I hate to admit defeat, and so this paper is not so much about defeat as it is about the complexity of the intellectual problem posed by the known printings of the various chapbooks entitled Peace Egg.
At present, I am making my third attempt at understanding the relationships among the various Peace Egg chapbooks. My first attempt, based on a very limited number of examples, was carried out in the early 1970s; my second attempt was in the late 1970s. What prompts the present attempt is the near certitude that most of the surviving evidence has been collected.
My earlier attempts at interrelating these chapbooks resulted in documenting two distinctly similar but yet separate "clusters" of texts. Somewhere, we hoped - Paul Smith, Georgina Boyes, and I - that a missing link existed which would allow us to demonstrate the relationship between the two, and so we set about locating as many Peace Egg chapbooks as possible. It is my intention, by the time of the Traditional Drama conference, to explain our current understanding of this textual problem, or to have resolved it.
As background, let me point to the Alexander and the King of Egypt monograph, published in 1976, an effort which grew out of my 1972 M.A. thesis on traditional drama, as well as to the yet-unpublished study of Irish chapbooks which contain traditional dramatic texts and our soon-to-be-published study of Quack Doctor broadsides and their relationship to both popularly printed and oral traditional dramatic texts. The working out of these popular printing traditions, in my mind at least, validates the methodology employed and suggests that it should be applicable to the Peace Egg chapbooks.
The question of why one might expend a considerable effort in resolving such a problem has numerous answers. The most obvious has to do with the history of the study of traditional drama. Traditional drama studies have suffered, first of all, from various theories of ritual origin, because they resulted in a distancing of the researcher from any particular representation of that tradition. As a result, the study of the printed texts was considered to be several removes away from the primary consideration of the explication of the ancient ritual from which everything assumedly derived.
For those of us interested in a theory of oral literature and its transmission, such printed texts likewise represented a late (and hence degenerate) representation of a privileged older, purely oral culture.
For those of us who come from traditional literary disciplines, chapbooks and broadsides have been hardly worth noticing when we have the more important issue of, for example, Shakespeare's text of King Lear to recover. King Lear, we assume, is worth any number of Peace Egg chapbooks.
But for those concerned with traditional drama - how it is what it is, what it means to those who perform it, what its history might have been - a study of the Peace Egg chapbooks is every bit as important as a study of the quartos and folios which contain King Lear. In addition, those concerned with a humbler printing tradition - not to say a humbler class of people - might valorize a study of the printing history of the Peace Egg chapbooks. For me, it is also an intellectual problem not yet resolved, a piece in the larger puzzle of the interrelationships between oral and printed traditions, between working-class and privileged behaviour.
[Ron Shuttleworth Collection holds audio tape recording, with transcript - although former may be incomplete.]