Peter Harrop - Mummers Plays Revisited

Peter Harrop offers a reappraisal of mummers plays, which have long been regarded as a form of folk or traditional drama, somehow separate from the mainstream of British theatre.

This fresh view of folk and tradition explores how mummers plays emerged in an eighteenth-century theatrical environment of popular spouting clubs and private theatricals, yet quickly transformed into traditionary drama with echoes of an ancient past. Harrop suggests that by the late nineteenth century the plays had been appropriated by antiquarians and folklorists, leaving mummers plays as a strangely separate and categorised form. This book considers how that happened, and the ways in which these late nineteenth-century ideas were absorbed into the mummers plays, providing a new lease of life for them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Ideal for anyone with a specialised interest in this unique form, Mummers Plays Revisited spans recent work in theatre history, performance studies and folklore to offer a comprehensive and engaging study.

Peter Harrop is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chester, formerly Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor. He has published in Lore and Language; Folk Life; Performance Research and Contemporary Theatre Review, among other journals, and in 2013 he co-edited Performance Ethnography with Dunja Njaradi.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-TheatrePerformance-Studies/book-series/RATPS.

Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation

Displayed and Performed

Playing Sick

Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine

Movements of Interweaving

Dance and Corporeality in Times of Travel and Migration

Performing Arts in Transition

Moving between Media

Incapacity and Theatricality

Politics and Aesthetics in Theatre Involving Actors with Intellectual

Disabilities

Womens Playwriting and the Womens Movement, 1890-1918

Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn

Mummers Plays Revisited

Hypertheatre

Contemporary Radical Adaptation of Greek Tragedy

After the Long Silence

The Theatre of Brazils Post-Dictatorship Generation

First published 2020

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

2020 Peter Harrop

The right of Peter Harrop to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Names: Harrop, Peter (Professor of Drama), author.

Title: Mummers plays revisited / Peter Harrop.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies

Identifiers: LCCN 2019008780| ISBN 9780815348375 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351167048 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Folk drama, EnglishHistory and criticism. | Mumming playsHistory and criticism. | English drama18th centuryHistory and criticism. | English drama19th centuryHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC PR979 .H37 2019 | DDC 822.009dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008780

ISBN: 978-0-8153-4837-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-16704-8 (ebk)

I first went mumming with members of the Monkseaton Morris Men and Folk Dance Club one New Years Day I think it was 1971. Thanks to all of them for helping foster a lifelong interest, particularly the late Alan and Joyce Brown, who worked hard to maintain the integrity of folk performance while celebrating its theatricality. Thanks to the late John Hodgson, for many years head of drama at Bretton Hall, who eventually allowed me to undertake a final year undergraduate project on folk performance. Thanks to Arthur Pritchard for kind assistance with the exhibition that formed part of that project, and for his samizdat cartoons. Special thanks to Tony Green, then of the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies of the University of Leeds, for his inspiring supervision of my PhD thesis on contemporary mumming. I continue to acknowledge the mummers, past and present, in Antrobus, Bampton, Chipping Campden, Ripon and Uttoxeter. The performances they offered in the 1970s and since, and the conversations Ive enjoyed, continue to shape my thinking.

Several members of the Traditional Drama Research Group helped me out then and are still helping me out forty years later; thanks to Duncan Broomhead, Peter Millington, Derek Schofield, Ron Shuttleworth and Paul Smith.

This book has a more recent genesis than my general interest in mumming. Thanks to Steve Rowley for organising the Mummers Unconvention events held in Bath, Gloucester and Stroud between 2011 and 2016 and inviting me to introduce them; Bill Tuck and Barbara Segal of Chalemie performance group (Bills papers and our mutual conversations suggested a way forward for me which is evident in the structure of this work); Victor Emeljanow, then editor of Popular Entertainment Studies, for publishing the first of those Unconvention introductions in modified form in 2012. Thanks to Anne Daye of the Dolmetsch Historical Dance Society for inviting me to speak on Mumming: Disguised and Obscured by Scholarship at their annual conference at Goldsmiths in 2015. Thanks to Tim Wheeler, vice chancellor at the University of Chester, who invited me to deliver a valedictory address later that year. That lecture, When History isnt Enough: Mumming as Cultural Performance, was followed in 2016 by a University Christmas Lecture at Storyhouse Theatre in Chester subtitled A Very Partial History of Christmas Performance. Working with Duncan Broomhead and Derek Schofield during 2017 and 2018 as they re-worked and re-presented the Folk Play Research website also afforded me an opportunity to try out my thinking thanks again to them. The website that resulted has been an important resource in producing this work, as has Peter Millingtons website Master Mummers Folk Play Website.

At the University of Chester, I particularly thank both Emma Walsh, site librarian at the Broomhead Library, and Fiona McLean, subject librarian at the Seaborne Library, who have been more helpful than they probably realise. Thanks also for the administration of SCONUL and the staff at Manchester University Library for their patient assistance. Paul Smith and Mike Preston allowed generous access to unpublished work in progress. Ron Shuttleworth, in my mind the last of the antiquarians, managed to unearth material I couldnt find elsewhere.