Mummers Plays' Revisited by Peter Harrop (review)

Peter Harrop's reassessment of the eighteenth-century mummers' play is to be welcomed, given that these low-brow, folk entertainments have been neglected due to the critical tendency to focus upon the literariness of drama from that period. Harrop neatly structures the book around the notion of the "visit", echoing the actual visit by mummers to private households, a subject which occupies much of the second chapter. The introduction, "First Visit", sets out the definition of the mummers' plays, which, as Harrop notes, were diverse because they survived and developed over 250 years. Typically the plays were "short and in verse … although the verse is often patchy and inconsistent" (3). They were supported by local agency, often associated with Christmas, and played as "visits", a connection with the earlier medieval, silent, mumming dramas.

The first chapter uses the allure of the stock characters of the "quacks, fools, heroes and villains" to take the reader into the mumming world, much like an actor drawing the spectator into a performance. Here Harrop aligns the mumming personae with the medieval sottie and the Italian commedia del'arte. He also explores the structures surrounding the production of the mummers' plays, putting forward an original argument that the performers and audiences overlapped with the spread of theatre across eighteenth-century England (47). Although the significant research in this chapter pulls together sources that have not easily been accessible, I sometimes missed Harrop's analysis amongst the historical detailing.

The chapter "Second Sightings" examines "spoutings" (clubs formed to enable mainly young men to perform their favourite speeches) and "private theatricals". This covers a range of extant eighteenth-century mummers' entertainments found at Newcastle, Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire, Truro, and Oxfordshire. The selection shows the geographical and social range of amateur mumming with servants often appearing alongside their household superiors. As Harrop points out, rank and talent did not always correlate (59).

The third chapter, "Turning Theatre into Folklore", switches its focus to the historiography of mumming in the nineteenth century captured largely through its documentation in the antiquarian periodical Notes and Queries. It's here that Harrop presents a fascinating picture of the way in which the nineteenth century saw an "edge of strangeness" in its critique of the mummers' plays so they were seen as a "cultural fossil" (158). The continuing depiction of them using language such as "merriment", "burlesque", "boisterous" means that they are increasingly presented as folk dramas, rather than as theatre, particular towards the end of the period.

If I have any regrets it is that the coda "Revisiting: The Last Hundred Years" is so short. A mere seven pages looks at the way the theatrical language of mumming finds itself in the rebirth of post-Second World War amateur drama. The scope of this would not have fitted into the format of this book, but it opens up a nice sequel, which I hope Harrop undertakes. The exploration of the vestiges of mumming in contemporary spectacles would be fascinating.