Juba's Roman Soul: Addison's Cato and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism
1999; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-2678
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoWhen Charles II reopened the English stage, he decreed that women would now play the female roles, thus ending the Renaissance tradition of using boy actors. Ostensibly based the moral imperative to stop cross-dressing, this decision clearly also staked a major investment in the stage's hetero-eroticism, part slap in the face to the Puritans, part compromise with the Puritans in retreat from earlier associations of the Stuart court with homoeroticism, and part personal taste of the monarch. Out of all available possibilities for the grand debut of the public heterosexuality that would characterize the theater for centuries, Othello was chosen (Van Lennep 1: 18). We might take this decision as an emblem for the erotic investments in racial and national difference in the eighteenth century as well as evidence of the ambivalent figuring of international relations as heterosexual coupling. Joseph Addison's Cato (1713) similarly incorporates a transracial romance; the attraction between Juba and Marcia, however, generally has not been understood as central to the play. Many critics have read this romance as something tacked on to the main story of the play, which concerns Cato's resistance to Caesar's transformation of Rome from republic to empire.(1) In some ways, the play supports this reading: Marcia refuses to approach her father about her love for Juba for fear of distracting him from his military and political concerns. I would like to suggest, however, that the sexual attractions in Cato play a crucial part in the drama's meaning. Rather than providing a romantic and domestic interlude as intermittent relief from the important business of politics and empire, the promised marriage between Juba and Marcia in many ways defines a significant alternative to the conflict between Caesar and Cato. In short, Cato does not simply articulate the ideals of nationalism but places nationalism in tension with Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the many paradoxes of which become visible in the drama's unfolding. Cato has stirred political controversy since its initial production in 1713, when both Whigs and Tories claimed it as the expression of their deepest beliefs.(2) Specifically, the Whigs read Cato as the duke of Marlborough and the play as an argument for the duke's continued participation in the War of the Spanish Succession. The Tories, the other hand, were able to read the dictatorial Caesar as Marlborough (Loftis 57-60). But as Addison's biographer, Peter Smithers, points out, Addison did not originally write this play to comment the war, for he had drafted it at least ten years earlier (259); contemporaries found a meaning in this play that it initially could not have had. This presents neither a problem nor a novelty, for the most compelling drama tends to persist through precisely this kind of cultural intertextuality. Yet in the case of Cato, I think it has obscured some of the play's complexity and richness. Thus, I wish to make both an aesthetic and a political point about Cato: first, in spite of some sites of reception, Addison's play does not offer Cato himself as an unqualified ideal, or even as an ideal at all; and, second, reading Cato as less than utterly heroic suggests the promised marriage between Cato's daughter Marcia and the African prince Juba as the drama's hopeful alternative to Cato's stubborn, suicidal despair. Cato takes place in North Africa, where the eponymous Roman senator has aligned himself with the Numidian king in opposition to Caesar, who has begun the process of transforming a democratic Roman republic into a corrupt and overreaching Roman empire. The Numidian king has died in the battle against Caesar's empire, and the remaining Numidians must decide whether to side with the powerful Caesar or the stoical Cato. Juba, the son of the Numidian king (also named Juba), loves Cato and his daughter Marcia, who returns Juba's affection but fears distracting her father from his battle with the prospect of her marriage. …
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