Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger

Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger is the 1957 Berkeley textbook that becomes a material test of the word “Trystero”: its hardcover text and scholarly notes do not account for the paperback line that Oedipa has encountered in The Courier’s Tragedy. The discrepancy makes the anthology more than a source to consult. Its editions, annotations, and uncertain chain of transmission become part of the mystery Oedipa is trying to understand.

Publication and Provenance

Randolph Driblette tells Oedipa that the scripts for his production are purple, dittoed copies, worn, torn, and stained with coffee. The original source, he says, was a paperback anthology of Jacobean revenge plays, identifiable by a skull on its cover. He found it at Zapf’s Used Books, but someone took it at an opening-night party; Driblette says he loses at least half a dozen copies every time. He suggests there may be another copy at the shop.

When Oedipa follows this lead, Zapf says the paperback has been in great demand. She buys a copy and reads the single occurrence of “Trystero” in it. The pencil note opposite the line directs the reader to a variant in the 1687 edition, prompting her to wonder whether another reading might clarify the word. The paperback’s brief preface says that its text derives from an undated folio. Its copyright page, however, identifies the source hardcover as Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger, issued by The Lectern Press in Berkeley in 1957.

The Berkeley Search

The Los Angeles library cannot supply the hardcover, though staff offer to request it through inter-library loan. Oedipa notices that the publisher is in Berkeley and decides to approach it directly, also thinking she might visit John Nefastis. After driving north and spending the night in a hotel, she finds The Lectern Press in a small office building on Shattuck Avenue. The press does not keep the book there, but accepts her check for $12.50 and gives her an Oakland warehouse address and a receipt. By the time she has collected the volume, the afternoon has arrived.

She searches the hardcover for the line that sent her to Berkeley. In the leaf-fractured sunlight, she finds a couplet that ends, “Who once has crossed the lusts of Angelo.” It does not contain the paperback’s “Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.” Oedipa protests aloud at the difference. The book she holds therefore confirms neither that the paperback is a faithful reprint nor that the puzzling word belongs to the text as established by its stated source.

Textual Variants and Editorial Uncertainty

The hardcover’s footnote does not settle the matter. It says that the “Trystero” line appears only in the 1687 Quarto. The earlier Folio, by contrast, has a lead inserted where the closing line should be. The note reports that D’Amico thought Wharfinger might have made a libellous comparison involving someone at court, and that the later restoration may have been the work of the printer, Inigo Barfstable. The anthology thus presents the difference not as a simple copying error but as a history of possible suppression, restoration, and editorial intervention.

The note also records a doubtful “Whitechapel” version, dated about 1670, whose wording is “This tryst or odious awry, O Niccolò.” It calls the line syntactically difficult and metrically graceless, then cites J.-K. Sale’s unorthodox proposal that it puns on “This trystero dies irae.” That explanation, too, leaves the text nearly as corrupt as before, since the meaning of “trystero” remains unclear; the note offers pseudo-Italianate derivation from triste, meaning wretched or depraved, only as a possibility. It warns that the Whitechapel edition is a fragment full of corrupt and probably spurious lines, and therefore cannot be trusted.

The book’s own apparatus makes uncertainty explicit: the readings do not converge on a stable original, and the explanations multiply without providing a secure definition of the word. Oedipa checks further footnotes for nearly an hour and finds no additional answer. The preface to the paperback had been unsigned; the hardcover’s preface, by contrast, bears the name of Emory Bortz, a professor of English at Cal. Yet the signed authority supplies no edition beyond the Quarto, Folio, and Whitechapel fragment that could explain the paperback’s wording.

Function in Oedipa’s Investigation

The anthology binds a theatrical clue to a physical trail of books and institutions. Oedipa first learns about the lost paperback from Driblette, locates a replacement through Zapf, follows its bibliographical references, and travels to the publisher and warehouse to examine the hardcover. At each step, a new document seems to promise verification, but the evidence complicates rather than closes the question: the paperback cites a variant, its stated source lacks the line, and the scholarly note describes several unstable alternatives without naming another edition that would account for the paperback.

That unresolved gap gives the anthology its decisive significance in Oedipa’s investigation. A word that might have been dismissed as a line in a play now appears within conflicting printed witnesses, each with its own provenance and editorial problems. The book cannot establish what “Trystero” means or where the paperback’s version came from; instead, it makes the act of checking sources another encounter with incomplete evidence. The more carefully Oedipa compares editions, the less the word can be contained by any single text.