From time to time, folk play performances and their preparations have been incorporated into literary works, sometimes as incidental events (as in Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays), and sometimes as part of the plot (as in Yonge's The Christmas Mummers).

Michael Nyman based his libretto for Birtwhistle's Down by the Greenwood Side (1969) on the "Normalized text" in E.K. Chambers' The English Folk-Play (1933).

She wrote the historical novel A Cavalier Stronghold: A Romance of the Vale of Belvoir (1890), portraying life and events as she imagined it during the Civil War at her manor house home - Wiverton Hall, Nottinghamshire. One chapter has a plough play being performed anachronistically in the Hall. The text of the local play, actually performed at Cropwell in the late 19th century, is given in an appendix and is available in our Text Collection.

Mrs. Ewing was a successful Victorian children's author, whose stories first appeared in Aunt Judy's Magazine. Her story The Peace Egg (1871) is centred round the performance of a Christmas play - the title being taken from one of the chapbook texts that were current at the time. In 1884, she published A Christmas Mumming Play, a script that she had compiled from five different versions, with a lengthy introduction. The story and the play tended to appear together in later book editions of her works. The script is available in our Text Collection.

Return of the Native (1878) is probably the most famous example of a folk play being incorporated into an English novel. This appears in Book 2, Chapters 4 to 6, with the main performance taking place in Chapter 5. Hardy subsequently published a separate, somewhat embellished, Dorset text of The Play of St. George (1928).

D.H. Lawrence's first published work was a short story - An Enjoyable Christmas: A Prelude - in which the performance of a Christmas Guysers' play and its preparations provide the background for the plot. It was published at his request under the name of his friend Jessie Chambers in the Nottinghamshire Guardian (1907). Guysers are also mentioned briefly in his novel The Rainbow (1915). Neither story gives much detail about the play itself, although they will have been drawn from the folk plays of his home town Eastwood, and neighbouring villages in Nottinghamshire. See Traditional Drama Forum, No.8, Oct. 2001 for the text of A Prelude and an article on Lawrence's references to Guysers.

She wrote a long series of books for girls called 'The Abbey Girls', based on the adventures of pupils at a girls' boarding school. Folk dancing was a recurrent theme in her plots, and Mummers featured in the 11th of the series - Abbey Girls Go Back to School (1922).