Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/212

184 time when its real purport and object had passed away. The various dialogues found in the English Mummers' Play are, like the myths of ancient Greece, exemplifications of the myth-making power of the people; they are the various folk-explanations of a traditional rite or ceremony, which only came to need explanation when its original purpose had been forgotten, for the very good reason that it had long ceased to exist.

In all the forms, therefore, of the Mummers' Play there should be some action which is constant and always present, though the various dialogues invented to explain it, and consequently the various characters in the dialogues, differ in different localities. On examination it will be found that there is one feature common to them all, and that the central and dominant element in the plot of all these plays. What holds together each and every one of the plays is that, in each and all of them, one of the characters is killed and brought to life again. The circumstances under which he is killed, the events which lead up to his death, his name and station may and do vary, but the one point in which there is no variation is that, for whatever reason—and the reasons given vary—the character that is killed is brought to life again. The play is a ceremonial performance, or rather it is the development in dramatic form of what was originally a religious or magical rite, representing or realising the revivification of the character slain. This revivification, which is the one essential and invariable feature of all the Mummers' Plays in England, was, we may suppose, what was performed by the players who were forbidden by the Church, elsewhere than in England, to enter the houses of the faithful.

So long as the object and purpose of the revivification—whatever the object and purpose may have been—was present to the minds of the performers and spectators of the rite, so long the rite was a living rite. When its purport began to fade from living consciousness, and the rite