Peter Harrop-
Dean School of Arts and Media, University of Chester
This Play was Acted Here Before-Stream Repetition and Embodiment

Picture if you will a grey, wet, windy Boxing Day morning.  It is 9.00am and there are five men on the street.  Aged mid twenties to mid sixties, they are wearing old fashioned white butcher’s coats I think, but they are beater’s coats, white so you didn’t get shot by the gentry,  with short strips of ribbon sewn on at random, two are carrying butchers cutting tools, and two are carrying large wooden collection boxes.  Black felt cut out cats are sewn on the backs of the coats.  All are wearing hats with ribbons and badges; one a trilby; one a sun hat; one an army ranger hat.  We are on a street called Alma Crescent on a council estate.  No one at all is about.  They start singing, loudly, four of them standing in a huddle in the middle of the road.  One is banging on doors and collecting money.  Another introduces himself as Beelzebub then goes to the other side of the road and knocks on their doors collecting money.  Man three introduces himself as Littlewit; man four says he is here to shed blood; man five says he is St George.  They fight, man four bows his head to indicate death.  Man three says he is a doctor and gives man four a drink of whisky.  Man four recovers.  He’ll recover forty odd times today, then there’s the social drinking on top.  They sing and move along the road for about twenty five metres then start again, and again, and again.  Every four to five minutes.  No one else is on the street, some people give money, some shout abuse from bedroom windows, some ask them in and give them drink.  In two hours time they will start to do the play in pubs, at three o’clock when the pubs shut they will perform in clubs, at about five o’clock they will perform on the street again.  They have a route.  They’ll stop when they’ve finished.

They’ve always done it; Tony’s great grandfather did it.  They’ve always done it in Ripon.

“It’s a tradition.  It’s a tradition and traditions die out.  It’s one of the few that’s left, that I know of anyway, round here, that has kept going.  It’s a tradition and I’m certainly going to make sure that it doesn’t die out.  Keep it going.”

“They wanted us to do it on the August Bank Holiday, St Wilfred’s Day, and they wanted us to perform it in the Market Square.  I tended to think it would make a mockery of it, really, by doing it on that day.” [1]

My title is the concluding line of text from a mummers’ play performed some fifty times each Boxing Day in Ripon, North Yorkshire since at least 1870, when a thirteen year old boy called James Brown is documented as having taken part. [2] By inference the line ‘this play was acted here before’ has been spoken some 6850 times over a 137 year period.  That play has indeed been acted there before and I am interested in the relation between acts of repetition and the generation of meaning within and around traditions of performance. Before I commence an analysis of the particularities of the Ripon tradition I need to make three points.  First I will summarise the evidence base around mumming in general; second, I will summarise the theories that have been imposed on or have derived from that body of evidence; thirdly, I will reflect on the evolution of some folklore studies into what Richard Schechner describes as ‘broad spectrum’ performance studies. [3]

‘Mummers’ Play’ is one of a number of generic terms describing a complex of dramatic calendar customs found throughout England, southern Scotland, parts of Ireland, parts of Wales, outport areas of Newfoundland, and on some former British colonies in the Caribbean. [4] Succinct description of these activities is difficult; one recent effort suggests a typology of some twenty forms of the play [5] but I argue that the basis of ‘type’ must remain contested, since in this case, and there have been many cases, it privileges character and spoken text over other forms of action and performativity.  The author isn’t the first to falter; a hundred years of efforts at classificatory systems have not yet disentangled the preceding 150 years, let alone the concurrent 100 years, of people performing bits of this and bits of that in their own particular village or city mix.  Morphology, typology, and taxonomy are prone to bruise at the edges in the field of folklore.  [6] Accurate historical documentation is also problematised by the etymological complexity of the word mumming which carries a weight of localised dialect meaning. The earliest proven reference to the broad folk play activity under discussion (we get the term mumming and we get some description thus matching ‘a’ to ‘b’) comes from 1770, with gradual increases in reference to both orally transmitted and printed versions of texts and performances until the early twentieth century.  As AE Green has pointed out, the period 1810 to 1914 is where “most of our records of the mumming plays came, and which, by reasonable inference, saw their diffusion and proliferation at least, and possibly their crystallisation into their present form.”  [7] To give some indication of the extent of this ‘diffusion and proliferation’ the first effort at a geographical index, published in 1967, [8] listed 1165 performance locations in England.  Further detailed research has substantially expanded this database, with, for example, over 500 variants recorded in Nottinghamshire alone, without any suggestion that this is an exceptionally rich geographical area.  [9] The latest research suggests a historical case for the ‘grafting on’ of modern text to earlier regional forms of house visiting throughout the eighteenth century.  Peter Millington’s unpublished doctoral thesis proposes a spoken proto-text from evidence based textual genealogy, possibly with chap book origins, but sensibly calls for further bibliometric and archival searches from the period 1650 to 1750.  [10] In any event, we are without doubt looking at the most widespread and widely performed form of English drama, and I am interested in the way in which repetition, both geographical and temporal, has been harnessed to generate meaning both within – and without – performances of these plays.

My reference to ‘without’ or more accurately ‘outwith’ is important.  The mummers play has acted as something of a locus for that chapter in the history of ideas known as survivalism, itself surviving in the lazy thinking of its new age successors.  Regardless of the kind of summary evidence presented above, most mumming scholars have gone off, as the American folklorist Henry Glassie once put it, “questing for holy origins”.  [11] In the early twentieth century scholars as thorough and hard nosed as the theatre historian EK Chambers, seem to have had a blind spot when it came to mumming and Frazerian meta-narrative.  Chambers was clearly influenced by both the first two-volume edition of The Golden Bough which appeared in 1890, as well as the three-volume second edition published in 1900, although the final twelve-volume third edition didn’t appear in full until 1915.   Between 1903 when Chambers published ‘The English Folk Play’ [12] – the first of seven ‘precursory volumes to a little book on Shakespeare’ and 1965 when OB Hardison Jnr produced ‘Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Early Middle Ages’ – [13] particularly his chapter of critique ‘Darwin, Evolution and the Origins of Drama’ a series of utterly tenuous post-Frazerian assumptions had taken root in both the lay and scholarly mindset.   1)  That the mummers play is a medieval remnant of a ceremony of seasonal revitalisation - Chambers actually said “…for this, there is not much evidence beyond natural logic”.  2)  That the mummers play is an ancient ceremony associated with the human life cycle and present throughout Europe thereby demonstrating a complete lack of awareness of van Gennep’s earlier and still defining work on rites of passage. 3)  That the mummers play had its origins in the fertility rituals of a witch cult and 4) that the origin of the folk play lies in shamanistic ritual.  These last two are so wrong as to prohibit concise rebuttal in the confines of this paper, but Norman Cohn’s refutation of Margaret Murray (the retired Egyptologist who made up the idea of a European witch cult in the first place) serves as indicator. [14] The persistence of these ideas, particularly the first, itself a very recent imposition of antiquity on a relatively recent performance tradition, has occasionally impacted on performers interpretation of the activity they are engaged in, and has frequently impinged on audience reception of mumming performances.  This is why we have to consider the importance of perceived antiquity in the generation of meaning attaching to the performances but only loosely deriving from them.  Simplistic I know, but important in a discussion of repetition, and I’ll return to this point later.

The sustaining power of these imposed ideas is peculiar when we consider that Folklore was never a strongly established discipline in the UK in any event. Even in its Victorian and Edwardian heyday it was largely a secondary interest for classicists such as the Cambridge School ritualists, establishing two distinct centres in the Folklore Society and the English Folk Dance and Song Society rather than the Academy.  There remained a schism between folklore as academic pursuit and the collection and replication of folklore as practice, with the latter centered in the EFDSS at Cecil Sharp House and the former enshrined in the Journal of the Folklore Society.  The ‘collected’ or ‘captured texts’ from which theory was generated were then largely frozen in performative aspic.   It was only the small scale and short lived ‘professionalisation’ of folklore at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and Stirling that made way for the social scientific ‘functional shift’ of  the late 1960s and 1970s and eagerly embraced  the ‘performance orientation’ in the north American folkloristics of the time. The folklorist  Dell Hymes, in his essay ‘Breakthrough into Performance’ wrote with some prescience:  “One might even hope that folklore would take the lead in showing how appreciation and interpretation of performances as unique events can be united with analysis of the underlying rules and regularities which make performances possible and intelligible.”  [15] My own view is that it did just that, and that the ‘performance orientation in folkloristics’ as it was termed, is a major and largely unsung chapter in the history of performance studies. The performance orientation made possible the study of what I like to term ‘liberated’ performances, freed from a particular kind of scholarly preconception that privileged accurate preservation of the performance as originally ‘collected’, whenever that may have been and whatever the circumstances, but denied one counterpoint to repetition – change.  And the only thing folklorists know for certain is that traditions change.  Which brings us neatly to the ‘last but one’ chair of the Performance Studies department at NYU, Diana Taylor, whose recent work Acts of Transfer highlights and carries forward this distinction between what she has termed the archive and the repertoire.  The collected, if you will, and the performed.  For the moment I merely wish to note that acts of archiving occur in cultural contexts, and acts of archiving and cultural contexts can both impact on the repertoire. “By taking ‘performance’ seriously as a system of learning, storing, and transmitting knowledge, [she says] Performance Studies allows us to expand what we understand by ‘knowledge’.”  [16]

In a recent article I conjoined the words ‘Performance and Civility’ with an important sub-title ‘the making and unmaking of strangers’, itself borrowed from Zygmunt Baumann.  [17]  The paper was expressly concerned with the ways in which performance, and performances, can be harnessed to negotiate and re-negotiate social relationships, both within and across cultures.  I believe that one of the ways in which performances enable this to happen – and mumming is no exception - is by encouraging us to see the common (place) and common (time) quotidian social networks we inhabit through fresh eyes.  In an earlier manifestation of this preoccupation of mine, someone suggested I use another version of that subtitle, particularly appropriate to some forms of Newfoundland mumming, ‘the masking and unmasking of strangers’. [18] The insertion and removal of those two‘s’s’ is now central to my discussion.  The making and unmaking of strangers, the masking and unmasking of strangers, masking and making strangers, unmasking and unmaking strangers.  It is this issue which constitutes the ‘civility’ of mumming.  For at the core of civility lies the unmaking of strangers, which I believe the mummers’ perambulation actually sets out to do.   The writer Paul Theroux has noted that “even the most distant and exotic travel has its parallel in ordinary life.  Every day we meet new people and are insulted or misunderstood; we are thrown upon our own resources.  In the coming and going of daily life we rehearse a modified version of the dramatic event known as first contact”.  [19] It seems to me that the ‘making and unmaking of strangers’ describes a series’ of processes which underlie the interface of performance and civility, and as others have argued, notably Pietr Bogatyrev, Tony Green and Herbert Halpert [20], it is the adumbration of the presentation and representation of both known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar, outsider and insider, that makes mumming so attractive.  This is the context within which I would like you to consider repetition in mumming in general and in the Ripon tradition in particular.

Mumming is first and foremost a calendar custom, it is time and site specific, repeats both its approach and its recession, makes you wait, is measured, makes you measure yourself, confronts you with strangers and strangeness, reminds you of the stranger you now were last year and the other years ago.  Makes you take stock, makes you take measure.

Mumming carries a weight of historical and geographical repetition, yet every performance remains both site specific and processional, each site specific to its own adjuncts, each procession unique to a site, each tradition possessed of a location, weighing you down with your relation to location, to time, to space, place, procession and perambulation, to coming and going and the passing of seasons, with your relation to yourself, to others.

Mumming re-presents, and re-presents, the real, the presentational and the representational.  It re-presents and re-presents a glissando of real, presentational and representational.  It shows us people we know, Norman, Tony, John; it shows us strangers; the slow, the bad, the violent, but we know them anyway, and it’s our house, farm, street, pub, market, and we’re not alone, and it was ok last year, and look they’re moving on.

The performers repeat themselves, their roles, their characters year in year out, performance in performance out.  The audiences repeat themselves, their roles, their characters.  There is both piquancy and melancholy in the changing self in regard to this constant performance, or in the constant self in relation to changes in a place, or shifts in a tradition.  The actors and audience know each other and many of the changes in each other, as Bogatyrev [21] had it, the audience mostly knows the actor behind the mask, and in mumming the actors sometimes know the audience behind the mask. 

As I’m sure you all know a palimpsest is a manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.  That’s what mumming is. A palimpsest can also be an object, place, or area that reflects its history.  That’s what tradition is for, to make a palimpsest of place, and maybe to make a palimpsest of people.  Pentimento, on the other hand, is an underlying image in a painting, as an earlier painting, part of a painting, or original draft that shows through, usually when the top layer of paint has become transparent with age. The Edwardian folklorists chose to believe that mumming had become transparent enough with age for them to see the original draft beneath.  I think they missed the wood for the trees.  In my view mumming makes such profound use of repetition precisely because it is a system of learning, storing and transmitting knowledge, but the survivalist emphasis on pushing meaning into the past, the false assumptions of atavism, shard, remnant and doggerel, have distracted observers from the richness of contemporary performance.  Repetition was viewed by survivalist folklorists as a degenerative process rather than a creative and meaning making tool.  To paraphrase Daniel Dennett, whatever the self is, it acts as a centre of gravity for the generation of narrative.  What calendar customs do, what mumming does, what the Ripon tradition is an example of, is a highlighting of self, and the changes in self, and the narratives that emerge from self, by facilitating reflection on time, place, the familiar and the strange.  To use the language of modernity it facilitates a verfremdungseffekt, a making strange of the familiar, and once is never enough.   “This play was acted here before”… even when the scholarship has done a volte face.

Endnotes.

1. Harrop, P. The Ripon Plough Stots, Traditional Drama Studies, volume 2, 1988, pps.1 – 18.

2. Carpenter Collection p. 435.

3. Schechner, R.  An Introduction to Performance Studies, Routledge, 2003, Introduction p.v. 

4. See for example Halpert, H and Story, G.M. Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland, University of Newfoundland, 1969.  Abrahams, R. British West Indian Folk Drama and the ‘Life Cycle’ Problem, Folklore, vol. 81, 1970, pp. 241 – 265.

5. Millington, P. T. The Origins and Development of the English Folk Plays, Unpublished PhD, University of Sheffield, May, 2002.

6. Harrop, P. Towards a Morphology of the English Folk Play, Lore and Language, vol. 5. no. 2, 1986.  pps. 63 – 99.

7. Green, A.E. Popular Drama and the Mummers’ Play, in Bradby et al, Performance and Politics in Popular Drama, Cambridge, 1980. pps. 139 – 166.

8. Cawte, E. C; Helm, A; and Peacock, N.  English Ritual Drama: A Geographical Index, Folklore Society, 1967.

9. Millington, P.T. An Interim List of Nottinghamshire Folk Plays and Related Customs.  Long Eaton, 1980.  Reprinted by the Traditional Drama Research group, Sheffield, 1984.

10. Millington, P.T. The Origins and Development of the English Folk Plays, Unpublished PhD, University of Sheffield, May, 2002.

11. Glassie, H.  All Silver and No Brass: An Irish Christmas Mumming.  Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1976. p.55.

12. Chambers, E. K.  The English Folk Play, Oxford, 1933.

13. Hardison, O.B.  Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Early Middle Ages, Baltimore, John Hopkins. 1965.

14.See Murray, M.A. The God of Witches, Low, London, 1933 and the sterling demolition job conducted by Cohn, N. in Europe’s Inner Demons, Sussex University Press, 1975.

15. Hymes, D. Breakthrough into Performance in Ben-Amos, D. and Goldstein, K. (eds) Folklore: Performance and Communication, Mouton, The hague, 1975, p.11.

16. Taylor, D.  The Archive and the Repertoire.  Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.  Durham, Duke University Press.   www.nyu.edu/tisch/performance/pages/essays/dianetaylor/html retrieved 23rd March 2003.

17. Baumann, Z.  Postmodernity and its Discontents, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1997.

18. Harrop, P.  The Making and Unmaking of Strangers:  Verfremdungseffekt and its Antithesis, Folklore Society Centenary Conference, University of London, 2003.

19. Theroux, P. Fresh Air Fiends, Travel Writings 1985-2000, pp xxiv, cited in Harrop, P. Performance and Civility: The Making and Unmaking of Strangers, Performance Research, volume 9 , number 4, pps 134 – 138, 2004.

20. See Green, A.E. 1980 op cit; Halpert, H. 1969 op cit; Bogatyrev, P. in Matejka, L and Titunik, I.R. Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, Cambridge, Massuchusetts, 1976. 

21. Bogatyrev, P. op cit.