English Folk Drama - Sword Dance Plays
Sword Dance Plays
The Sword Dance plays are the most difficult to grasp nowadays. The texts and descriptions which have come down to us are clearly fragmentary, and we don’t even know basic things like whether the ‘play’ and the ‘dance’ were originally separate customs or whether they had always been combined. Many of the sword dances documented around the turn of the twentieth century did not have a play attached and we don’t know if they had lost them, or never had them.
Sword dances often have a ‘calling-on song’ that introduces and names each dancer, which implies that they will all take individual part in some storyline, but this does not usually happen, although they do sometimes have a verse of text to recite before, or after dancing.
In addition to the dancers, a team usually includes a Captain, a Fool of some sort, and often a Bessy or man/woman character. The play usually involves a death and revival, like the other types of mumming play, but the crucial difference is that the death is not caused by individuals fighting but by the dancers placing their swords around the neck of one of the characters and 'hanging' or decapitating him. With the wooden swords of the Long Sword type of dance, this can be done relatively safely, but with the shorter metal swords of the Rapper teams this is impossible to carry out in reality and usually there is a symbolic killing by knocking his hat off.
