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

Here, lines are added on the Alexander branch, but are lost on the Irish branch.

Of these, Alexander [right arrow] Truro/Father Christmas [right arrow] Irish is the most likely. This is first because the dates of the versions are consistent with this lineage [11]. Second, there is a strong tendency for texts to lose lines during transmission, rather than gain them, and this is the only route where each step entails a loss of Alexander material.

Unidentified Traditional Parallels

While the three sources discussed account for nearly all the Truro lines that are found in other folk plays, there remain a number of relatively common Truro lines that have not been covered. The more notable examples include:

   Introductory speech number three
      hopen the doar and Lat me in
      i hope your faver i shall wind
      wether irise or wether ifoll
      i will do my endeavour to please you all

   Lines from Saint George's speech number seventeen
      great britians right iwill mentain
      and fight free for england wance again

   The Doctor's cure from speech number thirteen
      are jack take a little of my drip drop
      pour it up in the tiptop

   Lines from the final speech number thirty-one
      here comes i that never come yate
      with a great head and litle wit

These speeches are found in a variety of other folk plays, but it is not yet possible to tell whether they come from another distinct class or classes. They may, however, provide useful leads in the search for such hero-combat subtypes.

Conclusions and Residual Issues

The key conclusions to be drawn from investigating biographical information on the actors listed in this manuscript are that its actual location should be Truro rather than Mylor, and that its date of performance must have been in the late 1780s--making it one of the oldest known English folk-play texts. This corrected date is also supported by physical characteristics of the original manuscript. In addition, it has been possible to determine the correct order of speeches, as a result of which the text conforms more to conventional sequences than the earlier published transcripts.

Someone with easier access to archives in Cornwall may be able to find further information to fill the gaps in the actors' biographies. Such information should improve confidence in the new place and date. Similarly, an expert paper historian may be able to contribute more precise information on the date and provenance of the manuscript's paper.

A consequence of the re-dating of this text is that the inclusion of literary and ballad material in English folk-play texts is now focused on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, emphasising that the plays were generally more variable in content during this period than later. No new literary or ballad parallels were found during this study, but it would be worthwhile repeating the search in the future, when more material has been added to the various full-text online databases.