Traditional Drama 1979

Past scholarship in folk drama has tended to concentrate its attention on plays performed mainly in rural areas. However, there are many instances in the last 150 years of plays being performed not only in villages and small towns, but also in cities and large industrial towns. This paper intends to examine these urban plays and attempts to show that both urban and rural plays are of equal importance in folk drama scholarship.

This will involve, for example, studying the relationship between urban folk drama and chapbooks containing traditional play texts. These chapbooks were published predominantly in towns and cities and they are generally thought to have had a considerable influence on the play traditions in such areas. This study attempts to determine exactly how influential these chapbooks have been. Specific reference will be made throughout to the play traditions in two of our largest cities – London and Manchester.

Research into folk drama has tended to neglect the rich forms and traditions of the play in the northern industrial towns. This paper will examine the unique history of the play in Rochdale and pose some problems for the future, chief of which is, 'Why bother?' The writer hopes that the ensuing discussion will resolve some of his dilemmas!

Cawte, Helm and Peacock's English Ritual Drama has been one of the most influential books dealing with traditional plays to appear in recent years, if only for its extensive bibliography and geographical index. Since its publication in 1967 however, much more material has come to light, and unfortunately, this has not yet been covered by a comparable work. As a result it is now becoming increasingly difficult to discover just what material other people have located, and no doubt there has been much duplication of effort in searching through publications and collections. In addition, researchers now find they require much more detailed information than is given in English Ritual Drama. In the hope of improving this situation, we therefore propose a co-operative indexing scheme.

This scheme, which we have been developing for several years, is based on three work sheets, dealing with the following:

The initial proposal is to circulate periodically photocopies of all completed work sheets to participants in the scheme. Then, if this proves successful, the next stage would be to produce a regular publication which would also include indexes to locations, authors, collectors, characters, dates, etc. Ultimately, as the amount of material increases, we envisage using computers to speed processing and index compilation. We would also like to see a parallel collection of the indexed source material, housed in a suitably central location, and available to all participants.

[Ron Shuttleworth Collection holds typescript.]

In their writings and theory, researchers in traditional drama have tended to represent plays from particular communities in concrete terms – as 'the Antrobus play' or 'the Ampleforth text'. This paper is an attempt to assess the value of such terminology in the light of a case study of the recorded tradition at Ampleforth and more recent fieldwork at Antrobus.

This paper is divided into three parts. The first part reviews the work of the folk play and folk dance specialists that are of major relevance to Plough Monday, and puts the case that Plough Monday customs need to be examined afresh. The second part presents a preliminary survey of Plough Monday customs, producing a table of the relative frequency of the various features of the customs, and a distribution map. It goes on to detail various points which need to be taken into consideration during a systematic survey of Plough Monday customs. Thirdly, it examines possible origins, on the basis of this preliminary survey.