ABSTRACT
The Newcastle text is avowedly mock-heroic, specified as being a Christmas play for mummers and thereby intended as perambulatory. Nineteenth-century commentators are also clear in reporting non-play mumming as a discrete activity occurring in parallel with mummers’ plays. The chapbook has a title page with seven further pages, and the play itself consists of two acts of two scenes each, followed by a third act of one scene and a separately specified conclusion with an overall 139 lines of spoken text. The Revesby Play was first brought to wider public attention in 1813 when a brief description was given in Henry Ellis’s extensive revision of Brand’s Popular Antiquities. There were seven performers and a musician at Revesby, as well as two singers from a neighbouring village, John Ironmonger and John Clarkson, who played the parts of Landlord and Tenant for a concluding song.
