The Folk Interlude: Dramatic Aspects of Traditional Games, Gambols and Songs

The dramatic and semi-dramatic games associated with Christmas revels, lyke-wakes and harvest homes, etc. are a significant segment of traditional drama independent of (and with a better-documented history than) the mummers' plays, to whose development they may nonetheless have made some contribution. The independent games also have intriguing relationships with conventional theatre history (e.g. via the interlude, the jig and the droll). While offering sporadic documentation of these theses, the paper is structured as an attempted typology of games in terms of context, content and form.