Beatty—The St. George, or Mummers’, Plays. 285 
St. George is killed as often as he conquers. Moreover, the 
-struggle is sometimes a melee , and there is a general slaughter. 
In many of the plays, the dragon does not appear at all. Thus 
there is every evidence that the St. George incident is very 
ronghly laid on over some older story, which evidently did not 
place any special stress on the death of any particular person 
or persons. 
(2) This brings us to the second important point of differ¬ 
ence between legend and play. We admitted that the char¬ 
acteristic speech of the Doctor might easily he borrowed from 
the liturgical plays; but we cannot say the same thing of his 
characteristic act. Here, too, we come to the one constant and 
central incident of the St. George plays—the revivification of 
all the persons who were killed. In none of the liturgical 
plays does snch an incident appear, nor does there seem to be 
any idea, even the most remote, of snch an outcome in any of 
the English guild plays. The whole incident is absent from 
all the liturgical and ecclesiastical plays. Neither the plays in 
Ooussemaker, nor any of the German plays that I have been 
able to examine, nor any plays in the York, Coventry, Dublin, 
Digby, Towneley, Chester or Beverley cycles have the ele* 
ments out of which the constant and most characteristic in- 
f 
cident in the Mummers’ plays could by any possibility have 
been developed. 
What, then, is the source of the Doctor and his revivifying 
medicine? To answer this, let us remove from the play the 
comparatively recent accretion of the St. George element. We 
have now a play the central act of which is a death or deaths, 
with or without a struggle or fight, and followed by the revivi¬ 
fication of all the dead by a leader, or a Doctor. This play 
brings us to ground that is very familiar to the student of 
of St. George in the plays may thus be a memory of this earlier form 
of the story. But this will not explain many of the details’ of the play. 
In the plays the one who habitually resuscitates is not St. George, but 
the Doctor. Even if one were to grant that the revivification incident 
passed from the legend to the play, there would still remain to be ex¬ 
plained the great popularity of the incident, its frequent dissociation 
from St, George in the play, its constant association with a combat, 
and its ultimate origin. 
