Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/430

 426 Rudwin drama after its religious content has been emptied out of it. They always keep the same plot and the same unvarying char- acters from year to year, having taken over the dramatic inci- dents of the ritual with the minimum of literary intervention. They may have been turned in some instances into puppet plays in so far as the living actors were degraded into mechanical figures. In the Kasperlespiel and the English Punch and Judy show, the hero, who triumphs over the Devil and Death, may, indeed, originally have been a representative of the vegeta- tion spirit. We have seen that stuffed figures stood from the very first for the vegetation powers in the Nuremberg Schem- bertlauf. But these rustic folk-plays never assumed a literary form. They never merged with the main current of dramatic evolu- tion. They have lingered on down to the present day wholly independent of the literary drama. While they, indeed, share the plot with the Carnival ritual, they show no links whatever with the Carnival play. The view expressed by J. G. Robertson, 198 that the drama in all literatures may ultimately be led back to the conflict of Spring and Winter must not be understood in the sense that the conflict of wills, which is the very centre and soul of all drama, is to be traced back to the ritual combat between the powers of good and evil. The root of the drama we will find neither in this nor in any other incident in the ritual. The dance, and especially the armed dance, has been more commonly considered as the source of the drama. 199 We know from analogy with existing savages that the dance formed an essential part of all the agricultural festivals of Europe. 200 Early Greek vases show certain masked dances presumably intended to promote the growth of the crops. The ship- procession in Nuremberg and probably elsewhere was accom- panied by masked dances. 201 Processional and round dances 198 A History of German Literature (1902), p. 181; cf. also Grimm, op. cit., ii. 784. 199 Cf. Michels, op. cit., p. 85; Creizenach, op. cit., i. 409; Hampe, op. cit., p. 94; Pearson, op. cit., ii. 280; Frazer, op. cit.,ix. 384. 200 Cf. Chambers, op. cit., i. I60sq. The Jews also adopted this practice as an act of worship; cf. 2 Sam. vi. 14, 16, 17, 21. 201 Cf. Grimm, op. cit., i. 264; Michels, op. cit., p. 103.