Driblette’s Insertion of the Trystero Lines

Driblette’s insertion of the Trystero lines into The Courier’s Tragedy turns an alteration in performance into an unresolved question about textual authority and personal motive. Oedipa Maas treats the change as a clue to a decisive event in Randolph Driblette’s life; the scholars she consults can explain how he might have encountered the lines, but cannot confirm why he chose to speak them onstage.

The Textual Dispute

Emory Bortz distinguishes the text he personally accepts from the versions available to Driblette. In Bortz’s account, the other couplet’s final line was suppressed in the text he follows; the Vatican book is only an obscene parody, the ending about crossing Angelo’s lusts was added by the printer of the 1687 Quarto, and the “Whitechapel” version is corrupt. On that basis, Bortz thinks Driblette did well to leave the doubtful material out. His judgment makes the performance’s use of the Vatican lines conspicuous: what Oedipa heard was not, for Bortz, a settled or authoritative ending.

The disagreement is not simply over whether the words belong in the play. It is also over which witness to the play should carry authority: a preferred text, a manuscript or printed variant, or the director’s sense of the work. Bortz calls the Vatican book a parody and the “Whitechapel” version corrupt, but his own conclusion remains a scholarly preference rather than a direct account of Driblette’s decision. The available textual evidence can establish that versions differ; it cannot by itself disclose what the actor-director intended.

The Performance and Oedipa’s Inference

Oedipa brings forward a concrete counterexample to Bortz’s account of what the performance contained. On the night she attended, Driblette used the Vatican lines and said the word “Trystero.” Bortz answers that the choice was Driblette’s because he was both director and actor. That answer locates the revision in the freedom of performance, but it does not settle Oedipa’s question about its cause.

Oedipa presses the distinction between permission and purpose. She wonders whether inserting lines from another version could have been “just some whim,” done without telling anyone. Her question connects the textual anomaly to the possibility of an undisclosed personal motive. She then draws a stronger inference: something must have happened in Driblette’s personal life, something must have changed drastically that night, and that change must have led him to add the lines. The performance thus becomes, for her, not merely an editorial choice but a possible sign of an otherwise inaccessible event.

A Possible Route to the Lines

One of Bortz’s graduate students recalls that whatever was troubling Driblette would somehow have to emerge onstage. The student suggests that Driblette may have examined many versions of the play to develop a feel for its spirit rather than simply follow its words, and that this process could have brought him to Oedipa’s paperback, which contained the variation. This account supplies a plausible route by which the lines entered the performance: textual browsing, interpretive judgment, and access to a variant edition.

That explanation remains explicitly tentative. The student offers a possibility, not a documented chain of discovery, and the account does not establish that Driblette found the lines in the paperback or that a personal crisis prompted him to use them. It gives Oedipa a way to imagine the change as both textual and expressive: Driblette might have encountered the variant while searching for the play’s spirit, then let what concerned him surface through performance. The evidence leaves that conjunction open rather than confirming it.

Meaning Without Resolution

Bortz resists Oedipa’s assumption that a man’s mind can be treated like a pool table, as though a change in circumstances must produce a legible and predictable response. His “maybe, maybe not” refuses to validate her proposed cause-and-effect account. Oedipa answers that she hopes the mind does not work that way, but her reply does not resolve the uncertainty; it exposes her wish that human motives might be more than mechanical reactions.

The insertion consequently remains caught between several explanations: a questionable textual variant, an actor-director’s discretion, an encounter with Oedipa’s paperback, and a possible upheaval in Driblette’s private life. None is established as the decisive cause. The scene gives the lines evidentiary force because Oedipa heard them, yet keeps their significance unsettled because no account can securely connect the words onstage to Driblette’s intention. The revision advances the Trystero mystery while preserving the possibility that its apparent clues exceed what can be proved.