Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/214

186 individuality as does the hero, but remains vaguely a Turkish Knight, Valiant Soldier, Champion, Marshalee, Cutting Star, Captain Bluster, Colonel Spring.

But the fact—the important fact—that the ceremony was in its origin a rite and not a play is shown by the persistent way in which the revival of the slain character maintains itself as essential and indispensable to the ceremony, in spite of the difficulty of making the revival fit in with the dramatic situation. When the hero has killed the villain, there is dramatically no possible justification for reviving the villain. Yet the most striking feature in all forms of the Mummers' Play, without exception, is that the person slain is brought to life again. Since, then, there is no dramatic justification for this revival, and inasmuch as it stultifies the action of the piece, and yet is an essential—or, rather, the essential—feature of the ceremony, it can only have been retained because it was the essential feature of the rite in which the Mummers' Play had its origin.

This want of dramatic justification for the revival of the villain was evidently felt by the performers to be a dramatic non sequitur. The proof that they felt it to be such is afforded by the fact that they either apologised for it, or else—departing from the folk-lore version of the story—they allowed the villain to kill the hero, and so provided a dramatic reason for the revival of the slain. In about half the versions of the Mummers' Play the villain is killed, and his revival is apologised for, as, e.g., in Dorsetshire by St. Patrick, on the ground that "he feels for the wives and families of the men slain." The apology, however, was felt to be but an inadequate reason for such a violation of dramatic probability; and, accordingly, in the other half—and presumably the later half—of the versions of the Mummers' Play a dramatic justification for the revival is found in the simple device of allowing the hero instead of the villain to be killed—a device which is evidently an after-