Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/210

182 These ecclesiastical prohibitions suffice to show that in Europe, as in other parts of the world, religious rites were performed in which the celebrants wore masks and were believed to be spirits or gods; and, inasmuch as, in other parts of the world, such rites eventually became theatrical performances in which the actors continued to wear masks, the possibility that the Greek drama may have originated in the same way becomes a probability. Perhaps it may be felt, if not urged, that if in Greece these religious rites eventually became theatrical performances and the masked celebrants became actors wearing masks, then in other parts of Europe also these rites should have followed a similar line of evolution; or, if they did not, then some sufficient reason should be forthcoming to account for their failing to do so.

As we have seen, for the first thousand years of the Christian era, the attitude of the Church towards these rites and their masked celebrants was one of denunciation and prohibition. We have next to notice that the Church succeeded so far as to deprive the processions of masked figures of their originally religious significance and to make them innocuous in this respect from the Church point of view. Having done so, the Church could afford to tolerate them.

But, whereas on the Continent they survived as the festum stultorum and were tolerated in that form, in England the Festival of Fools did not come into being or, by native growth, spring out of them. In England, I suggest, they survived in the form of the Mummers' Play.

In the first place, the performers, the Mummers, wore, if they do not still wear, masks, as did the performers in the pagan festivities of the New Year, denounced by the Church. Next, the Mummers in England went round from house to house in the same way that St. Boniface says the performers went in procession through the streets of Rome. In England, again, the Mummers not only went from house