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.
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)
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