Why Does Someone Get Killed and Then Cured? A Play Nobody Wrote

The structure is remarkably consistent wherever the performance is recorded. A presenter clears a space and introduces the characters. Two combatants boast, quarrel and fight, and one is killed. A doctor is called, makes extravagant claims about his travels and his cures, produces a bottle and revives the dead man. The remaining characters are introduced in turn, each with a short rhyming speech, and the company then asks for money or food and leaves. The whole thing takes ten minutes, is performed by a small group of local men, and is repeated at house after house through an evening.

The text was not written and behaved accordingly:

• •Learned by ear from the previous generation of performers
• •Never read from a script by the performers themselves
• •Lines corrupted into nonsense while still being recited faithfully
• •Characters added from whatever was topical, including recent generals
• •Local names and jokes inserted freely
• •The core sequence of fight, death and cure preserved throughout

Folklorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries read the death and revival as a survival of an ancient seasonal ritual enacting the death and rebirth of the year, and that interpretation was stated confidently and repeated for decades. It has since been dismantled. No version is recorded before the eighteenth century, the earliest texts appear suspiciously soon after printed chapbooks containing similar material circulated, and the geographic distribution follows patterns of print and migration rather than anything ancient. The current view is that the plays are an eighteenth century phenomenon spread by cheap print and by performers moving, which is a far less romantic answer and fits the evidence.

Several related customs are frequently confused with it and separating them clarifies the picture. Sword dance teams perform a linked-weapon figure that ends with a mock beheading, and in some traditions that is followed by a short play. Morris dancing is a distinct performance tradition with its own history and no plot. Wassailing and carol singing are door-to-door customs with singing rather than drama. Hooded animal customs involve a horse skull or a decorated figure carried from house to house. All share the midwinter season, the disguise and the collection, and none of them descends from the others as directly as popular accounts suggest.

Stripping away the ritual interpretation leaves a clearer and more practical picture. The performance was a licensed way of asking for money, and the season is exactly when agricultural work was scarce and money was short, so the play functioned as an accepted form of soliciting from better-off households at a time of year when giving was expected. Disguise mattered, with faces blackened, veiled or masked, which preserved the pretence that the askers were not recognised and allowed a social transaction that would otherwise be humiliating. The plays declined with agricultural employment and with changing attitudes to door-to-door asking, and most surviving performances are twentieth century revivals.

A presenter, a fight, a death and a doctor who revives the corpse recur across hundreds of recorded versions, learned by ear and corrupted into nonsense while the sequence survived. The reading of it as an ancient seasonal ritual has been dismantled, since nothing is recorded before the eighteenth century and the distribution follows cheap print. The performance was an accepted way of asking for money in winter.