Randolph Driblette’s performance of The Courier’s Tragedy becomes a pivotal but unresolved piece of Oedipa Maas’s search for Tristero: Driblette used lines naming it, yet the available accounts do not establish why. Emory Bortz remembers the director as faithful to the play’s spirit, while their discussion exposes how unstable that spirit can be when its text survives in competing versions.

The Performance and Its Director

Bortz distinguishes Driblette’s production from a pornographic version he says he did not see until 1961. The performance at the Tank Theatre, by contrast, seemed to him typically virtuous. He describes Driblette as a peculiarly moral man, one who felt little responsibility toward the literal word but remained intensely faithful to the invisible field surrounding a play—to its spirit. In Bortz’s view, Driblette was uniquely capable of calling up the historical Wharfinger because he seemed close to the author’s imagined world, or to the microcosm that must have surrounded Wharfinger’s living mind.

That praise makes the production more than a straightforward case of fidelity or deviation. Bortz’s account separates exact wording from a director’s apprehension of the work as a whole: Driblette could be faithful to the play while departing from one textual witness. The performance’s significance lies partly in that distinction, which allows a stage choice to seem both deliberate and difficult to interpret.

The Fourth-Act Ending and Its Variants

When Oedipa asks how the fourth act ended, Bortz recites the couplet spoken after the miracle, when the characters stand around the lake: “He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew,” followed by “Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn,/And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.” The graduate students present agree that these are the lines they recognize. Oedipa presses him about another couplet, indicating that the familiar ending is not the whole point of dispute.

Bortz says that the text he personally accepts suppresses the other couplet’s last line. In his account, the book in the Vatican is only an obscene parody; the ending “Who once has crossed the lusts of Angelo” was added by the printer of the 1687 Quarto; and the “Whitechapel” version is corrupt. He considers Driblette’s omission of the doubtful passage the best choice. His explanation supplies a textual history for the uncertainty, but it does not make one version an uncontested authority: Bortz explicitly frames his position as the text he follows personally.

The Added Trystero Lines

Oedipa reports that the night she attended the play, Driblette used the Vatican lines and said the word Trystero. Bortz answers that the choice was Driblette’s: he was both director and actor. Oedipa wonders whether inserting lines in that way could have been only a whim, since their presence appears to make the performance a possible link between the play and the name she is investigating. The question is consequential without being conclusive: the added material is part of what she heard, but the conversation cannot establish what Driblette meant by using it.

A stocky graduate student in horn-rimmed glasses offers another possibility. Whatever was troubling Driblette internally, the student recalls, tended sooner or later to come out on stage. Driblette may have examined numerous versions to develop a sense of the play’s spirit rather than to follow its words, and may have encountered the relevant variation in Oedipa’s paperback. This explanation connects the performance to textual research as well as private feeling, but it remains a recollection and a possibility, not a confirmed account of Driblette’s process.

What the Encounter Establishes—and Leaves Open

Oedipa concludes that something in Driblette’s personal life must have changed drastically that night, prompting him to add the lines. Bortz declines to endorse that inference. He asks whether she thinks a man’s mind is a pool table; Oedipa replies that she hopes not. Their exchange blocks a neat causal answer: the performance may reflect an inward disturbance, a response to one of the play’s variants, or a relation between the two that the witnesses cannot recover.

The event thus carries two kinds of uncertainty at once. There is uncertainty about the text—the competing endings and the status of the Vatican and “Whitechapel” versions—and uncertainty about the performer, whose reasons remain inaccessible even to people discussing his work. Driblette’s insertion gives Oedipa evidence that the name Trystero was spoken onstage, but it does not verify a hidden history or reveal a definitive motive. The production matters precisely because it turns an apparent clue into a question about how authors, texts, directors, and performances make meaning without settling which source or intention governs it.