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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
Determining which of these printing traditions did provide the immediate source for the Truro interpolations might have some relevance for our understanding of the processes involved. Use of the text from a three-volume Miscellaneous Works would suggest someone with a library, or at least with the means to purchase literary publications, and the leisure and taste to enjoy them--say a local schoolmaster or clergyman (by a convenient coincidence, the University of Southern Denmark Library has a copy of the 1777 edition acquired with the library of the Bishops of Odense). Textual differences are minimal in the scenes relevant for the Truro play but, as it happens, in the borrowed stanzas there are discrepancies between the Miscellaneous Works and the single-volume traditions of Rosamond printings that, juxtaposed with the Truro text, suggest (by a margin of two to one) that it derived from the Miscellaneous Works tradition. Thus, at what in modern editions is Act 1 scene 1, line 14, Truro agrees with the Miscellaneous Works that a "voice" is "tost," against the "words" of the single-volume Rosamond, and the same goes for "word" being "lost" as against "voice" at Act 1 scene 1, line 17 (Guthkelch 1914, 301, 306). These two are evidently linked in that, at some point, "word" and "voice" have been swapped between Act 1 scene 1, line 14 and Act 1 scene 1, line 17, probably by a compositor working on one of the editions (it does not really matter which arrangement came first). On the other hand, at Act 1 scene 4, line 4, Truro's "tracks of love" is closer to the single volume's "Tracks I rove" than to the "tracts I rove" of the Miscellaneous Works, but it is difficult to judge whether the difference between the two words could actually be heard, and in the line concerned this change is anyway less significant than, and probably subordinate to, the change from "I rove" to "I love."
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That we are none the less not obliged to imagine a schoolmaster or clergyman composing this part of the Truro play with a copy of the Miscellaneous Works at his elbow is due to the final piece of the Rosamond publishing jigsaw, the edition of Rosamond. A Tragic-opera of 1778 touched on earlier because of its opportunistic title-page reference to theatre performances. This follows (at least with regard to the discrepancies already noted) the Miscellaneous Works textual tradition, which apparently lies behind the Truro play interpolations, but makes it available in a single octavo volume in what is evidently a cheap series of dozens of theatre "hits" (plays by Steele, Farquhar, Gay, Shakespeare, Dryden, Fletcher, Garrick, Congreve, and the like) issued by the same publishers in these years, probably within the financial means of Peter Millington's Truro cordwainers, and a few years before the recording of the Truro play in the 1780s.
Rosamond in Truro
Reviewing the derivative material, all of which was quoted earlier, alongside the equivalent lines from Rosamond (quoted from the 1778 edition), one sees that, in purely quantitative terms, the Truro players managed to retain the inserted material with some tenacity: of the, in all, forty-three lines of the segments of text concerned, thirty-eight have been preserved in recognisably derivative forms, almost invariably in the same order. And, assuming that at this period and in this environment spelling is both phonetic and reflects local pronunciation, there are quite a few changes that are probably not changes at all: "seens appare" is probably how "scenes appear" (Act 1 scene 1, line 2) sounded locally. In other cases, however, a definite garbling has occurred, as one word is replaced by another; sometimes, admittedly, with little real damage:
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