Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/390

334 dialogue is of secondary importance altogether. Those of my hearers who have seen these traditionary plays performed, cannot fail to have remarked the unalterable adherence to custom and tradition by the actors; not a step is allowed to be changed, not a gesture. A folk-play as performed by one generation is an exact reproduction of the play as performed in the previous generation. Very often the performers themselves are obviously oblivious of the meaning of their gestures and words; old words are used, which are quite obsolete in the dialect of the district; actions are rendered with a studious adherence to tradition, but sometimes a little removed from the exact part of the dialogue to which they belong, and when that happens the solemnity of the actors appears a little grotesque. But what is important for us to note, is the fact that that permanence of traditional acting gives us something far older in these folk-dramas than the dialogue, which in most cases appears to belong to the seventeenth century. So, too, with regard to the popular dances. They are all called, almost without exception, "Morris Dances". But, as in the piece I have been alluding to—“The Morrice Dancers at Revesby”—the dance is the sword-dance, or variants of it, or popular traditional dances, to which something of the Morisco became added, just as the folk-plays took in allusions to the Crusades, and in modern times turned St. George into Prince George.

I hope in a future paper to present the results of an analysis of English traditional plays, or folk-plays, side by side with an analysis of the pre-Shakespearean drama, on the lines laid down in the present paper. This will yield a two-fold contribution to folk-lore and the drama respectively; and I am not without hope that collectors of folk-lore, on the one hand, may be induced to look to this department of the subject with increased interest, while, on the other, literary students may be convinced of the importance of traditionary beginnings. Let it be understood that the aim is to reconstruct from tradition the embryo on