Mummers' Plays Revisited

Peter Harrop is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chester, formerly Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor. He has published in Lore and Language; Folk Life; Performance Research and Contemporary Theatre Review, among other journals, and in 2013 he co-edited Performance Ethnography with Dunja Njaradi. Peter is co-Editor (with Steve Roud) of The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance due for publication in June 2021.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsFirst Visit: Introducing Mummers’ Plays.Chapter One: A Theatrical Background. Chapter Two: First Sightings. Chapter Three: Turning Theatre into Folklore.Revisiting: The Last Hundred Years. Index

"[Harrop offers] the striking thesis that mummers’ plays should properly be seen as a particular segment of eighteenth-century English theatre history and that their origins, nature, and function can properly be appreciated within that context….The important thing is that the insights achieved by Harrop’s book be brought to the attention of literature and theatre historians…We cannot face fifty more years in which the conventional wisdom prevails…" - Thomas Pettitt, University of Southern Denmark, Folk Music Journal."Every now and then a book comes along that changes our understanding of a topic. For more than a century mumming plays have been interpreted as a surviving relic of pagan fertility rituals, celebrating the circle of life and death. In comes Peter Harrop to address the issue head on by examining the evidence.…full of all the academic rigour you would expect and yet remains readable and engaging." - Stephen Rowley, The Living Tradition."There is no doubt that Mummers’ Plays Revisited is a valuable contribution to the genre, which, if taken up, will influence the next generation of commentators." - Steve Roud, Folklore, 132:3 2021"[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’ […] increasingly presented as folk dramas rather than theatre, particularly towards the end of that period." - Prof. Katie Normington, Theatre Notebook, 75:1, 2021