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Snapdragon & Swordplay
Rebecca Sicree on Christian Imagination & Epiphanies to Remember
I bought my daughter a guillotine for Christmas.
For the record, the guillotine was a magician's arm-guillotine, not a Frenchman's chop-off-your-head--guillotine. Ours even came with a fake arm. Maria had wanted one, not because she was a Robespierre in training, but because she didn't have a lovely assistant to saw in half, just a reluctant ten-year-old brother.
"After Maria's arm was cut off," Helena remembered, "it reached out of the bag and tried to choke John. It was very funny. It was almost as good as the punch bowl filled with punch that she pulled out of her handkerchief."
The Play's the Thing
Maria and John's magic show was the warm-up act before Christmas in Camelot, the mummers' play our kids and their friends from our parish performed at our Twelfth Night party that January. Unlike traditional mummers' plays, ours was sandwiched between a potluck dinner and a swing dance in our nice and warm parish hall, not performed by costumed mummers traipsing door to door in the mid-winter cold like overgrown and over-late trick-or-treaters.
We also did not use the traditional plot. Usually, in a real mummers' play, the characters of Saint George and the Turkish Knight duel to the death in a series of sword fights—only to rise and fight again, like Vikings in Valhalla, cured by the wonder-working Doctor. Commentary is provided by Father Christmas. Mummers' plays vary from place to place, so sometimes Saint George has more than one opponent. These can include the Dragon, of course, or the King of Egypt or Hector or Alexander the Great or other heroes or villains.
Or Oliver Cromwell.
A Broken Tradition
Cromwell was the leader of the Puritans during the English Civil War. When they seized power, the Puritan Parliament not only closed all the theaters in England but also banned the celebration of Christmas. Although these bans were lifted in 1660, after Cromwell died and the monarchy was restored, no record exists of any mummers' plays being performed until a hundred years later. No one knows whether these plays were a revival of a lost folk art form or the development of a new tradition derived from older types of Christmas dramas, such as the medieval mystery plays put on by trade guilds.
When a broken tradition is revived, it might come back in a different form, so that Father Christmas from the old Christmas masques ends up in a miracle play about Saint George performed on Twelfth Night. Mummers' plays saw their heyday in Victorian England, then began dying out in the twentieth century. Today's mummers rarely perform their plays door to door: London mummers, for example, perform on outdoor stages, while Philadelphia ones march in a New Year's parade instead.
The Turkey & the Turk
I first discovered mummers when I read The Turkey and the Turk, a mummers' play written by G. K. Chesterton. My husband and I, raising ten children in a decomposing culture, always believed it was important for our family to do its part in the fight to revive Christian culture, but we did not know how to start. We couldn't build our own monastery. Or dig a moat around the house (we rent). Then we realized that celebrating Epiphany by hosting a Twelfth Night party, complete with a mummers' play, was that small first step toward revival.
So out went invitations to a potluck, play, and party, and rehearsals began. On a cold night in January, with all the New Year's parties over, the children back in school, and the bleak weeks of winter stretching ahead, we gave Christmas one last hurrah.
And a hundred people showed up to join us.
Dragons & Snapdragons
The Turkey and the Turk went off almost without a hitch: Chesterton's script was witty, and the kids were a big hit, sword fighting in their funny costumes. (Although Tom, our Turkish Knight, had his duct-tape sword bent in half during the first duel, the audience just laughed and thought it was part of the act.) Reviving an old play, though, taught me a few new things. Do you know, for example, how a dragon is like a snapdragon? I discovered the answer to that riddle several weeks after our party, while reading about other Victorian customs.
I realized that I had completely misunderstood part of Chesterton's play. After the Doctor scoffs at eating the delicious, but decidedly unhealthy, Christmas pudding and ridicules the gallantry of the "mad Crusader," good Saint George, Father Christmas replies:
But what of you, most prudent paragon,
You are as frightened of the snapdragon
As of the dragon, that St. George has beaten,
More scared to eat than he was to be eaten.
How, I wondered, could the cynical Doctor be afraid of a snapdragon? For I assumed it was the well-known wildflower.
It was not. Snapdragon was a Victorian parlor game commonly played on Twelfth Night. In this game, you pour heated brandy into a shallow bowl and scatter raisins in it. Then you douse the house lights and ignite the brandy. Your goal is to grab raisins out of the fiery pool, pop them in your mouth, and quench the flames with your lips. Whoever grabs the most raisins wins. Part of the game's appeal, apparently, is seeing blue flames burning hellishly on the surface of the brandy and flickering out of the corners of your friends' mouths, who look as if they are, well, dragons.
How is a dragon like a snapdragon? They both breathe fire, that's how. Victorian parlor games may have been for children, but they were not for wimps.
At first, I wished I could have explained the game to our audience. Then, as the mother of five sons, I thought better of the idea. My boys would have found the game very interesting indeed. I would not at all have enjoyed explaining the game afterwards to stern bureaucrats from Children and Youth Services.
But although Snapdragon is a lost Christmas tradition unlikely to be revived, there's no reason why the memory of it should be lost as well. Even a play written for the sake of Christmas merriment can still pass on Christian culture, whether it takes the form of legend, history, or local custom. Plays are particularly good ways to pass on memories to the Christian community, for if the curtain is to go up, two communities are required: a small community of actors and a larger community of audience members.
Getting Rid of the Pooka
No sooner had our troop of players taken their bows than everyone was asking what play we would perform next year. Chesterton, unfortunately, only wrote one mummers' play, so before our second Twelfth Night party I had to sit down to write my own Christmas comedy. Mine was based on the legend of Robin Hood. I showed it to my husband. He previewed it and sighed.
"The first thing you have to do," he told me, "is to get rid of the pooka."
I winced. The pooka was my favorite part. In my play, the legendary bounty hunter Guy of Gisborne disguises himself with a horse-head hood in order to capture Robin Hood. Surely, I thought, a slightly superstitious Little John would mistake Gisborne for a pooka, an Irish ghost that looks like a horse walking on two legs. But my husband insisted that the play was too long, and the pooka had to go.
So the next year we performed Twelfth Night in Sherwood Forest, and though there was no pooka, a tradition was born. In the years following, Robin Hood was succeeded by King Arthur, Zorro, and Sherlock Holmes (who solves a robbery committed during a game of Snapdragon). Another play had a starship crew outwitting space aliens; the following play had a poor Cajun family outwitting pirates. After six plays, I learned a few things about what was necessary for a good play.
First, I was forced to admit that my husband was right: pookas are not necessary. Neither are bullfights, as Isabel persuaded me, which made staging our Zorro play much easier.
The Essential Element
But the old traditions were right: what is necessary for a good mummers' play is sword fighting—several good, old-fashioned, swashbuckling sword fights, which provide action, suspense, comedy, and a way to show real conflict without killing anyone. They even command the attention of little kids who sit on the floor five feet away from the actors. So we had sword fights, cane fights, and quarterstaff fights. Our boys loved them; other boys asked if they could be in our plays just to be in the sword fights—even if they had no lines.
Our sword fights accidentally gave birth to a second tradition. In our Robin Hood play, while Robin fought Gisborne with his quarterstaff, Friar Tuck was reduced to fencing Father Christmas with a loaf of French bread. (For the record, Friar Tuck was fighting Father Christmas not because Tuck was secretly a Puritan, but because Father Christmas was secretly the Sheriff of Nottingham.) When Tuck's weapon exploded into a cloud
of crumbs, he switched to a rubber chicken.
Friar Tuck's food fight proved so popular that all future plays were expected to include one. My husband had to start stocking up on loaves of stale French bread in early December. Our rubber chicken also became a returning cast member. The audience roared with laughter as our actors bopped each other over the head with exploding bread and beaned each other with plastic fruit.
The Rat & Mask Menagerie
Our most popular prop, however, was not our rubber chicken, but our remote-controlled rat. In its first play, the rat let us know in no uncertain terms that it would only go in straight lines or spin in circles. Only James could get it to obey stage directions, probably because, as a small boy, James had patiently used an old video game controller that only turned left. The prima donna rat, our only prop with its own fan club, returned in play after play.
Over time, we also acquired a large collection of rubber animal-head masks. I learned that costumes, the more fantastic the better, are also necessary for a good mummers' play. In a world that is becoming more and more virtual, audiences are getting jaded by computer-generated special effects. Reality is more impressive and harder to ignore, especially if it takes the form of three ladies-in-waiting entering Stage Left wearing dog's-head masks. (Morgan de la Fay cast some interesting curses on King Arthur's court.) If Shakespeare's most famous stage direction was Exit, pursued by Bear, mine might be Exit, pursued by Alligator, where the alligator, played by Mark, and its prey, played by Helena, exited at full speed, running right through the audience.
The Final Act
Long-term, who knows what the future of our mummers' plays will be? Will anyone ever perform them again? Nothing made by man lasts forever, of course, only men themselves do. If these plays have done any good to those who saw them, they served their purpose, even if it was only to convince viewers that, as Chesterton wrote, "It is a test of a good religion whether you can joke about it."
Short-term, I will keep looking for ideas for Christmas plays. Maybe an Icelandic fairytale where a poor farmer, whose house is invaded by trolls every Christmas Eve, is rescued by a traveler with a pet polar bear. Think of the costumes! I can already imagine which kids I will cast as trolls.
Now if I can only put a sword fight in it . . .
Rebecca Sicree writes from Boalsburg, Pennsylvania. She and her family attend Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church in nearby State College. She and her husband Andrew have ten children, six of whom are now adults.
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