"This is a Mummers' play I wrote": Modern compositions and their implications

It seems that may people feel compelled to rewrite folk plays. Working with a large sample of composed and adapted texts, the apparent personal and cultural motivations of these wannabe folk playwrights are explored. More specifically, this study examines the textual characteristics of the rewritten plays in an attempt to determine what it is that makes the authors think that they have written a mummers' play. These features are then compared with a historical database of “authentic” Quack Doctor plays. It is suggested that similar processes and criteria have existed throughout the history of the plays, and may indeed have been the prime factor in their evolution

'Plough Bullocks' and Related Plough Monday Customs in the Nottingham Area, 1800-1930

This paper describes Plough Monday activities in the city of Nottingham, which died out in the inter-war years, and chronicles the establishment of its Plough Day Fair in 1712. Elsewhere in Nottinghamshire, house visits by folk play performers were an important feature of Plough Monday. However, it is concluded that these were not part of the 'Plough Bullocks' tradition in Nottingham city. Nottingham's Plough Monday activities provoked conflicts between certain sections of local society, which led to active suppression during the 19th century. These non-play conflicts contrast with the folk play customs, which were more socially acceptable

Do you recognise this costume?

This illustrated article disusses a English mummers' costume, bearing the date 1829, that recently turned up at an antiques gallery in New York. Although the provenance is unknown, it is similar to the costumes of the clowns who accompanied swords dancers and plough plays in Yorkshire and the East Midlands. The closest match is with the clowns of the village of Bellerby, North Yorkshire, so it may have come from near there

Fifth forces and discrete symmetry breaking

Modifications of general relativity often involve coupling additional scalar fields to the Ricci scalar, leading to scalar-tensor theories of Brans-Dicke type. If the additional scalar fields are light, they can give rise to long-range fifth forces, which are subject to stringent constraints from local tests of gravity. In this talk, we show that Yukawa-like fifth forces only arise for the Standard Model (SM) due to a mass mixing of the additional scalar with the Higgs field, and we emphasise the pivotal role played by discrete and continuous symmetry breaking. Quite remarkably, if one assumes that sufficiently light, non-minimally coupled scalar fields exist in nature, the non-observation of fifth forces has the potential to tell us about the structure of the SM Higgs sector and the origin of its symmetry breaking. Moreover, with these observations, we argue that certain classes of scalar-tensor theories are, up to and including their dimension-four operators, equivalent to Higgs-portal theories. In this way, ultra-light dark matter models may also exhibit fifth-force phenomenology, and we consider the impact on the dynamics of disk galaxies as an example.Comment: 7 pages, JPCS format. Prepared for the proceedings of DISCRETE2018: the Sixth Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries, 26 - 30 November 2018, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, to appear in the Journal of Physics: Conference Serie

Nottingham's Owd 'Oss Mummers and their scrapbooks

Nottingham's Owd 'Oss Mummers were formed in the late 1960s as an offshoot of the Nottingham Traditional Music Club, and continued into the 1980s. They have not totally disappeared, although they are now in new guises. The author joined them shortly after their formation, and after going to college performed with them in the late 1970s. For nearly all the time they existed, the Owd 'Oss Mummers maintained scrap books in which they lodged tour reports, photographs, press cuttings and other ephemera. The scrapbooks are now showing the ravages of time, with items becoming unstuck, bindings disintegrating, and so forth. This talk will outline the history of the group, illustrated with excerpts from the scrapbooks and personal reminiscences. It will also explore some of the issues regarding the long term conservation and preservation of such scrapbooks

Book Review: «In Comes I»: Performance, Memory and Landscape. Mike Pearson. Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2007.

Review of a book on the interaction between performance and landscape, focusing on Hibaldstow and North Lincolnshire. It includes extensive coverage of folklore topics, showing how traditions work, and what they mean to the participants and performers

Thermal field theory to all orders in gradient expansion

We present a new perturbative formulation of non-equilibrium thermal field theory, based upon non-homogeneous free propagators and time-dependent vertices. The resulting time-dependent diagrammatic perturbation series are free of pinch singularities without the need for quasi-particle approximation or effective resummation of finite widths. After arriving at a physically meaningful definition of particle number densities, we derive master time evolution equations for statistical distribution functions, which are valid to all orders in perturbation theory and all orders in a gradient expansion. For a scalar model, we make a loopwise truncation of these evolution equations, whilst still capturing fast transient behaviour, which is found to be dominated by energy-violating processes, leading to non-Markovian evolution of memory effects.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. Prepared for the proceedings of DISCRETE2012: the Third Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries, IST Lisbon, to appear in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS). Presented by P. Millingto

Mummies and masquerades: English and Caribbean connections

The composite mumming play script that the Ecclesfield-based Victorian children's author Juliana Horatia Ewing published in 1884 found its way to St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, where it was it was taken up enthusiastically by the black population as one of its Christmas Sports. The Mummies continue to act (and dance) to this day. Economic migrants took the Christmas Sports in turn to the Dominican Republic, in particular around the town of San Pedro de Macoris, where the performers recently gained a UNESCO Cultural Heritage Award. This paper derives from a presentation based around two videos, presented here as story boards. Millington introduces Ewing's play, and footage of the St Kitts Mummies and the Bull Play filmed by Joan McMurray. James continues the story by introducing footage of the related tradition from the Dominican Republic called the Wild Indians in English and Los Guloyas (the Goliaths) in Spanish

Green's function method for handling radiative effects on false vacuum decay

We introduce a Green's function method for handling radiative effects on false vacuum decay. In addition to the usual thin-wall approximation, we achieve further simplification by treating the bubble wall in the planar limit. As an application, we take the $\lambda\phi^4$ theory, extended with $N$ additional heavier scalars, wherein we calculate analytically both the functional determinant of the quadratic fluctuations about the classical soliton configuration and the first correction to the soliton configuration itself.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, revtex format; references extended, Section III A and Appendix C corrected and further clarifications added; version accepted for publication Physical Review

Perturbative Non-Equilibrium Thermal Field Theory

We present a new perturbative formulation of non-equilibrium thermal field theory, based upon non-homogeneous free propagators and time-dependent vertices. Our approach to non-equilibrium dynamics yields time-dependent diagrammatic perturbation series that are free of pinch singularities, without the need to resort to quasi-particle approximation or effective resummations of finite widths. In our formalism, the avoidance of pinch singularities is a consequence of the consistent inclusion of finite-time effects and the proper consideration of the time of observation. After introducing a physically meaningful definition of particle number densities, we derive master time evolution equations for statistical distribution functions, which are valid to all orders in perturbation theory. The resulting equations do not rely upon a gradient expansion of Wigner transforms or involve any separation of time scales. To illustrate the key features of our formalism, we study out-of-equilibrium decay dynamics of unstable particles in a simple scalar model. In particular, we show how finite-time effects remove the pinch singularities and lead to violation of energy conservation at early times, giving rise to otherwise kinematically forbidden processes. The non-Markovian nature of the memory effects as predicted in our formalism is explicitly demonstrated.Comment: revtex, 79 pages, 17 figures; further clarifications and extended discussion of the absence of pinch singularities included; version accepted for publication in Physical Review