The Truro cordwainers' play: a "new" eighteenth-century Christmas play - Research article: focus on traditional drama

The significant difference is line thirteen, which is worthy of further discussion. As far as I am aware, the use of the word "admorration" [admiration] is unique to the Truro version of the line, although the line conforms to a pattern found elsewhere, where a variety of alternative rhyme words are used. The most common alternatives are "nation," "reason" and "wrong," all of which more or less rhyme with the subsequent "bloody weapon" line. With this degree of variation among the sixteen or so examples I have been able to locate, it is difficult to say what the original couplet would have been. Conflating several similar versions, one distinct variant of the couplet appears to be:

   England's right and England's reason
   That makes me carry this bloody weapon

However, the variant that is more relevant to Truro is:

   England's right and England's nation
   Here I draw my bloody weapon.

The rhyme seems not to be satisfactory in either variant, and the other variations may have arisen as a result of attempts to resolve or improve the rhyme. Because of its Anglo-centric sentiment, it is easy to imagine that the latter variants might not have been popular in Ireland. However, an Irish adaptation was recorded in Ballybrennan, Wexford, about 1818:

   For England's right and Ireland's nation
   Here I draw my bloody weapon (Kennedy 1863, 584).

The few other occurrences of this variant I have found from Ireland use the same wording. From the Irish perspective, it may be an improvement on the English version, but it still could have been at odds with Irish sensitivities of whatever persuasion. This could explain the use of a replacement line regarding liberty in the Irish chapbook texts and their derivatives. Furthermore, the capitalisation of the word "liberty" in the early nineteenth-century editions of the chapbooks (Boyes et al. 1999) suggests a deliberate attempt to indulge protestant Irish sentiments [9]. The verses of the Irish chapbooks are all in couplets but, in using the "liberty" line, a pair of couplets is transformed into a triplet plus an isolated line. It is likely, therefore, that the "liberty" line was substituted for an earlier "nation" line.

A conclusion to be drawn from this discussion so far is that there appear to have been two early versions of the Irish plays--the chapbook version, and a pre-chapbook version. Evidently, the Truro and the pre-chapbook Irish versions originally drew their material from the same ultimate source. While the Truro text predates the Belfast chapbook (the earliest Irish text) by ten to fifteen years, the ultimate textual source could equally have been Irish or English. In Ireland, a standardised pre-chapbook form (for example, Ballybrennan) was used as the basis for the Christmas Rhyme chapbook. A few changes or adaptations were made for the chapbook, but along the way some material was evidently lost. Most obviously, the cure is missing from the chapbook, even though the doctor is called in.

Returning to the "nation" couplet, in England these lines normally come immediately after the following variant of Prince, King or Saint George's self-introduction: