The Peace Egg Book: an Anglo-Irish chapbook connection discovered - Research article: focus on traditional drama

The Physical Format

The Christmas Rhime and The Peace Egg Book

The physical formats of The Christmas Rhime ... chapbooks and The Peace Egg Book are somewhat different. The former, comprising thirty-two pages (80 x 54 mm), dedicates sixteen pages to presenting and illustrating the play, the rest being devoted to the covers, prelims, an alphabet reminiscent of a horn book (Tuer 1979), and ten pages of children's rhymes. In contrast, The Peace Egg Book (99 x 68 mm) devotes ten pages out of a total of twelve to presenting and illustrating the play, the other two pages being the front-cover and the back-cover that contains an alphabet and the colophon. In that respect, The Peace Egg Book appears not to be an attempt to duplicate a Christmas Rhime ... chapbook in its entirety, but only to reproduce certain aspects; namely, the play text and the alphabet.

The front-cover woodcut of The Peace Egg Book is informative in itself as it provides some evidence of a terminus a quo. The dress worn by the soldier on the cover was adopted by officers of the British Army around the time of the Peninsular War (Barnes 1950; Windraw and Embleton 1974). Thus, an assemblage of woodcuts and text such as Carr's could have been constructed only after c. 1810.

A comparison of the woodcuts in The Christmas Rhime ... chapbooks and those in The Peace Egg Book demonstrates a close level of affinity. The latter appears to contain a series of illustrations that not only attempts to mimic those in the earlier Belfast editions but, as the following shows, are placed in the play text at very similar, if not identical, positions. In both instances, the positioning of the illustrations is possibly not coincidental; the woodcuts appear to have been used to separate the speeches and identify the speakers.

Christmas Rhime ...      The Peace Egg Book        Position
Punch                    Punch                     Identical
Soldier                  Soldier                   Identical
Combat                   Soldier                   Indentical
Wounding/Death           Soldier                   Close
Doctor                   Soldier                   Close
Doctor and Patient       --                        --
Soldier and St Patrick   Soldier                   Identical
[Block Missing           Soldier                   Identical
Cromwell as a Soldier    Cromwell as a Gentleman   Identical
Belzebub                 Belzebub                  Identical
Devil Doubt              Devil Doubt               Identical
Collector                --                        --
Three Soldiers           --                        --

Overall, the woodcuts in The Christmas Rhime ... appear to have been selected specifically to illustrate the play. In contrast, those in The Peace Egg Book, while not out of place, leave the impression that they were simply selected from what was available at the time (O'Lochlainn 1939, xii; Simons 1994, 359), mostly being of soldiers striking heroic poses. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, Carr's image of Oliver Cromwell as a "gentleman" contrasts with that of him as a military figure in the Irish chapbooks, although again this may be as a result of there being few woodcuts available from which to chose. As Hugh Shields has observed: