ABSTRACT
Charles Marson is known to scholars of the folk revival as the parson in whose vicarage garden Cecil Sharp heard his first folksong. Marson was a Christian socialist, a radical who believed that ‘worship and every other communal act [is] essentially dramatic’. Marson’s involvement in the folk revival was deeply linked with his espousal of Christian socialism. He believed in common culture as a bond linking strong communities, which were to him the basis of a healthy society. Marson ultimately found folksong inadequate, but his interest in folk culture and in the lives of his rural parishioners remained. Until his death in 1914, Marson facilitated yearly ‘Shepherd’s Plays’, improvised versions of the nativity story acted by parishioners in their own words and incorporating contemporary concerns. He published a transcription of one play, and this chapter examines this alongside his work in the folk revival and his final publication, Village Silhouettes. It reveals the complex relationship between Marson’s interest in folk culture, particularly in performance as an embodiment of community, and his belief in the social gospel as taught through the incarnation, including Marson’s insistence on the dramatic and performative aspects of public worship.
The Christian socialist vicar Charles Marson is known to those interested in the folk revival as the occupier of the vicarage in whose garden Cecil Sharp heard his first folksong, ‘The Seeds of Love’, sung by Marson’s employee, the gardener John England. During his lifetime, however, Marson was better known as an outspoken activist and writer on politics and theology. His folksong collecting was not a sideline or mere hobby, distinct from his Christian socialism, but another expression of this worldview. His notion that community and a common life could be the bond bringing all people together in a better, socialistic society necessitated some form of common culture to anchor those communities. He also envisaged the Church of England and its acts of worship as a similar living community, a bond created and maintained by continuous use of common language, rituals and performance. The idea that Christian worship was a form of performance may sound surprising, even now, and especially in Marson’s lifetime, but Marson saw the services of the Church, and especially Holy Communion, as a kind of communal drama:
The truth is that not only is worship and every other communal act essentially dramatic, but even reason itself is the same. A man who thinks out a problem with closed eyes […] has already erected a stage in his mind, where pro and con, the dramatis personae, argue and fence […]. Particularly in public worship, where God is approached by and through men, there must always be a very marked dramatic element. 1
Worship as a group was not only a performance of shared cultural heritage, speaking the words, sharing the bread and wine (themselves a symbolic performance of Christ’s body and blood), that had been repeated down the centuries, but literally an embodiment of that community, each communicant symbolically taking their part and becoming part of the whole through their participation. Performance of community, and through performance, embodiment, came to be at the centre of Marson’s religious, political and social outlook, and his various cultural activities provided material and inspiration for these performances. Many Christian socialists such as Marson took from the incarnation of Christ as a man on earth that the Kingdom of Heaven was also to be realised on earth as an ideal society of individuals in communion with one another. This was itself another embodiment: a living performance of God’s goodness. They believed that strong, harmonious communities were the answer, forming the basis of a 146revitalised society enriched with a shared culture which would itself build and bind these communities together. Folksong represented collective creativity and the concept of useful culture, developed by and according to the needs of those who were to make use of it. This was an idea very important to those wishing to create a socialistic society because it placed at the forefront the needs of a group or community, rather than of any individual.
