Another way of working in the grotesques and other supernumeraries is to give them minor parts in the drama itself. Father Christmas or the King of Egypt is utilized as a sort of chorus, to cheer on the fighters, lament the vanquished, and summon the Doctor. At Newbold the woman, called ‘Moll Finney,’ plays a similar part, as mother of the Turkish Knight. At Stoke Gabriel, Devon, the woman is the Doctor’s wife[764]. Finally, in three cases, a complete subordinate dramatic episode is introduced for their sake. At Islip, after the main drama is concluded, the presenter Molly suddenly becomes King George’s wife ‘Susannah.’ She falls ill, and the Doctor’s services are requisitioned to cure her. The Doctor rides in, not on a hobby-horse, but on one of the disengaged characters who plays the part of a horse. In Dorsetshire the secondary drama is quite elaborate. In the ‘A’ version ‘Old Bet’ calls herself ‘Dame Dorothy,’ and is the wife of Father Christmas, named, for the nonce, ‘Jan.’ They quarrel about a Jack hare, which he wants fried and she wants roasted. He kills her, and at the happy moment the Doctor is passing by, and brings her to life again. Version ‘B’ is very similar, except that the performance closes by Old Bet bringing in the hobby-horse for Father Christmas to mount. I do not think that I need further labour the affiliation of the St. George plays to the sword-dances. Placed in a series, as I have placed them in these chapters, the two sets of performances show a sufficiently obvious continuity. They are held together by the use of the swords, by their common grotesques, and by the episode of the Doctor, which connects them also with the German Shrovetide and Whitsun folk-ceremonies. They are properly called folk-drama, because they are derived, with the minimum of literary intervention, from the dramatic tendencies latent in folk-festivals of a very primitive type. They are the outcome of the instinct of play, manipulating for its own purposes the mock sacrifice and other débris of extinct ritual. Their central incident symbolizes the _renouveau_, the annual death of the year or the fertilization spirit and its annual resurrection in spring[765]. To this have become attached some of those heroic _cantilenae_ which, as the early mediaeval chroniclers tell us, existed in the mouths of the _chori iuvenum_ side by side with the _cantilenae_ of the minstrels. The symbolism of the _renouveau_ is preserved unmistakably enough in the episode of the Doctor, but the _cantilenae_ have been to some extent modified by the comparatively late literary element, due perhaps to that universal go-between of literature and the folk, the village school-master. The genuine national heroes, a Stercatherus or a Galgacus, have given way to the ‘worthies’ and the ‘champions of Christendom,’ dear to Holophernes. The literary tradition has also perhaps contributed to the transformation of the _chorus_ or semi-dramatic dance into drama pure and simple.