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Juba's roman soul: Addison's Cato and enlightenment cosmopolitanism
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1999 by Rosenthal, Laura J
When 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 on 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, on 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 on 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. Both of Cato's sons, Porous and Marcus, love Lucia, the daughter of Roman senator Lucius, but resist becoming each other's rivals. Meanwhile, the Numidian general Syphax and the Roman senator Sempronius conspire to betray Cato to Caesar and try to bring Juba over to their side. The love plots and the war plot converge several times: Sempronius also loves Marcia, and Syphax offers both Juba and Sempronius his help in ravishing her; Marcus flings himself recklessly into battle after failing to win Lucia's love; Cato rewards Juba's loyalty and honor with permission to marry Marcia. In the end, after contemplating Plato's philosophy of the immortality of the soul, Cato kills himself as Caesar's army approaches.
While traditional readings have concentrated on the party politics in which Cato became entangled, Julie Ellison and J. Douglas Canfield both recently have brought attention to the complexities of nation, empire, gender, and racial identity explored in this play. Canfield argues that Cato dramatizes Marcia's gendered and Juba's racialized inadequacies when compared to Cato's virtue. Ellison moves even further from traditional readings by seeing not just Cato alone but the pairing of Cato with Juba as demonstrating republicanism's intertwined discourses of stoicism and sensibility articulated as a bond between the heroic Roman and the passionate, exotic African. This dynamic had a particular force, she notes, in the North American colonies, and "the play entered deeply into the iconic self-dramatizations of George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Nathan Hale" (592, 593).3 Fredric M. Litto and Albert Furtwangler have also suggested ways in which colonial revolutionaries identified Cato's struggle for liberty against empire as their own. There is thus no denying that Cato became a prototype for republican patriotic heroes, especially in North America. Nevertheless, this prototypical reading does not sufficiently capture the complexity of Addison's play. Ellison reads George Washington's desire, expressed in a letter, to play the Numidian prince Juba rather than the Roman Cato as an example of the erasure of racial particularity in the play's reception. But, perhaps instead of erasure, Washington's desire suggests a more complicated reading of the play, in which Juba emerges as something more than a racial inferior or an exotic other, especially considering the North American colonial context that greatly exaggerated the heroism of Cato's resistance to empire (for obvious reasons). I want to suggest that Juba might be read as not just a crucial part of the republican patriotism that Cato comes to represent, as Ellison shows, but even as an alternative to his admired Roman paternal friend.
