Playhouse Calls: Folk Play Doctors on the Elizabethan Stage

Abstract

It remains uncertain whether the English folk drama known as the mumming play coexisted with the drama of Shakespeare's age. Flourishing in the United Kingdom and elsewhere since the 1700s, this curious event enacts a 'hero combat' wherein a champion (often St George) boasts of his battle skill to an enemy (often a Turkish or Egyptian knight). After one opponent has killed the other, a doctor, sometimes at the urging of a young or old woman, raises the dead combatant; several unrelated characters then give brief comic speeches; the play ends with a collection of money for the players. 1 While it is impossible to say with certainty that Elizabethans practiced this folk custom, we ought to consider that elements of the play may date back to older, if now-vanished, forms of popular entertainment. On the continent, analogues to the mumming play claim a widespread and very ancient existence. Chambers writes of folk-plays representing combat, doctor, and cure existing throughout Europe, surviving still in Greece and the Balkans in the early 1900s. 2 In 1928 a folklorist reported the existence, in the French Pays Basque, of an entertainment in which a barber shaved 'the Master Grinder' (knife-sharpener) and cut his throat. The doctor who is summoned to bring the grinder back to life enters with a speech about his wide travels, not unlike the typical entrance lines of the mumming play doctor. 3 In Russia the comic doctor, with 'a long and complex pedigree in the world of popular entertainment', appears in Christmas folk plays, where he resuscitates a knight killed by the Czar's champion. 4 In the Western Russian folk ritual that is the basis for Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring a doctor attempts to revive a dead virgin. In Hungary the folk-doctor appears in wedding plays, where he enters with a cure, like his mumming counterpart, at the turning point near the play's end. 5 These doctors tend to share certain features with their colleague in the mumming play: they have a medicine that will bring the dead to life; they brag about their achievements, travels, or high fees; they use an often preposterous medical jargon. Several

When the Golden Bough Breaks: Folk Drama and the Theatre Historian

“…60 problematic assumptions about the antiquity of folk traditions, and distracting speculations on pre-Christian myths and rituals. 59 Hutton 1991;1996a;1996b;Smith 1999: 152-53;Hardin 2002. 60 See also Burke 1978: 23-9, and later discussion here.…”