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Spenser’s Aesculapius Episode and the English Mummers’ Play

HE MUMMERS' (Saint George) Play, based in oral and folk tradition, probably existed in Spenser's time, although there is no direct evidence of performance until the early 1700s. The play enacts a "hero combat": a hero, often St. George, boasts of his fighting skill to an enemy, often a Turkish Knight; one opponent kills the other; a doctor, sometimes urged by an old woman, raises the dead combatant in the "cure scene." The play ends with comic speeches by several unrelated characters, who then collect money from the audience. Evidence exists that this folk play influenced Tudor drama, and I think it shapes Book I, Canto v of The Faerie Queene, where Duessa tries to resurrect Sansjoy in the underworld (stanzas 28-44). Night in her iron chariot takes the Saracen below, to be healed by Aesculapius. A two-stanza digression then describes that urphysician's healing and revival of Hippolytus. Discussion of this episode has usually focused on the pagan Aesculapius as a negative image of Christ, true doctor of souls. The Mummers' Play can account for other circumstances of this episode, especially the duel between Redcrosse and Sansjoy, the similarity of Duessa to "the king of Egypt's daughter" sometimes rescued by St. George, and the presence of the ancient female Night. All such details cohere, though—combat, damsel, old woman, physician, and cure—if read in the context of the Mummers' Play. The significance of this similarity for Spenser's narrative depends on how the poet himself interpreted its meaning. It is entirely possible that he thought of it rather as some modern folklorists do, as a remnant of paganism. His godly contemporaries, after all, regarded maypoles and Christmas festivity as such. At the very least, Spenser's digression offers yet another tantalizing clue that, a century before the earliest known date, the Mummers' Play was well enough known to appear in a parody.