The Mediaeval Stage, Volume 1 (of 2)

by E. K. Chambers

The last two chapters have afforded more than one example of village festival customs ultimately taking shape as drama. But neither the English Robin Hood plays, nor the French Jeu de Robin et Marion, can be regarded as folk-drama in the proper sense of the word. They were written not by the folk themselves, but by trouvères or minstrels for the folk; and at a period when the independent evolution of the religious play had already set a model of dramatic composition. Probably the same is true of the Hox Tuesday play in the form in which we may conjecture it to have been presented before Elizabeth late in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless it is possible to trace, apart from minstrel intervention and apart from imitation of miracles, the existence of certain embryonic dramatic tendencies in the village ceremonies themselves. Too much must not be made of these. Jacob Grimm was inclined to find in them the first vague beginnings of the whole of modern drama[625]. This is demonstrably wrong. Modern drama arose, by a fairly well defined line of evolution, from a threefold source, the ecclesiastical liturgy, the farce of the mimes, the classical revivals of humanism. Folk-drama contributed but the tiniest rill to the mighty stream. Such as it was, however, a couple of further chapters may be not unprofitably spent in its analysis.

The festival customs include a number of dramatic rites which appear to have been originally symbolical expressions of the facts of seasonal recurrence lying at the root of the festivals themselves. The antithesis of winter and summer, the renouveau of spring, are mimed in three or four distinct fashions. The first and the most important, as well as the most widespread of these, is the mock representation of a death or burial. Dr. Frazer has collected many instances of the ceremony known as the ‘expulsion of Death[626].’ This takes place at various dates in spring and early summer, but most often on the fourth Sunday in Lent, one of the many names of which is consequently Todten-Sonntag. An effigy is made, generally of straw, but in some cases of birch twigs, a beechen bough, or other such material. This is called Death, is treated with marks of fear, hatred or contempt, and is finally carried in procession, and thrust over the boundary of the village. Or it is torn in pieces, buried, burnt, or thrown into a river or pool. Sometimes the health or other welfare of the folk during the year is held to depend on the rite being duly performed. The fragments of Death have fertilizing efficacy for women and cattle; they are put in the fields, the mangers, the hens’ nests. Here and there women alone take part in the ceremony, but more often it is common to the whole village. The expulsion of Death is found in various parts of Teutonic Germany, but especially in districts such as Thuringia, Bohemia, Silesia, where the population is wholly or mainly Slavonic. A similar custom, known both in Slavonic districts and in Italy, France, and Spain, had the name of ‘sawing the old woman.’ At Florence, for instance, the effigy of an old woman was placed on a ladder. At Mid Lent it was sawn through, and the nuts and dried fruits with which it was stuffed scrambled for by the crowd. At Palermo there was a still more realistic representation with a real old woman, to whose neck a bladder of blood was fitted[627].

The ‘Death’ of the German and Slavonic form of the custom has clearly come to be regarded as the personification of the forces of evil within the village; and the ceremony of expulsion may be compared with other periodical rites, European and non-European, in which evil spirits are similarly expelled[628]. The effigy may even be regarded in the light of a scapegoat, bearing away the sins of the community[629]. But it is doubtful how far the notion of evil spirits warring against the good spirits which protect man and his crops is a European, or at any rate a primitive European one[630]; and it may perhaps be taken for granted that what was originally thought to be expelled in the rite was not so much either ‘Death’ or ‘Sin’ as winter. This view is confirmed by the evidence of an eighth-century homily, which speaks of the expulsion of winter in February as a relic of pagan belief[631]. Moreover, the expulsion of Death is often found in the closest relation to the more widespread custom of bringing summer, in the shape of green tree or bough, into the village. The procession which carries away the dead effigy brings back the summer tree; and the rhymes used treat the two events as connected[632].

The homily just quoted suggests that the mock funeral or expulsion of winter was no new thing in the eighth century. On the other hand, it can hardly be supposed that customs which imply such abstract ideas as death, or even as summer and winter, belong to the earliest stages of the village festival. What has happened is what happens in other forms of festival play. The instinct of play, in this case finding vent in a dramatic representation of the succession of summer to winter, has taken hold of and adapted to its own purposes elements in the celebrations which, once significant, have gradually come to be mere traditional survivals. Such are the ceremonial burial in the ground, the ceremonial burning, the ceremonial plunging into water, of the representative of the fertilization spirit. In particular, the southern term ‘the old woman’ suggests that the effigy expelled or destroyed is none other than the ‘corn mother’ or ‘harvest-May,’ fashioned to represent the fertilization spirit out of the last sheaf at harvest, and preserved until its place is taken by a new and green representative in the spring.

There are, however, other versions of the mock death in which the central figure of the little drama is not the representative of the fertilization spirit itself, but one of the worshippers. In Bavaria the Whitsuntide Pfingstl is dressed in leaves and water-plants with a cap of peonies. He is soused with water, and then, in mimicry, has his head cut off. Similar customs prevail in the Erzgebirge and elsewhere[633]. We have seen this Pfingstl before. He is the Jack in the green, the worshipper clad in the god under whose protection he desires to put himself[634]. But how can the killing of him symbolize the spring, for obviously it is the coming summer, not the dying winter, that the leaf-clad figure must represent? The fact is that the Bavarian drama is not complete. The full ceremony is found in other parts of Germany. Thus in Saxony and Thuringia a ‘wild man’ covered with leaves and moss is hunted in a wood, caught, and executed. Then comes forward a lad dressed as a doctor, who brings the victim to life again by bleeding[635]. Even so annually the summer dies and has its resurrection. In Swabia, again, on Shrove Tuesday, ‘Dr. Eisenbart’ bleeds a man to death, and afterwards revives him. This same Dr. Eisenbart appears also in the Swabian Whitsuntide execution, although here too the actual resurrection seems to have dropped out of the ceremony[636]. It is interesting to note that the green man of the peasantry, who dies and lives again, reappears as the Green Knight in one of the most famous divisions of Arthurian romance[637].

The mock death or burial type of folk-drama resolves itself, then, into two varieties. In one, it is winter whose passing is represented, and for this the discarded harvest-May serves as a nucleus. In the other, which is not really complete without a resurrection, it is summer, whose death is mimed merely as a preliminary to its joyful renewal; and this too is built up around a fragment of ancient cult in the person of the leaf-clad worshipper, who is, indeed, none other than the priest-king, once actually, and still in some sort and show, slain at the festival[638]. In the instances so far dealt with, the original significance of the rite is still fairly traceable. But there are others into which new meanings, due to the influence of Christian custom, have been read. In many parts of Germany customs closely analogous to those of the expulsion of winter or Death take place on Shrove Tuesday, and have suffered metamorphosis into ‘burial of the Carnival[639].’ England affords the ‘Jack o’ Lent’ effigy which is taken to represent Judas Iscariot[640], the Lincoln ‘funeral of Alleluia[641],’ the Tenby ‘making Christ’s bed[642],’ the Monkton ‘risin’ and buryin’ Peter[643].’ The truth that the vitality of a folk custom is far greater than that of any single interpretation of it is admirably illustrated.

Two other symbolical representations of the phenomena of the renouveau must be very briefly treated. At Briançon in Dauphiné, instead of a death and resurrection, is used a pretty little May-day drama, in which the leaf-clad man falls into sleep upon the ground and is awakened by the kiss of a maiden[644]. Russia has a similar custom; and such a magic kiss, bringing summer with it, lies at the heart of the story of the Sleeping Beauty. Indeed, the marriage of heaven and earth seems to have been a myth very early invented by the Aryan mind to explain the fertility of crops beneath the rain, and it probably received dramatic form in religious ceremonies both in Greece and Italy[645]. Finally, there is a fairly widespread spring custom of holding a dramatic fight between two parties, one clad in green to represent summer, the other in straw or fur to represent winter. Waldron describes this in the Isle of Man[646]; Olaus Magnus in Sweden[647]. Grimm says that it is found in various districts on both sides of the middle Rhine[648]. Perhaps both this dramatic battle and that of the Coventry Hox Tuesday owe their origin to the struggle for the fertilizing head of a sacrificial animal, which also issued in football and similar games. Dr. Frazer quotes several instances from all parts of the world in which a mock fight, or an interchange of abuse and raillery taking the place of an actual fight, serves as a crop-charm[649]. The summer and winter battle gave to literature a famous type of neo-Latin and Romance débat[650]. In one of the most interesting forms of this, the eighth-or ninth-century Conflictus Veris et Hiemis, the subject of dispute is the cuckoo, which spring praises and winter chides, while the shepherds declare that he must be drowned or stolen away, because summer cometh not. The cuckoo is everywhere a characteristic bird of spring, and his coming was probably a primitive signal for the high summer festival[651].

The symbolical dramas of the seasons stand alone and independent, but it may safely be asserted that drama first arose at the village feasts in close relation to the dance. That dancing, like all the arts, tends to be mimetic is a fact which did not escape the attention of Aristotle[652]. The pantomimes of the decadent Roman stage are a case in point. Greek tragedy itself had grown out of the Dionysiac dithyramb, and travellers describe how readily the dances of the modern savage take shape as primitive dramas of war, hunting, love, religion, labour, or domestic life[653]. Doubtless this was the case also with the caroles of the European festivals. The types of chanson most immediately derived from these are full of dialogue, and already on the point of bursting into drama. That they did do this, with the aid of the minstrels, in the Jeu de Robin et de Marion we have seen[654]. A curious passage in the Itinerarium Cambriae of Giraldus Cambrensis (†1188) describes a dance of peasants in and about the church of St. Elined, near Brecknock on the Gwyl Awst, in which the ordinary operations of the village life, such as ploughing, sewing, spinning were mimetically represented[655]. Such dances seem to survive in some of the rondes or ‘singing-games,’ so frequently dramatic, of children[656]. On the whole, perhaps, these connect themselves rather with the domestic than with the strictly agricultural element in village cult. A large proportion of them are concerned with marriage. But the domestic and the agricultural cannot be altogether dissociated. The game of ‘Nuts in May,’ for instance, seems to have as its kernel a reminiscence of marriage by capture; but the ‘nuts’ or rather ‘knots’ or ‘posies’ ‘in May’ certainly suggest a setting at a seasonal festival. So too, with ‘Round the Mulberry Bush.’ The mimicry here is of domestic operations, but the ‘bush’ recalls the sacred tree, the natural centre of the seasonal dances. The closest parallels to the dance described by Giraldus Cambrensis are to be found in the rondes of ‘Oats and Beans and Barley’ and ‘Would you know how doth the Peasant?’, in which the chief, though not always the only, subjects of mimicry are ploughing, sowing and the like, and which frequently contain a prayer or aspiration for the welfare of the crops[657].

I have treated the mimetic element of budding drama in the agricultural festivals as being primarily a manifestation of the activities of play determined in its direction by the dominant interests of the occasion, and finding its material in the débris of ritual custom left over from forgotten stages of religious thought. It is possible also to hold that the mimesis is more closely interwoven with the religious and practical side of the festivals, and is in fact yet another example of that primitive magical notion of causation by the production of the similar, which is at the root of the rain-and sun-charms. Certainly the village dramas, like the other ceremonies which they accompany, are often regarded as influencing the luck of the farmer’s year; just as the hunting-and war-dances of savages are often regarded not merely as amusement or as practice for actual war and hunting, but as charms to secure success in these pursuits[658]. But it does not seem clear to me that in this case the magical efficacy belongs to the drama from the beginning, and I incline to look upon it as merely part of the sanctity of the feast as a whole, which has attached itself in the course of time even to that side of it which began as play.

The evolution of folk-drama out of folk-dance may be most completely studied through a comparison of the various types of European sword-dance with the so-called ‘mummers’,’ ‘guisers’,’ or ‘Pace-eggers’’ play of Saint George. The history of the sword-dance has received a good deal of attention from German archaeologists, who, however, perhaps from imperfect acquaintance with the English data, have stopped short of the affiliation to it of the play[659]. The dance itself can boast a hoar antiquity. Tacitus describes it as the one form of spectaculum to be seen at the gatherings of the Germans with whom he was conversant. The dancers were young men who leapt with much agility amongst menacing spear-points and sword-blades[660]. Some centuries later the use of sweorda-gelac as a metaphor for battle in Beowulf shows that the term was known to the continental ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons[661]. Then follows a long gap in the record, bridged only by a doubtful reference in an eighth-century Frankish homily[662], and a possible representation in a ninth-century Latin and Anglo-Saxon manuscript[663]. The minstrels seem to have adopted the sword-dance into their repertory[664], but the earliest mediaeval notice of it as a popular ludus is at Nuremberg in 1350. From that date onwards until quite recent years it crops up frequently, alike at Shrovetide, Christmas and other folk festivals, and as an element in the revels at weddings, royal entries, and the like[665]. It is fairly widespread throughout Germany. It is found in Italy, where it is called the mattaccino[666], and in Spain (matachin), and under this name or that of the danse des bouffons it was known both in France and England at the Renaissance[667]. It is given by Paradin in his Le Blason des Danses and, with the music and cuts of the performers, by Tabourot in his Orchésographie (1588)[668]. These are the sophisticated versions of courtly halls. But about the same date Olaus Magnus describes it as a folk-dance, to the accompaniment of pipes or cantilenae, in Sweden[669]. In England, the main area of the acknowledged sword-dance is in the north. It is found, according to Mr. Henderson, from the Humber to the Cheviots; and it extends as far south as Cheshire and Nottinghamshire[670]. Outlying examples are recorded from Winchester[671] and from Devonshire[672]. In Scotland Sir Walter Scott found it among the farthest Hebrides, and it has also been traced in Fifeshire[673].