The Robin Hood Folk Plays of South-Central England

The Robin Hood Folk Plays of South-Central England Michael J. Preston The British folk plays have been given considerable atten­ tion since their "discovery" in the late eighteenth century.I Comment on the plays has concentrated heavily upon their origins; according to the current theory, the plays are vestiges of an archetypal "life-cycle play."2 Because of this emphasis on origins. as well as the co-ordinate assumption that the texts are either hopelessly corrupt or purely a matter of latter-day accretion, there has been a tendency to avoid detailed study of the many texts which have been recorded;3 it is the action of the play which is considered important.4 Accordingly. the Revesby Sword Play,5 or some other atypical text,6 has been examined in great detail because it manifests some trait which supports the current assumption made about the origins of the tradition. Although Roger Abrahams has argued that "the inter­ dependence of life and death was [not] the dominant theme" of seasonal festivities and that �'there does not seem to be any evidence for the existence of any 'original folk drama' involving this total life-cycle perspective,"7 the theory is still maintained by a significant group of British and Irish folklorists& and should not too readily be discounted. In all probability the British folk play tradition is a set of traditions which differ among them­ selves, not merely because of oral change, but because in dif­ ferent areas there have been different influences, and to sort out which influence influenced the original origin produces argu­ ments of more heat than light. Besides, although one may be interested in the origins of a tradition, it must be remembered that even certain knowledge of an origin might shed very little light on the tradition as it exists centuries or millennia later. The 91 92 Comparative Drama British folk plays, as performed today, are certainly far removed from any ritual origin they might have. Generally studies of the British folk plays are based on very few texts and ignore the hundreds of others which, in one way or another, tend to contradict or at least not support the ideas under consideration.9 One example of this selection is the detailed treatinent given the 1779 Revesby .Sword Play,10 while ignoring the traditional 1780 St. George play from Islip, Oxfordshire.11 Rather than using 1the odd text to support a theory, I propose to study a number of texts from one small area-parts of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Somerset, and Wiltshire-and explain what has happened within this tradition. I One aspect of the British folk play texts which lends sup­ port to the notion that the entirety of all texts is a matter of accretion is the apparent tendency of the texts to absorb snips and snatches from almost any conceivable source. Perform­ ances may be lengthened by adding spee ches and songs, as well as by multiplying the number of combats. On occasion, a second entire play may be added to the end of a traditional text, as seems to have happened to the Ducklington "Men's Mumm ering."12 Many changes seem to come about through the substitution of one speec h or set of speec hes for another. Perhaps the most interesting examples of substitution in­ volve major portions of the ball ad of "Robin Hood and the Tanner" (Child 126) and two stanzas from "Robin Hood and the Shepherd" (Child 135).13 Although the plays from Icomb14 and Sapperton,15 Gloucestershire, and Keynsham, Somersetl6 contain only small fragments of the ballads, large portions of the play texts are comprised of the ballad substitu­ tions at Kempsford17 and South Cemey,t.8 Gloucestershire, Ducklington and Shipton-under-Wychwood,19 Oxfordshire, and Inglesham,20 Wiltshire-towns located within a few miles of each other. The texts from these five towns begin with their regionally distinct texts and change to the more broadly tra­ ditional wording only after the battle when the doctor, who is needed to raise the slain hero, enters. Perhaps because there is no organic identification of the speaker of each ballad stanza, as there often is for folk play spee ches, the...