suggestion that he is merely unconscious-and it seems unlikely that if this death were a foolish error on the part of a scribe of the first play it would have been allowed to stand in later adaptations. Wit died, and was brought back to life, and the incident would appear perfectly normal to a medieval audience, accustomed to see the same thing happening in their folk drama for many generations.

It was not only upon folk drama that the authors of miracles and moralities drew in order to entertain their audiences ; they also made use of other tales, incidents and sayings well known to the folk of their time.

Perhaps the most famous folk tale to be embodied in a miracle play is that of Mak the sheep stealer, who appeared in the Second Shepherds' Play at Wakefield. Mak boasts to the shepherds in the fields that he is the king's yeoman, but that he suffers from a wife who does nothing but drink and bear children. He asks to be allowed to stay with them, and

although suspicious of his intentions they grant him his request. He sees his chance of stealing a sheep, and puts a sleeping spell on the

shepherds, this in itself being a clear borrowing from folklore. Away he

goes with the sheep to his wife Gyll who, to ensure that the shepherds suspect nothing, puts the animal in a cradle, pretending that it is a new- born child, while Mak goes back to the fields. When the shepherds waken, Mak tells them that in his dream his wife has given birth to another

son, and that he must go home to see whether it is true. Meanwhile the shepherds discover the theft, suspect Mak, and come to his home to make a search. They find Gyll in bed, and Mak singing a lullaby over the cradle containing the supposed new baby. He challenges the

shepherds to search his house, but tells them to keep well away from the cradle lest they should disturb the sleeping child. Gyll is very indignant about the whole business, and swears that she will eat the child in the cradle if she ever cheated them, a safe enough vow under the circum- stances. The shepherds are about to leave when one of them remembers that they have given no presents to the child. They return, and in their efforts to kiss the baby the fraud is discovered. For a time Mak and Gyll try to bluff things out, and swear that their child has been bewitched and turned into a sheep, but at last they are forced to confess to the theft. The shepherds are so amused, however, that Mak escapes with no more serious punishment than a tossing in a blanket. That is the story as it



Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama 73 appears in the miracle play, and research in recent years has revealed the existence in various parts of the world of at least ten parallel folk tales. Not all are close parallels, but all retain to a greater or lesser degree the essential incidents and characters. In 1945 an American scholar, R. C.

Cosbey, made an examination of the elements of these stories, and came to the conclusion that they all had a common folklore source. The interest-

ing thing is that the Wakefield dramatist appears to have deliberately adapted the story, and to have added to it certain incidents which do not

appear in the other known versions, in order to produce a very daring and

startling parody of the actual Nativity of Christ which he deals with in the next scene. Here is the use of a folk tale by a religious dramatist in order to parody one of the most sacred events of his religion, thereby- throwing this event into much greater prominence by the contrast. At the same time he has made sure of attracting the attention of his rustic audience by dramatising a story which must have been very well known to them, and which concerned the kind of people and life with which they were completely familiar. There is a further interesting point about the

story which also has its roots deep in folk custom. There has apparently persisted in European folklore the custom of shaking a pregnant woman in a canvas or blanket to assist her delivery, and shepherds, from the

experience of their calling, have been reckoned as suitable helpers on such occasions. The shaking of Mak in this way, therefore, while his wife lies in false child-bed, is not mere horseplay, but a very clear example of

making the punishment fit the crime, a sentiment calculated to appeal to folk humour in all ages. The Mak story, for all these reasons, is one of the most amazing things in the whole of the medieval religious drama.

It is not, however, the only folk tale to be dramatised by the Wakefield

playwright. The First Shepherds' Play of the cycle has an amusing scene between two shepherds, Gyb and Horne, the former of whom is going to

buy some sheep. The two immediately begin to quarrel about where he shall be allowed to graze them, and so violent does their argument become that they fall to calling out contradictory orders to sheep which they do not in fact possess. At the height of the battle a third shepherd, Slowpace, arrives and points out to them the futility of fighting over non-existent

sheep. He makes them hold his mare while he shakes his sack empty, then tells them that their wits are as thin as the empty sack. Jack Garcio next appears, and very significantly says that apart from the fools of Gotham these shepherds are the biggest fools he has ever encountered. In the sixteenth century appeared the first printed edition of The Merry Tales of the Madmen of Gotham, and the first tale is so very similar to the




one of the quarrel over non-existent sheep that there can be no doubt, especially in view of Garcio's reference to Gotham, that it formed the dramatist's source. It was the kind of tale that would appeal to the dry humour of the folk, and it was doubtless with this point in mind that the Wakefield dramatist made use of it in his religious play, at a time when he was concerned with drawing some of the most realistic shepherds and country people that we shall find in any literature.

These are the more definite and formal influences of the folk play and the folk story upon the religious drama of the Middle Ages, but there is too a host of incidents, characters and proverbial sayings which, though they cannot often be traced to a definite source, show very clearly the interest taken by the folk in these plays, and also the care that their authors had to cultivate that interest by the inclusion of material that would appeal to it. Over and over again there is a tendency to employ the more unusual and apocryphal legends which grew up around well- known Biblical characters, rather than to restrict the action of the play to those details which had been formally approved by the ecclesiastical authorities. The Cornish plays tell the beautiful story of the approaching death of Adam, when he sends his son Seth back to the gates of Paradise to ask the angel guardian whether God will show mercy to Adam at the last. Seth retraces the footprints burnt in the grass by Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden, and eventually reaches Paradise. He is allowed to look inside, and his account of what he saw forms one of the most beautiful passages of poetry in the whole body of religious drama. He sees a tree with its branches bare, its roots descending into hell, its

top reaching to heaven; there is a serpent in it, but high up in the branches is a new-born child who, the angel tells Seth, is the Son of God

through whom Adam and all his kin will obtain mercy at the last. Seth returns to Adam, and reports what he has seen and heard, and the old man dies in peace. This story does not appear in the authorised versions of the Bible, but it is the kind of half magic tale that would appeal to the folk imagination, and would be kept alive with or without official

approval. The writer of the Cornish plays has in fact confessed to its

power by treating it at some length and in poetry of a very high order. Another story in the same cycle of plays concerns three rods planted by Moses on Mount Tabor, which were eventually destined to make the cross for Christ's crucifixion. King David is told to collect them, and in a passage of about twenty lines which, since in the manuscript it is enclosed in

brackets, seems not to have formed part of the original composition, he performs miracles with them, healing the deaf, the lame, the blind.



Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama 75 It is a small incident, but one which shows that the author was very conscious of his peasant audience, whose nature and upbringing led them to expect and to delight in this kind of story, which had almost the

standing of a folk tale. Another example occurs at the beginning of the Cornish cycle; Adam and Eve have been driven from Paradise, and Adam makes his first efforts to till the gound; as he strikes the earth with his spade the earth groans. There is about it an air of mystery, almost a touch of magic, the unreal, which would delight a people whose whole life was spent on the borderland of a haunted world, and whose traditions were full of similar events which had happened to themselves or to their friends. The Coventry cycle preserves the beautiful story of the cherry tree which, at the command of her unborn son, bowed down to the Virgin Mary so that she could taste of its fruit, and the jealous and suspicious Joseph was thus made to realise how baseless and sordid his fears and accusations had been.

The comic treatment of Noah and his wife which appears in most of the

cycles is also apocryphal, and acts as a model of domestic comedy involving the hen-pecked husband and the nagging wife which has also been strong in folk literature. It illustrates too the wealth of realistic detail with which the dramatists of these religious plays portrayed shepherds or soldiers or any other ordinary people, a trait which betrays their close interest in, if not their close connection with, the folk in all its activities. Language, dress, habits and actions are all there without fear or favour, a rich field for folklorist, historian and philologist alike. Cain

ploughs his field, and addresses his horse and his boy in the genuine language of the rough and foul-mouthed carter or ploughman; Noah builds his ark, and in the Cornish plays the carpenters build David's

Temple, and in both instances the details are clear enough to show that the dramatist knew his carpentry, and, even more important, his

carpenters. The Wakefield shepherds complain, like true born country- men, about the weather, the state of their crops, the diseases which attack their sheep, the high rents and taxes which they are called upon to pay, the bold beggars and tramps who infest the countryside, and all in language which is very close to the earth; they prepare a meal, the component parts of which are listed in some detail, of brawn, cow-heel, black pudding, calves' liver and ale, all good North Country dishes. When they come to the manger to greet the infant Christ, they bring presents full of a rustic simplicity and charm, a bob of cherries, a bird and a ball. The shepherds from York give a brooch with a tin bell, two cob nuts on a ribbon, and a horn spoon that will hold 40 peas ; those from




Coventry give a shepherd's pipe, a hat and a pair of mittens to keep the child's hands warm. It is the grimmest of irony to find later that the soldiers who are to carry out the crucifixion, and who are in many ways like the shepherds with their rough and ready language concealing a certain kindliness, true men of the people, are depicted as being guilty of the most thoughtless cruelty in carrying out their instructions. The York dramatist lets them speak for themselves, and we see them collect-

ing their hammers and nails, boring holes in the cross only to discover that they bored them too far apart and have to stretch and twist the

body in order to make it reach the holes, grumbling at the slower and more clumsy of their number for holding up the work, taking a wilful and childish pleasure in allowing the cross to fall heavily into the hole

prepared for it so that the body is jolted as hard as possible, hammering it home as tightly as possible with wedges, and finally jesting at the

plight of their victim. It may be thought that the dramatist is here

guilty of exaggerating their cruelty for religious propaganda, but it is equally probable that the contrast between the shepherds and the soldiers is excellent proof that these dramatists had the folk very clearly in mind when they were composing the plays, and had carefully observed that strange mixture of kindliness and cruelty which unprejudiced observers have always recognized as characteristic of the folk of all countries and of all ages. Folklorists have too often shown themselves

eager to overlook the cruelty and to adopt a sentimental attitude towards the ways of life that they are studying; but the religious dramatists were not afraid to give both sides of the picture, and in this they showed themselves to be accurate and scientific observers.

The language of the miracle plays is full of the racy and pithy sayings and the picturesque metaphors which the folk has always employed without self-consciousness. Cain, doing his best to make the value of his tithe as small as possible, is rebuked by God, who warns him that as he gives so he shall receive. But Cain, a sturdy countryman, is not impressed:

Why, who is that hob-over-the-wall,

he asks, and goes on with his work. A few lines later, as Abel is about to leave him, he holds him back with the remark:

No, no, abide, we have a craw to pull,

which must surely be the original of the present day expression about having a bone to pick. Noah's wife tells her husband that he ought



Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama 77 always to be dressed in " Stafford blue " since he is such a coward; Beelzebub in the Cornish plays speaks of carrying Adam off to hell

On the back of a fox or a mastiff,

a phrase which must embody some belief known to the original audience of this cycle, but which has since passed out of circulation. There are even traces in the later moralities and early interludes of that most characteristic of all folk humour, the topsy-turvy or nonsense speech which frequently appears in the mummers' play : " I went up a straight crooked lane ", says Beelzebub, "I met a bark and he dogged at me. I went to a stick and cut a hedge .. ." and on he goes with a perfect cataract of nonsense. Was it this kind of thing that John Rastell, the

printer and dramatist and friend of Sir Thomas More, had in mind when he wrote, in the middle of a serious play,

Robin Hood in Barnysdale stood, And lent him to a maple thistle, Then came Our Lady and sweet St. Andrew, Sleepest thou, wakest thou, Geoffrey Cook,

or, on a different occasion,

In the beginning of this year John Frith is a noble clerk. He killed a millstone with his spear, Keep well your geese, the dogs do bark.

The Vices of the later moral interludes echo over and over again the travels of the mummers' Doctor:

From France, from Spain, from Rome I come, I've travelled all parts of Christendom,

while one of them goes even further,

I have been at St. Quintin's where I was twice killed, I have been at Mussellburgh at the Scottish field,

and ends up his list with the tantalising phrase,

And I have been in the land of green ginger, which at once recalls that amazing Land of Cockaigne and all its impli- cations, which peeps out in the most unlikely places in the drama of our period. It is this same Vice who is attacked and robbed, has his head covered with a sack, and is told to reply to all who challenge him that he " goes a-mumming "-and all this in a moral play.



78 Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama But all these, and the much-travelled dripping pan of Beelzebub which

in a later morality surely comes to life again in Idleness's self-description,

I am Idleness, the flower of the frying pan,

are matters which still call for a great deal of research in the future. One thing is certain, that although the greater part of the medieval drama in this country was religious in inspiration and purpose, its writers had very clearly in mind not only the practice of their opposite numbers in the field of folk drama, but also a very full stock of folklore and legend of all kinds upon which they did not hesitate to draw when it seemed to suit their purpose. They saw nothing inconsistent in the juxtaposition of Christian belief and semi-pagan material which sometimes resulted; they were concerned with attracting the attention of the common people, and they used the most effective material for this purpose. And no one can say that the religious drama, which could have been complete in

itself, was not benefitted considerably by its borrowings from the literature and traditions of the folk for whose edification it was intended.



Folklore Elements in the Medieval Drama

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