In about 1870, J.S.Udal first noted the Symondsbury mummers' play and he subsequently published details of this and other West Dorset plays in a number of articles including, most notably, "Christmas Mummers in Dorsetshire," in The Folk-Lore Record.
Although there had been no publications on the subject before Udal's work, there is evidence, from a variety of sources, to show that mummers' plays were widely performed in Dorset in the decades before 1870. In some cases these plays were not of the usual hero-combat type. In others, the hero-combat play was rewritten to reflect topical events.
The information available for the pre-1870 plays does not, for the most part, relate to texts but to costume, mode of performance, audience attitude and the status of the performers. It is just these aspects which now attract the attention of researchers, so it is hoped that the nineteenth-century evidence reported here will be of value for comparison with material collected from twentieth-century recollection in recent years.
The sources on which I have drawn are numerous but most information comes from William Holloway, Thomas Hardy, Gertrude Bugler, and H. Nobbs.
Holloway, a Dorset poet of the early nineteenth century, wrote a poem, "Scenes of Youth", which includes a description of a play performed near Blandford in about 1790. This is the earliest known description of a Dorset play and it shows similarities to the plays noted by Udal some eighty years later.
Hardy was familiar with the Puddletown play in the 1850s and featured it in his novel, The Return of the Native. The novel, its subsequent dramatisation, Hardy's correspondence and his published recollections give details both of the play's text and background.
Gertrude Bugler played Eustacia/The Turkish Knight in the 1921 dramatisation of The Return of the Native. She recalled that Hardy took a particular interest in the mummers' play within the play and that he supervised the making of costumes and coached the mummers in their delivery and gestures. These features were reproduced in her own production of the mummers' play at Beaminster in 1961. Photographs and a recording of this performance provide a reflection of the 1850s play as seen by Hardy.
H. Nobbs, whose History of Cattistock was published in 1886, described the background to local performances and indicated how the "Napoleonic" and "Crimean" plays, to be recorded by the BBC fifty years later, came into being.
[Ron Shuttleworth Collection holds typescript.]