Addison’s Cato and Liberty

 

George Cruikshank, "John Kemble in the role of Cato" (1816)

 

Citations of the play in parentheses refer to the 2004 edition edited by Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin.  Numbers in  brackets indicate endnotes.

  

     This year, when the American election presents a choice between an outright fascist dictatorship under the most absurd of “strong men” and maintaining our longstanding bourgeois democracy, battered and compromised as it has been from the start by big money men, political dramas of the past seem reanimated with relevance.  I recently watched Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty with its neatly ironic plot of a cynical politician who succeeds only as long as he is corrupt.  A similar theme underlies Robert Rossen’s film of Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men.  Willie Stark’s demagoguery, while in ways more benevolent than the current Republican Party, pointed at the country’s vulnerability to a demagogue. [1] 

     I picked up Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) thinking that his hero might offer an appropriate response to tyrannical leaders and that his Caesar might have something in common with the outlandish television performer and would-be caudillo who has mesmerized a third of the electorate.  In fact, this play, though rarely read and even more rarely performed, was once not only extremely popular, but more closely intertwined with American history and ideals than, perhaps, any other work of literature.

     Current neglect of the play is unsurprising.  While Addison’s journalistic essays were lively and colloquial, his drama is icily formal and abstract, the pentameters rolling like a slow but regular drum set loop.  A modern critic states as a matter of fact that “the literary merits of the work no longer attract appreciative comment.” [2]  Lacking the Enlightenment era’s love for the fresh idea of liberty, today’s readers are likely to yawn at Addison’s verse which is more reminiscent of Corneille and Racine than other English poets.  Observance of the “unities” and a lofty theme are no longer sufficient to impress readers or viewers.

     The characters speak in generalities and platitudes.  Cato’s initial determination and Lucius’ concluding moralizing are sufficient examples of this pervasive abstraction.    

 

Let not a torrent of impetuous zeal

Transport thee thus beyond the bounds of reason”

True fortitude is seen in great exploits

That justice warrants, and that wisdom guides,

All else is towering phrensy and distraction   

                                                            (II, I, 43-47)

               From hence, let fierce contending nations know

What dire effects from civil discord flow,

‘Tis this that shakes our country with alarms

And gives up Rome a prey to Roman arms,

Produces fraud, and cruelty, and strife,

And robs the guilty world of Cato’s life.

(V, iv, 108-112)

 

Even the loves of Marcia and Juba, Portius and Lucia are subordinated to the grand political and philosophical themes of the play.  When Juba attempts to make love to Cato’ daughter Marcia by declaring the intention to emulate her father, she reproves him, saying the national crisis renders such personal goals as love inappropriate.

 

 

Juba: That Juba might deserve thy pious cares,

I’ll gaze forever on thy godlike father,

Transplanting one by one, into my life

His bright perfections, till I shine like him.

 

Marcia: My father never, at a time like this

Would lay out his great soul in words, and waste

Such precious moments.

(I, v, 18-24)  

  

     Meanwhile, Lucia prefers Portius specifically because Marcus is too passionate, “overwarm” (I, vi, 49).  The very signs of deep passion idealized in other drama are for Addison signs of weakness, making him “disfigur’d” (III, ii, 8). 

 

He pines, he sickens, he despairs, he dies:

His passions and his virturs lie confus’d.

(III, ii, 5-6)

 

Indeed, many critics including Voltaire, found the love scenes altogether out of place.  Voltaire praised the play as a whole, calling it the first “regular tragedy in English,” infused with “a spirit of elegance through every part,” yet he (inconsistently) found it marred “by a dull love plot, which spreads a certain languor over the whole, that quite murders it.”  In 1764 an edition was printed with a Latin translation the play “without the love scenes” [3].

     The ill fit of a romantic story in a story glorifying Cato is consistent with the hero’s reputation as a Stoic hero.  Washington himself received an education more vocational than Classical, but had some familiarity and sympathy with Stoicism which was in his day, as in ours, in the air, [4] though sometimes these more modern Stoicisms have little in common with Zeno, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.  Cato himself left no philosophic writings, yet he became widely regarded as an exemplary Stoic, particularly in  light of his suicide. [5]

     The figure of Cato was already well-known at the start of the eighteenth century primarily from his biography in Plutarch, but Addison’s immensely popular play increased his reputation.  From the day of its opening Cato was “an immediate, a sensational success” and the play became one of the most frequently performed of the century, running through twenty-six English editions in print during the 1700s. [6]  In the colonies that were to rebel, productions were mounted in many cities, including Charleston in 1736, New York in 1750, Philadelphia in 1759, Providence in 1762, and, following the outbreak of hostilities, in Boston and Portsmouth in 1778. [7] 

     Addison had himself been an active Whig politician, seeking to strengthen the powers of Parliament.  He died well before the conflicts between the British and their American cousins came to a head, but the play was thoroughly pollical from the start.  In a remarkable and unlikely circumstance Frederick, Prince of Wales, produced the play privately at Leicester House in London to oppose the authoritarian tendencies of his own father George II.  Among the performers was Frederick’s son, the future George III to whom was given a new prologue including the lines 1749 to promote his own support for English liberty against the supposed tyranny of his father, George II of Great Britain. The cast featured four of Frederick's children, including the future George III, the bête noire of the American colonists, who spoke a specially-written prologue, which included the line "What, tho' a boy? it may with pride be said / A boy in England born, in England bred,” drawing attention to George II's birth in Hanover, Germany. 

     During the winter of 1778-1779 the Continental Army camped at Valley Forge, a season that has become legendary for the soldiers’ hardships.  After the harsh winter Washington flouted the congressional ban on theater (as well as “every species of extravagance and dissipation” [8]) and arranged for a production of Addison’s play before “a very numerous and splendid audience” [9] including his comrades-in-arms.   

Horatio Greenough's statue of Washington (1832)

     Cato was not only Washington’s favorite play.  It had so deeply entered the consciousness of American patriots that its words seem clearly to have shaped the best-known lines associated with the Revolution. [10]  For instance, Patrick Henry's famous line, reported in 1817 as the dramatic conclusion to a 1775 speech to the Second Virginia Convention "Give me liberty, or give me death!" restates, with dramatic compression, the sentiment of the play’s "It is not now time to talk of aught/But chains or conquest, liberty or death." (IV, iv, 84)  Nathan Hale’s last words, according to the account of British captain John Montresor who was present, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" resembles "What a pity it is/That we can die but once to serve our country." (IV, iv, 80-81)

     The extent to which Addison’s play had permeated American consciousness is clear from the numerous other citations and rephrasings of its lines in the writing of American revolutionaries.  The speech in which Portius says “Tis not in mortals to command success,/ But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it” (I, 2, 43-44) underlies passages in a letter from George Washington to Benedict Arnold dated December 5, 1775, a letter from Washington to Nicholas Cooke dated October 29, 1775, and a letter from John Adams to his wife of February 18, 1776.  Charles Thomson, in a November 1, 1774 letter to Benjamin Franklin, declared himself “ready to ask, with the poet, ‘Are there not some chosen thunders in the stores of heaven armed with uncommon wrath to blast those Men,’ who by their cursed schemes of policy are dragging friends and brothers into the horrors of civil War and involving their country in ruin?” (the quotation is a paraphrase of I, 1, 21–4).  These few examples in which his influence has been noted might be multiplied, and doubtless many reminiscences of the language of the play have not attracted the attention of historians. [11]

     Surely a part what made this play a sensation in the eighteenth century was the neo-Classical taste of the age which fancied high ideals and found abstractions more mighty than particulars.  While no one considered reinstating the old Roman (and Japanese) custom of honorable suicide, Britons and Americans alike admired the frugality, self-control, and dignity of the Stoic pose and cast their leaders in this mold.  The artificiality of the style reinforced what was seen as strength of character in a hero’s strong will. 

      In terms of content, both Old and New World felt the excitement of the fading of the old feudal absolute monarchy and the advent of emerging ideas of liberty and capitalism.  The movement forward, in which the United States played a critical role, inspiring patriots in France, Poland, and elsewhere for generations to come, must have been intoxicating at its outset.   Embodied in texts like Addison’s Cato, the excitement of these new ideas permeated the culture in a way that no play could do today. 

     What art remains from the movement against the Vietnam War?  How many people remember The Teeth Mother Naked at Last?  Surely no one would look at MacBird! today.   Even Country Joe’s "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" is a relic that requires footnotes for people younger than I.  Literary savants know the poets of World War I, but they were never popular in the way that Cato was.  A similar penetration of American culture could probably be achieved today only by a television series.  

     Today we like Cato face the threat of tyranny, but death and submission are not the only choices.  Perhaps an oblique approach to onetime ideals of the country’s founders through Addison’s play can provide a livelier sense of how inspiring self-government once seemed before its slogans became patriotic cliches, employed as often by the enemies of liberty as by friends.   

    

 

 

1.  Rossen had himself undergone historical trials.  Originally an uncooperative witness of the HUAC, he was blacklisted and eventually, like Elia Kazan, named names in order to resume work in Hollywood. 

2.  M. M. Kelsall, “The Meaning of Addison’s Cato,” The Review of English Studies, Volume XVII, Issue 66, May 1966,

3.  Voltaire, Letters on the English, Letter XVIII, “On Tragedy.”  For a full account see Lisa A. Freeman, “What's Love Got to Do with Addison's "Cato"?,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 39, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1999), pp. 463-482.

4.  See H. C. Montgomery, “Washington the Stoic,” The Classical Journal, Vol. 31, No. 6 (Mar., 1936).  Montogomery says he acquired information about Stoicism from his friends the Fairfaxes and quotes the statement in Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Young George Washington that Washington had an English outline of Seneca “the mere chapter headings are the moral axioms that Washinton followed through life.

5.  His semi-ascetic ways such as going barefoot and wearing a toga without a tunic fit well with Stoicism’s recommended abstemiousness.  Fred K. Drogula, Cato the Younger: life and death at the end of the Roman republic (2019) argues that he may have seen himself instead as representative of Roman mos maiorum rather than as a Stoic. 

6.  See Iskra Fileva, “Stoicism as a Fad and a Philosophy,” Psychology Today, posted August 4, 2022 at  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-philosophers-diaries/202208/stoicism-fad-and-philosophy.  Fileva notes that in 2019 the word Stoic was used more times than in any earlier year in  history.  She lists a few of the best-selling self-help books claiming to represent Stoic ideas: The Power of Stoicism; The Beginner’s Guide to Stoicism; Mastering the Stoic Way of Life; 5-Minute Stoicism Journal, and many others.

7.  Robert M. Keller, compiler, Performance Notices in The Colonial Music Institute database, http://www.cdss.org/elibrary/PacanNew/index.htm.

8.  The ban included “all kinds of gaming, cock-fighting, exhibitions of shows , plays and other expensive diversions and entertainments.”  See Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37.

9.  Mark Evans Bryan, "'Slideing into Monarchical extravagance’: Cato at Valley Forge and the Testimony of William Bradford Jr.,” William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010). 

10.  I provide no citation as these striking parallels have been noted by many historians. 

11.  A great many other echoes of the language of Addison’s play have been noted as well.  Among the many other correspondences between passages in Addison’s play and the literature of the American Revolution are Jonathan Mitchel Sewall’s new epilogue for the play (1778) which explicitly identified Cato with Washington, Juba with Lafayette, and Caesar with King George and included these lines.

Our senate, too, the same bold deed has done,

And for a Cato, arm’’d a WASHINGTON!

A chief in all the ways of battle skill’’d

Great in the council, glorious in the field! (25-28)

A Question of Tone in The Mill on the Floss

      The Mill on the Floss is a tragic story not alone in the essential sense that the principal characters die at the end.  The shadow of doom plays over Maggie and Tom even in their childhood when the real agonies of their lives lay far in the future.   At one point the narrator explicitly declares that the story is tragic, though admittedly in an unconventional way.  While the genre, she says, has customarily featured “lofty” heroes as the “source of that conspicuous, far-echoing tragedy, which sweeps the stage in regal robes, and makes the dullest chronicler sublime,” yet humbler people may likewise possess hubris (in Eliot’s phrase “pride and obstinacy”) and “have their tragedy too,” though often “of that unwept, hidden sort that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record.” (III, 1)  Written at a time when literary Realism was overtaking Romanticism, The Mill on the Floss sought to adapt the ancient form to modern experience by situating tragedy in a bourgeois setting familiar to many of the book's readers from lived experience. 

     The book closes in a pathetic scene in which Stephen and Philip separately visit Tom and Maggie’s grave.  The postmortem intimacy both between the siblings and between Maggie and her lovers, seems more sentimental than tragic, but the tone is thoroughly melancholy.  Their death in the flood had been repeatedly foreshadowed throughout the book not least in the unlikely legend of St. Ogg and its reprise in Maggie’s dreams while in the boat with Stephen. [1]  Though the fall of Jeremy Tulliver through his obstinate lack of judgement may be the central catastrophe of the plot, the focus is really on Maggie, the spirited girl too clever for her circumstances, too sensitive to avoid self-doubt and too emotional to act in a way others might find prudent.  Then, too, Tom is inherently kind but narrow-minded and stubborn like his father, Stephen is captured in languid insouciance until the crisis, while Philip Wakem, his father, the Dodson aunts, and virtually everyone in the story is portrayed as flawed to various degrees.  Even those who try to conduct their lives with moral sensitivity find their choices clouded by ambiguity and contradiction.  (The sole exception is good old Bob Jakin, whose dialect may sound comic, but who proves not only a loyal friend in spite of class division, but even a good investment advisor.)

     Yet the gravity of the situation in which Maggie and Tom find themselves remains latent for a long stretch.  For most of the volume the reader hears nothing of impending doom, but rather the voice of a warmly wise narrator, superior to the characters in knowledge and judgement, but not as much critical of them as gently amused and indulgent toward their all-too-human shortcomings.  While this sort of authorial attitude is generally foregrounded in predominately comic works, it is present in serious ones as well, occurring not only in Dickens and Trollope, but in George Eliot.  This tone is so dominant that passages might be found throughout her work.  The present analysis examines examples in “Mr and Mrs Glegg at Home” (Book I, Chapter 12).

     This odd condescension which views the characters as acting with incomplete knowledge or erring judgement is facilitated for a portion of the narrative by Tom and Maggie’s being still children, and the attitude is here intensified by the notion that St. Ogg’s at the time of the story was itself naive and young, a kind of immature village.

     Paradoxically, this trait is expressed even in calling the town “venerable,” which here sounds patronizing, as if to say “quaint,” or “curious.”  It is also said to be “familiar with forgotten years,” suggesting both a history and a failure to learn from it.  This phrase introduces a Romantic formulation of the past implying a misty, legendary history including “a Saxon hero-king” (who himself takes a retrospective view, thinking of “the scenes of his youth and love-time”).  The modern more sophisticated reader is urged to be indulgent, to “look with loving pardon on the inconsistencies” of village architecture.  The book’s “refined readers” are likely to feel condescension when regarding the country scene, as the author pays tribute to the readers’ refinement, graciously suggesting that their familiarity with such rural products as cheese and wool is not even in their daily use, but rather only “through the medium of the best classic pastorals.” [2]  The light tone is unmistakable.

     Eliot notes that in earlier years foreign wars had raged and civil conflict as well: “first Puritans thanked God for the blood of the Loyalists, and then Loyalists thanked God for the blood of the Puritans.”  The language suggests that there was no right and wrong cause; rather, each mindlessly reflected the fanaticism of the other.  St. Ogg’s was unconscious of the past, never educated by it, as the village had “inherited a long past without thinking of it.”  “The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it” for, after all, “for a long while it had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men.”  Not only had religion as well as politics become routine, in general, “it was a time when ignorance was much more comfortable than at present.”

     As a leading example of such “ignorance,” the narrator notes that it was “a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore large pockets, in which they carried a mutton-bone to secure them against cramp. Mrs Glegg carried such a bone, which she had inherited from her grandmother” in blind obedience to tradition.  She and her sister Mrs. Pullet are highly predictable, every appearance demonstrating anew the same characteristics: Mrs. Glegg’s lofty view of herself and her family and Mrs. Pullet’s vulnerability to melancholy and pessimism. 

     Mrs. Glegg may, one learns, look out from her front parlor to frown upon the “gadding about” of married women or out the back to reflect on her husband’s “folly” in maintaining elaborate gardens.  The reader, of course, is to feel altogether superior to both, gifted by the omniscient narrator with a vision nearly divine. The comedy widens from the lady herself to her entire sex; it emerges that “the responsibilities of a wife” include keeping a “check on her husband’s pleasures, which are hardly ever of a rational or commendable kind.” 

     Mr. Glegg is hardly more exemplary.  His energy might seem so, as might his delight in close-up studies of the natural history of his garden plot, yet we learn that he uses his observations to seek esoteric correspondences between the behavior of slugs and the like and events in the greater world.  This speculation is excused on the ground that he “had an unusual amount of mental activity, which, when disengaged from the wool business, naturally made itself a pathway in other directions.”  He, too, has a censorious side to his meditations, satisfied by considering the “contrairiness” of women of which his wife, of course, is an excellent example.  Both may appear foolish to others such as the narrator and the reader, but their foibles are invisible to themselves; both consider themselves to have good sense, though neither quite thinks that of the other, and the reader is entitled to look down on them all, albeit with an indulgent eye.

      If he is stingy, he is “a lovable skinflint.” If she sems in a foul mood, surely it is because she is one of those “who seem to enjoy their ill-temper.”  His difficult wife is only exhibiting “a too pungent seasoning that nature had given to [her] virtues.” As he has “an affectionate disposition,” he is inclined to accept her ways and, indeed, to take pride in “the tightness and emphasis” with which she rolled their table-napkins.  Mr. Glegg’s devotion to his garden may owe a good deal to his wish to escape the confines of his house, while his wife caricatures Maggie’s asceticism when she “made her tea weaker than usual this morning and declined butter” due to being annoyed.  The chapter’s final scene between them depicts their muted but habitual friction.  She is set on finding fault whatever he might do and he responds with some asperity, though the temperature never rises far.  The reader knows that the duet is enacted daily. 

     Despite their flaws – the main way in which each is described – neither is in any way wicked.  In fact, the entire book has no wicked characters.  Much of the narration is pitched on the level of social and psychological satire, colored with Dickensian warmth rather than Swiftian fierceness.  Perhaps for this reason the sudden denouement has struck so many critics as a fault.  The emotional engagement mounts to another plane from the practice of humor in which no one really is hurt and everyone strives to do well in a variety of absurd and ineffective ways to a sudden life-and-death crisis and the summation of two lives that had had more of privation and self-denial than of pleasures for years.  The shift from amusement to gravitas is abrupt.

     While combining comedy with tragedy would have seemed a breach of literary decorum in antiquity, by Horatian standards for instance, the mixing had come to be defended well before Eliot’s novel.  Samuel Johnson’s praise of Shakespeare, for instance, not only accepts the poet’s “mixing comick and tragick scenes”; he lauds such mixed compositions as exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination.”  As Johnson eloquently notes, in lived experience very often “the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another.”  [3] 

     At the same time that Eliot’s novel establishes new ground for realistic narrative, her loyalty to the Classical tradition, especially elements of Greek tragedy, remains. [4]  In The Mill on the Floss she insists on the emotional profundity of the experiences of ordinary, small-town citizens while at the same time reflecting their radically limited view.  Each is obliged at act on the basis of, at best, partial information.  It is then no wonder if worthy motives might motivate unworthy actions.  In the end the mingling of what the ancients would have thought incompatible, an impermissible violation of decorum, is justified for the simple reason that it reflects everyone's common experience.  Each of us is given an imperfect view of what is before our eyes, we are all like Oedipus oblivious, walking always directly toward our own undoing unaware of what lies ahead.  Literary decorum cannot govern life; each day presents a succession of moments of fatuous absurdity followed by sensitive concern, a satiric insight may be followed by deep empathy and ridicule may be jumbled with profound anxiety in a mélange reflected in the tonal range of The Mill on the Floss. 

 

 

 1. Among the studies of this device is Larry Rubin, “River Imagery as a Means of Foreshadowing in The Mill on the Floss,” Modern Language Notes, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jan., 1956).

2.  Proust, another writer captivated by memory, expressed great admiration for George Eliot and for The Mill on the Floss in particular.  Among the many studies of her influence on him are Ian McCall, “The Portrayal of Childhood in Proust's Jean Santeuil and Eliot's ‘The Mill on the Floss’", Comparative Literature Studies Vol. 36, No. 2 (1999); Kenichi Kurata, “George Eliot, Marcel Poriust, and the Logic of Desire,” The George Eliot Review 44 (2014), and Inge Crosman Wimmers, “Proust and Eliot: An Intertextual Reading,” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature Vol. 36, No. 1 (January 2012)

3.  “Preface to Shakespeare.”

4.  Fir a general treatment, see P. E. Easterling, “George Eliot and Greek Tragedy,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1991).

Korinna and the Choral Lyric

     In our era both the composition and the consumption of poetry are often conceived as solitary activities. Since the Romantics the cultivation of individual sensibility of both writer and reader has seemed the primary aesthetic goal, yet in fact this assumption has been dominant only in recent literary history, apart from the fact that it is less than wholly accurate in any era. The greatest share of human cultural production has aimed at expressing shared values, community sentiment, received ideas, and satisfying commonplaces. In thematic terms, liturgies, folk song and story, as well as patriotic and sentimental texts and the productions of mass culture such as popular television, all are primarily aimed at reinforcing attitudes – moods and tones as well as specific beliefs – already accepted by the audience. From the Golddiggers of 1933 to the latest Bollywood extravaganza, in Broadway, Las Vegas shows, and on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera we continue to relish the spectacle of groups of attractive young dancers who speak with one voice.
     The care expended on such events in antiquity is dramatically attested by an account preserved by Athenaeus of the Spartan Hyakinthia.

 

But the middle day of the three days there is a variety-filled [poikilē] spectacle [theā] and a great and notable gathering of all [panēguris]. Boys wearing girtup khitons play the lyre, sweeping all the strings with the plectrum as they sing the god in the anapaestic rhythm and at a high pitch. Others pass through the viewing area [theatron] on finely ornamented horses. Massed choruses [khoroi] of young men now enter and sing some of the epichoric songs, while dancers mixed in with them perform the ancient dance movements to the pipe [aulos] and the singing. Next maidens enter, some riding in richly adorned wicker carts, while others make their competitive procession in chariots yoked with mules. And the entire city is astir, rejoicing at the spectacle [theōria]. On this day they sacrifice an abundance of animal victims, and the citizens feast all their acquaintances and their own slaves. And no one is left out of the sacrifice [thusia], and what happens is that the city is emptied for the spectacle [thea]. [1]

     Clearly, choral song was central to the celebrations of the divine hero in an observance so joyful and universal that both helots and foreigners were welcome to join citizens to participate.
     Something of the character of their verses may be inferred from the few scattered remains of the Boeotian poet Korinna. She specifically declares that her role is to sing, not of her own inmost thoughts, but of “the brave deeds of heroes and heroines.” (664) She pays homage to Terpsichore (“delight in dancing”) as her particular muse, emphasizing not only the movement that should accompany her words, but also their collective character. She defines her audience as “Tanagra’s white-robed daughters,” but also more broadly declares that choral lyric provides the occasion for the entire city to rejoice. (655) Her story of the contest between the mountains Helikon and Kithaeron reflects the public poetic competitions so familiar to the ancient Greeks. (654)
     Such social observances allowed the community to celebrate specifically what it held in common: in particular the myths that made sense of the cosmos. The dancing of the choric troupes expressed in their patterned loveliness a greater beauty and a more sublime order and reassured every individual that all was not merely well, all was marvelous and wonderful. In a story significant if not factual, Korinna is said to have rebuked Pindar for insufficient use of myths, to her “the proper business of poetry.” [3]
     Choral lyrics, indeed, are the source of tragic drama, both chronologically according to Aristotle and thematically. Meaning is so concentrated in the mythic discourse of the choral passages that they can often be read as a short version of the play, though many modern readers find the interactions of individual characters, in particular the stichomythia, more dramatic. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the chorus regards itself as the physical sign and even the very guarantor of cosmic order, asking, if injustice is allowed to flourish, “why then would we dance together?” [2] Conversely, the beautiful dancing reflects that all is well and reassures the community that it is not threatened.
     In this way choral lyrics like Korinna’s define and reinforce the group’s collective assumptions in a way characteristic of religious liturgies, folk stories, television situation comedies, and other popular and mass art forms. The modern reader is likely to privilege the more apparently individualistic emotions of monody from Arkhilokhos or Sappho, but in antiquity her fellow countrymen felt sufficient regard for Korinna’s choral works that they built a statue of her in her hometown and included a painting of her in the gymnasium. [4] Indeed our own culture’s most significant images may likewise be enshrined in the most popular of arts as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and others observed. When one makes Romantic assumptions foregrounding innovation, one turns away from the bulk of human cultural production.
     I knew an excellent critic, one if the best, who insisted that the point of literature was to challenge preconceptions, to indicate cracks, ambiguities, ambivalence, and contradiction in received ideas, and he was not wrong, but his view, I believe, was incomplete. The opposite function, the reinforcement of what one’s consumers already believe is an equal, indeed complementary, role of art. Neither enjoys supremacy.


1. Gregory Nagy,”Transformations of Choral Lyric Traditions in the Context of Athenian State Theater,” Arion 3 (1994/5) 41–55. Also available at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Transformations_of_Choral_Lyric_Traditions.1995.

2. Oedipus Tyrannos, 896 “εἰ γὰρ αἱ τοιαίδε πράξεις τίμιαι, τί δεῖ με χορεύειν;”

3. From Plutarch’s Moralia, Κατὰ τί ἔνδοξοι Αθηναῖοι (On the Glory of the Athenians or De Gloria Atheniensium) “ In what were the Athenians famous?, ", 347-8. Plutarch goes on to tell how Pindar earned a further criticism by then composing lines with too many mythic references, a complaint that has been alleged against him by more recent critics as well. Plato notes as well that poetry’s foundation in myth which is to say in falsity is a sign of poetry’s removal from reality.

4. Description of Greece 9.22.3

The Cutty Wren

     Certainly in general literary analysis must rest primarily upon the words of the text under discussion, but all readers welcome footnotes at times, and, for some poems, the greater part of understanding must arise from sources outside the text. A poem may in some cases rely upon its original audience’s familiarity with data that, for later readers, can only be supplied by historians or anthropologists. This is especially true of work with mythological elements. Mythic stories also exist in multiple texts. Myth might be considered as the narrative of a culture, rather than the invention of an individual. Poems retell or refer to the myth, but the myth itself is not limited to any single telling.
     The interpreter of the old British folk song “The Cutty Wren” [1] must first recognize that the title refers to dozens of different variants and related verses, no one of which is definitive. The casual hearer of most of these versions would be likely to draw the conclusion from its repetitions and silly names that it is a nonsense poem, appealing mainly to children, while in fact the poem is associated with some of the most profound and archaic beliefs of humankind.
     The historically sociological focus of many folklore enthusiasts has fueled speculative historical readings which lack supporting evidence. The most popular single recording of “The Cutty Wren” in recent times by the British anarchist punk band Chumbawumba in 2003 included liner notes dating the song to the fourteenth century and associating it with the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381, implying that the bird to be eaten for the benefit of all was the ruling class. [2] Other historical explanations for the hostility to the wren include the bird’s betrayal by singing of either British defenders against the Vikings in the eighth century or seventeenth century soldiers, variously thought to be Irish, Manx, or British. [3]
     Rather than kings or soldiers, though, most commentary on “The Cutty Wren” has centered on use of the song in many variants in a wintertime ritual surviving into modern times, the hunting of the wren. In Ireland, England, and parts of Spain, Canada, and France around the time of Christmas, commonly the day after, young men hunt and kill a wren, fasten its body to the end of a pole and parade through town, stopping in front of homes to ask for handouts. This is precisely the pattern central to Frazer’s The Golden Bough and, in fact, Frazer includes a detailed description of such wren hunts. [4] The song seems to have originated in association with wren-hunting, and investigations of that activity by folklorists and anthropologists provide further important clues to its significance (as well as a number of red herrings).
     Frazer describes the ritual as a “form of communion in which the sacred animal is taken from house to house, all that may enjoy a share of its divine influence,” thus ensuring life and the potential for prosperity in the year to come. [5] The wren-sacrifice illustrates his general thesis, that religion arose largely from fertility cults that sought to regenerate the earth and assure human well-being through the worship and periodic sacrifice of a divine king who might be a person or an animal. For time to move forward properly, that “king” must, like the crops of the field and the generations of livestock and game, die, though, in a miracle constantly recurring, the divine energy returns again to life. Frazer’s discussion of the wren follows his description of similar customs among the “Snake tribe” of the “Punjaub” where villagers take round a snake made of dough, promising prosperity to all who “obey the snake” and give them gifts. After dealing with wren-hunting, Frazer goes on to treatment of the Hogmanay custom in Scotland in which a man wrapped in a cow-hide goes house to house to perform circumambulations about each the aim of which is to assure the community have “plenty of meat” in the coming year. Frazer’s data make it quite clear than such practices are found around the world focusing on a wide variety of animal, human, and symbolic figures.
     Though little is known about the pre-Christian beliefs of oral European cultures the significance of the wren is widespread enough to imply Indo-European roots. Aesop told how the trickster bird defeated the eagle become king, and the bird’s status is signaled by its name in many European languages, such as roitelet in French, winterkoninkje in Dutch, and Zaunkönig in German. In Celtic languages the bird is identified with the pre-Christian scholar/rulers: dryw means both wren and druid in Welsh, and close parallels exist in Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx. [6] While once a year the bird is hunted and killed in ceremonial fashion, the remainder of the year its kingship among the animals, its divinity in fact, is indicated by widespread protective taboos.
     Why do people perform such rituals? Of course, one motive is the vulgar instrumental magic that considers such activities essential for the progression of time and the seasons, and, in particular, for the renewal of fertility which must occur with every generation to ensure the survival of all living things. The wren-boys hope to bring prosperity to all. The utter ineffectiveness of such attempts to seize control of fate is a poignant expression of human desire, gesturing toward wants that never can be satisfied.
     There is, after all, a more profound symbolic meaning of all the dying and reborn gods, whose drama appears in countless myths, including the Christian one. [7] The killing of the wren is also of a piece with the portrayal of tragic heroes in ancient Greek drama, the enactment of gladiatorial contests in Roman times, and countless other dramatic presentations, including the much-deplored violence of today’s films and video games.
     All these cultural artifacts serve fundamentally the same role as an ancient Near Eastern sculpture representing a lion taking down its prey. The viewer may pause and contemplate the artist’s representation of the animal’s power over his victim’s life and death. [8] Surely such a theme, whatever else it may be, is a momento mori, reminding the viewer not merely of the inevitability of death, but its dialectical relationship to life. One cannot exist without the other, and their duality is, in the end, deceptive. Death is the conclusion of every life and life lives on life: one can live only by destroying other life, by consuming living things, be they plants or animals. What the hunting of the wren enacts is the inescapable fact that death is the necessary complement of life, the precondition, one might say, of sex and nourishment.
     People have often worried about mortality. Among the symbolic techniques for coping with this anxiety is indeed the wish fulfilment of such fantasies as the magical assurance of health and safety or the promise of life after death. Yet the hunting of the wren, like the skull depicted on St. Jerome’s desk, is also a symbolic rehearsal for the moment of death everyone knows will come. Thus people reassure themselves with a comfortable lie while simultaneously preparing through visualization for the inevitable. In the same way the viewer of tragedy feels both pity for the unfortunate suffering on stage and with the satisfaction that, for the moment, the sacrificial victim is someone else and fear, since every member of the audience knows that each will inevitably confront the abyss.
     If this important mental programming may be accomplished together with the good fellowship of a party of one’s own kind, and accompanied with fun and food, the result may be not only catharsis but also a kind of exhilaration. Singing nonsense is entertaining, but it also reflects an engagement with a world that must often seem absurd, meaningless, and indifferent to the plaintive cries of human desire. The entire practice of the wren hunt – the date near the winter solstice, the songs accompanying it, the responses of the villagers – constitute a supra-individual work of art as profound and beautiful as a work of an individual genius.




1. I append first the version first published in David Herd's Scots Songs. Walter Scott used some of the material Herd had collected in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Following this are a number of other texts representing a small selection of the many “versions of “The Cutty Wren.” In the United States and Australia, variations called “Billy Barlow” proliferated. These and more are available online. What I have included is chosen nearly at random; their sources, indeed, any of their particular characteristics are insignificant for my purposes here.

2. This unsupported notion, of a song first recorded in the eighteenth century, may arise from a comment by the influential A. L. Lloyd in the 1940s. See A. L. Lloyd, The Singing Englishman, p. 7. Lloyd, a central figure in the British folk revival, while an important singer and collector (and a Communist), was no scholar. In fact, rather than suggesting the song was composed with a political import, he says “Pretty certainly this was originally a magical song, a totem song, which about this time took a strong revolutionary meaning.”  The slogan “eat the rich,” popular during anti-gentrification agitation in the Lower East Side during the 1980s, became the title of a British film and an Aerosmith tune, and more recently reached an epigone as the name of posh restaurants in Washington, D. C. and Munich.

3., “The Irish Wren Tales and Ritual. To Pay or Not to Pay the Debt of Nature,” Sylvie Muller, Béaloideas (journal of An Cumann Le Béaloideas Éireann/The Folklore of Ireland Society), 131-169 1996/1997.

4. Frazer, The Golden Bough (two volume edition), 620.  A vestige of the practice survived until late Victorian times in the form of Christmas and New Year cards featuring dead birds, a motif that people found unaccuntbe only a generation or two later.

5. For two reasons I continue to value Frazer and use him as a reference though I am, of course, aware of the strictures on his conclusions by Edmond Leach and others. First, I think that customs such as the carrying about of the wren and similar practices are the very closest to Frazer’s paradigm. Though he may have overgeneralized as Tylor did about sun myths, that does not prove him wrong in every instance. Second, I read and use Frazer as a literary critic, not as an anthropologist. The standards of aesthetic hermeneutics are not the same as those of science.

6. The proto-Celtic *druwits (literally “oak-knower”), from Proto-Indo-European *dóru (“tree”) and *weyd- (“to see”). The wren is, of course, at home in the oak.  Considering an archaic bird deity, one thinks inevitably of the many bird-headed goddesses that fill the works of Marija Gimbutas.

7. Christian objections to Frazer’s treatment of Christ’s story as a myth led him first to move its treatment to an appendix and, in the abridged edition which I used, to excise it altogether.

8. Many variations are possible. There are also many sculptures of lion hunts in which the majestic animal is bent, pierced with spears and arrow, as if to imply the king’s hegemony even over even such a fearsome beast. Yet other images include conflations of king and lion in divine part-human, part-animal beings. All are meant to offer the hapless humans some sense of power over their environment while also reinforcing the social order.



1776 version from David Herd's Scots Songs


Will ze go to the wood? quo' FOZIE MOZIE;
Will ze go to the wood? quo' JOHNIE REDNOZIE;
Will ze go to the wood? quo' FOSLIN' ene;
Will ze go to the wood? quo' brither and kin.
What to do there? quo' FOZIE MOZIE;
What to do there? quo' JOHNIE REDNOZIE;
What to do there? quo' FOSLIN' ene;
What to do there? quo' brither and kin.
To slay the WREN, quo' FOZIE MOZIE:
To slay the WREN, quo' JOHNIE REDNOSIE:
To slay the WREN, quo' FOSLIN' ene:
To slay the WREN, quo' brither and kin.
What way will ze get her hame? quo' FOZIE MOSIE;
What way will ze get her hame? quo' JOHNIE REDNOZIE;
What way will ze get her hame? quo' FOSLIN' ene;
What way will ze get her hame? quo' brither and kin.
We'll hyre carts and horse, quo' FOZIE MOZIE:
We'll hyre carts and horse, quo' JOHNIE REDNOZIE:
We'll hyre carts and horse, quo' FOSLIN' ene:
We'll hyre carts and horse, quo' brither and kin.
What way will we get her in? quo' FOZIE MOZIE;
What way will we get her in? quo' FOZIE MOZIE;
What way will we get her in? quo' FOOSLIN' ene;
What way will we get her in? quo' brither and kin.
We'll drive down the door-cheeks, quo' FOZIE MOZIE:
We'll drive down the door-cheeks, quo' JOHNIE REDNOZIE:
We'll drive down the door-cheeks, quo' FOSLIN' ene:
We'll drive down the door-cheeks, quo' brither and kin.
I'll hae a wing, quo' FOZIE MOZIE:
I'll hae another, quo' JOHNIE REDNOZIE:
I'll hae a leg, quo' FOSLIN' ene:
An I'll hae anither, quo' brither and kin.



Chumbawunba version:


Oh where are you going? said Milder to Moulder
Oh we may not tell you! said Festel to Fose
We're off to the wood! said John the Red Nose
We're off to the wood! said John the Red Nose
And what will you do there? said Milder to Moulder
Oh we may not tell you! said Festel to Fose
We'll shoot the cutty wren! said John the Red Nose
We'll shoot the cutty wren! said John the Red Nose
Oh how will you cut him up? said Milder to Moulder
Oh we may not tell you! said Festel to Fose
With knives and with forks! said John the Red Nose
With knives and with forks! said John the Red Nose
And who´ll get the spare ribs? said Milder to Moulder
Oh we may not tell you! said Festel to Fose
We'll give them all to the poor! said John the Red Nose
We'll give them all to the poor! said John the Red Nose



Les Barker’s version, described as “made popular by the late Percy 'Stupid' Sedgwick, last of the very thin Baroldswick wren hunters”


Where are you going said Millda to Molda,
Where are you going oh where do you go?
I'm off to the forest said Molda to Millda,
I'm off to the forest all in the deep south. (emended to snow)

Why are you going says Millda to Molda,
Why are you going with all of these men?
You nosy old bleeder said Molda to Millda,
You nosy old bleeder we're hunting the wren.

Two dozen hunters says Millda to Molda,
Yet you never catch one won't you tell me how?
Its a bloody small target said Molda to Millda,
Its a bloody small target you stupid old cow.

Then why do you do it says Millda to Molda,
Why do you do it says the wining old voice.
I know it sound silly said Molda to Millda,
Its an old a pagan custom and we got no choice.

Would you walk in the forest says Millda to Molda,
Would you walk in the forest like an old pagan man?
We'll go in my motor said Molda to Millda,
I've got a Toyota its a four wheel drive van.

Where have you been says Millda to Molda,
Where have you been won't you tell me?
Hunting the wren said Molda to Millda,
Hunting the wren has your memory gone?

Pray have you got one says Millda to Molda,
Pray have you got one please tell I'm all ears.
Yes we're enraptured said Molda to Millda,
Its the first one we've captured for two thousand years,

Where did you catch it says Millda to Molda,
Where did you catch it pray tell to me.
We got it at Safeway said Molda to Millda,
We got it at Safeway for 55 p.

Its not very big though says Millda to Molda,
We won't need much stuffing I don't see the sense.
Of course its not big though said Molda to Millda,
Its one of the salient features of wrens.

You should have got a chicken says Millda to Molda,
A chicken or a turkey or maybe a joint.
We should have got a chicken said Molda to Millda,
You silly old woman you're missing the point.

So why hunt the wren then says Millda to Molda,
Why hunt the wren then if its such a small thing?
Its and old pagan custom said Molda to Millda,
And hunting the sausage don't have the same ring .

Where are you going says Millda to Molda,
Where are you going says Millda again.
Off to the Arndale said Molda to Millda,
To open a shop called Kentucky fried wren.



From Sam Henry, Songs of the People, collected in Armagh, 1937


"Where are you goin'?" says Arty Art,
"Where are you goin'?" says Dandrum Dart
"Where are you goin'?" says Brothers-In-Three
"I'm goin' to the fair." says Crickety Wee.

"What will you do there?"
I'll buy a wee pony."

"But what will you do with it?"
"It's for my wife to ride on."

"When will ye get married?"
"The day before the morrow."

"Will there be any drink?"
"A glass and a half."

"It'll not be all drunk."
"I could drink it myself."

"What'll you have to eat?"
"A loaf and a half."

"It'll not get all ate."
"I'll put it under my hat."

"The mice will get at it."
"I'll keep a good cat."

Will ye have any children?"
"Two, and two cripples."

"I doubt they'll not work."
"They'll work for death."



from Gammer Gurton's Garland, and English book of rhymes (published at Stockport, approximately 1760)

We'll go a shooting, says Robin to Bobbin
We'll go a shooting, says Richard to Robin
We'll go a shooting, says John all alone
We'll go a shooting, says everyone
What shall we kill, says Robin to Bobbin
What shall we kill, says Richard to Robin
What shall we kill, says John all alone
What shall we kill, says everyone
We'll shoot at the wren, says Robin to Bobbin
We'll shoot at the wren, says Richard to Robin
We'll shoot at the wren, says John all alone
We'll shoot at the wren, says everyone
She's down, she's down, says Robin to Bobbin
She's down, she's down, says Richard to Robin
She's down, she's down, says John all alone
She's down, she's down, says everyone
How shall we get her home, says Robin to Bobbin
How shall we get her home, says Richard to Robin
How shall we get her home, says John all alone
How shall we get her home, says everyone
We'll hire a cart, says Robin to Bobbin
We'll hire a cart, says Richard to Robin
We'll hire a cart, says John all alone
We'll hire a cart, says everyone
The hoist boys hoist, says Robin to Bobbin
The hoist boys hoist, says Richard to Robin
The hoist boys hoist, says John all alone
The hoist boys hoist, says everyone
So the brought her away after each pluck'd a feather
And when they got home, shar'd the booty together