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From stage to folk: a note on the passages from Addison's Rosamond in the "Truro" mummers' play - Topics, Notes And Comments
Folklore, August, 2003 by Tom Pettitt
Following his convincingly documented relocation and re-dating of the "Mylor" play to Truro and the 1780s, Peter Millington devotes more attention to its place in relation to the various sub-traditions of the Hero Combat plays than to the incorporation of substantial amounts of textual material from literary and sub-literary sources, which is this play's major idiosyncracy (Millington 2003). More than legitimate for a folklorist writing in Folklore, this bias has prompted, none the less, the following complementary observations from a literary and theatre historian with an interest in folk drama. While Truro may be unique with regard to the specific sources it uses, such intertextuality may actually be characteristic of the earlier phases of traditional drama, and therefore possibly of some relevance for exploring its origins and development (Pettitt 1981, 16-20). In this note, I deal specifically with the lines in the Truro play deriving from Addison's opera Rosamond, whose plot (of which we will see very little) involves Queen Eleanour's apparent poisoning of Rosamond, King Henry's mistress; when the King repents of the liaison, the Queen reveals that Rosamond is alive (but safely secluded in a nunnery). All the lines concerned were identified long ago by R. J. E. Tiddy (Tiddy 1923, 155-6). What follows rather notes the purposes to which the lines were put in the Truro play, and then speculates on how they got there. To this end, I shall juxtapose the original libretto of the opera (from the edition I identify as the most likely immediate source) with Peter Millington's transcript of the manuscript of the Truro play, which he rediscovered in the course of his research, and which he has made available in the Traditional Drama Research Group's Collection of Scripts.
Most of the untraditional material in the Truro play is used to construct what may once have been a rather less garbled sequel to the usual combat and cure plot, built up around stanzas taken from the ballad "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France" (no. 164 in Child's standard collection). This ballad may be no older than the early eighteenth century but, to judge from the surviving texts, by the time the Truro play was recorded it would have been readily available in oral tradition or on broadside (Child 1965, 3:320-6). The stanzas taken from it are accompanied by and interspersed with additional material, whose mostly belligerent exclamations (and references to one or other "King Henry") are compatible with its plot, if sometimes anachronistic (like the boasts of the much more recent historical figures, Admiral Byng and Edward Vernon). The sources of this additional material remain obscure, except for the lines identified by Tiddy as deriving from Joseph Addison's opera Rosamond, of 1707.
In the Truro play the lines concerned make up what (in the manuscript's idiosyncratic manner) is designated speech 24, assigned not to a character, but to a named performer, Penty Landin. The last time he spoke in the play (speech 22) he was playing the role of the English messenger from King Henry, demanding (in lines deriving from the ballad's stanza 4) tribute from the King of France. The latter (in the play's speech 23) predictably responds (with lines deriving from the ballad's stanza 5) by offering tennis balls. Since the messenger has already threatened (in speech 22) that, if rebuffed, Henry would rapidly invade, there is some dramatic effect in his responding to the King of France with the following outburst deriving from Rosamond, Act I scene 1:
Rosamond. A Tragic-Opera "A Play for Christmas"
London: J. Harrison, 1778. Cornwall Record Office,
(line-numbering supplied Enys Memoranda f. 22,
from modern editions) transcr. Peter Millington
[www.folkplay.info/Texts
/78sw84em.htm]
1.1 Page. Penty Landin 24
[= Henry's Page?]
68. Hark, hark! what sound invades my ear? Hark hark wot sonding
The conqueror's approach I hear. vads my ears the conquars
a porch I hear tis Henrys
march tis Henry tune/I
now
70. He comes, victorious Henry comes! he comes he comes
Hautboys, trumpets, fifes and drums, victorus Henry comes
In dreadful concert join'd, with obboys Tropats fifes
Send from afar and drums
A sound of war, send from a far
and sound of war
75. And fill with horror ev'ry wind. foll of grief and every
wind.
The interpolation is anachronistic, of course, in the sense that Addison's "Henry" was a quite different one, King Henry II, but (especially in the absence of the Roman numerals) it works in the immediate context, and may have been facilitated by a correspondence in speaker: in Rosamond, these lines are spoken by a page, while the messenger in the ballad is there referred to (stanza 7.1) as a "trusty page" (this comes through in speech 25 of the Truro text as "lovely page," probably influenced by earlier lines in the ballad; stanzas 2.1, 3.1). The narrative logic of the interpolation soon collapses, however, as, when the Truro play resumes following the ballad, as it does immediately (at speech 25), Henry V is still awaiting news of the French King's response to his ultimatum. And before this there is a thematic discontinuity, as the speech in the Truro play under discussion (speech 24) continues with further lines from Rosamond in a quite different mood from a later scene, spoken by Rosamond herself as she longs for the return of her royal lover:
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