Cato, from Britain to America

(by David Francis Taylor)

We don’t talk enough about the history of theatre as a history of risk. To perform Addison’s Cato in America in 2023 was certainly to take a risk—because of the issues of political liberty and race that the play raises and, equally, because it has long been considered virtually unstageable. But then risks of various kinds are part of the story of Cato almost from the beginning. Addison apparently conceived of a tragedy dramatizing the death of Cato the Younger (85–46 BCE)—famous stoic and uncompromising opponent of Julius Caesar—in the 1690s, while he was at Magdalen College, Oxford (Addison Reference Addison and Tickell1721:1:xiii–xiv). Numerous sources confirm that he had drafted four acts of the play by 1703, towards the end of a long tour of Europe. At this stage, Addison’s publisher Jacob Tonson saw it; so too did Addison’s friend and future collaborator Richard Steele, the actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber, and also Jonathan Swift (Spence Reference Spence and James1966:1:332; Cibber [1740] Reference Cibber and Fone1968:249; Swift [1710–13] Reference Swift and Williams2013:521–22). But the play would have to wait until the winter of 1712/13 for its fifth and final act, during which time the existence of the unfinished Cato seems to have been something of an open secret, with one Oxford student urging Addison to “no more detain/The free-born Cato, struggling in his chains” (Prevost 1733:112).

Why did it take Addison a decade to complete the play? He was, to be sure, a busy man, as both his literary and political careers took off: in 1705 he took a key position in government as an undersecretary of state, in 1707 he was elected to parliament, and in 1708 he became secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland. Such activities cannot, though, entirely explain leaving aside Cato as he had time to write another play—the opera, Rosamond—from scratch in 1705/06. Yet this experience would hardly have encouraged him as a playwright; though its premiere at Drury Lane in February 1707 was greeted with great anticipation, the opera disappeared from the stage after just three performances.Footnote ¹ If he didn’t already know it, Rosamond would have taught Addison just how much risk—of the most public and embarrassing kind of failure—attends the life of a writer for the commercial stage. Having achieved literary celebrity with his poem The Campaign (1704) and his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705) (see Smithers Reference Smithers1968:91–146), Addison returned to the seemingly more secure, or at least less exposed, domain of print, most notably with The Spectator, the wildly successful periodical he created in 1711 with Steele.

There is, however, another likely reason why Cato remained unfinished for so long—and here, too, the matter is one of risk. The prospect of the final act confronted Addison with the challenge of how to negotiate and stage the suicide of his protagonist in an appropriate way and without seeming to endorse such a practice. Cato, having retreated to the city of Utica in North Africa following the defeat of the republican army at the Battle of Thapsus (46 BCE), took his own life rather than face capture by Julius Caesar. The chief source for information about this suicide is Plutarch, who records that Cato first struck an understandably suspicious servant for refusing to return his weapon, which friends had hidden; then, having injured his sword hand in that act, Cato botched his own stabbing and so finally and desperately resorted to tearing out his entrails with his bare hands (Plutarch 1919:400–07). On his European travels, Addison saw Carlo Francesco Pollarolo and Matteo Noris’s opera Cato Uticense at Venice, which had followed Plutarch’s account with lurid fidelity (Addison [1705] Reference Addison and Guthkelch1914:2:59). But such violent and bloody spectacle lent itself neither to Addison’s conception of Cato’s character nor to his austere model of tragic theatre. In the Spectator, he denounced the English stage’s predilection for “dreadful butchering” as “absurd and barbarous,” arguing: “To delight in seeing Men stabb’d, poyson’d, rack’d, or impaled, is certainly the Sign of a cruel Temper” (Addison [1711–12] Reference Addison and Donald1965:1:187–88).

When at last Addison wrote the final act of Cato, he considerably tempered the scene of classical suicide. Cato’s self-wounding occurs offstage; then, in a markedly sedate spectacle, the protagonist is “brought forward in his chair” and delivers a final speech of anachronistically Christian import in which he expresses regret for his suicide and hope for providential mercy: “methinks a beam of light breaks in/On my departing soul. Alas! I fear/I’ve been too hasty” ([1713] 2004:5.4.79, 95–96; fig. 1). Yet amid widespread fears that England was in the grip of a suicide epidemic (see Minois Reference Minois and Cochrane1999:181-85), Addison’s attempts to ensure that his play could not be construed as valorizing suicide did not stop some readers from finding fault. John Dennis, in his highly critical Remarks upon Cato, argued that the spectacle of “a Man of accomplish’d Virtue driven to lay violent Hands upon himself, only for supporting Liberty” offered “pernicious instruction” to “People in a free Country, or to an Island so notorious as ours for the frequency of self Murder” (Dennis [1713] Reference Dennis and Hooker1939:2:45). Likewise, one newspaper condemned the play for “setting Self-Murther” in a “dazzling light” (Free-Thinker [1718] 1722:38). Such fears seemed to be realized in 1737, when the writer Eustace Budgell—in fact, Addison’s cousin—died by suicide and apparently left an unfinished couplet to vindicate the act: “What Cato did and Addison approved/Cannot be wrong” (in Johnson [1779–81] Reference Johnson and Lonsdale2006:5:14). These lines were not readily forgotten. As late as 1790, Charles Moore’s A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide—which actually jumped to Cato’s defense—observed in alarm that Budgell’s “mischievous” interpretation of the play had “been caught up by many suicides […] to justify his own murder” (1790:2:114, 116).

Figure 1:

Louis du Guernier’s engraving of the death of Cato at the close of Addison’s play, used as a frontispiece to the seventh edition of Cato in 1713. (Collection of David Francis Taylor)

Ultimately, it seems to have been the forceful entreaties of friends, as well as the prospect of another writer (John Hughes) penning the final act, that prompted Addison to complete the play. That these entreaties were partly if not largely driven by political considerations is clear. In 1713, the Tory party—rivals to Whigs, supported by Addison and his coterie—were in government and, with Queen Anne ailing, fears were growing that the Jacobite supporters of the House of Stuart would, upon Anne’s death, seek to disrupt the planned Hanoverian succession and install the Catholic James Francis Edward Stuart, son of the deposed James II, on the throne. At stake, as far as the Whigs were concerned, was the continuance of a Protestant, parliamentary regime secured by the Revolution Settlement of 1689. It is in light of this febrile political atmosphere that Hughes felt that Cato “would be of Service to the Publick, to have it represented at the latter End of Queen Ann’s Reign, when the old English Spirit of Liberty was as likely to be lost as it had ever been since the Conquest” (Oldmixon 1728:6). Cibber—comanager of Drury Lane, which mounted Cato in 1713 with Cibber in the role of Syphax—recalled: “the Friends of Mr. Addison, then thought it a proper time to animate the Publick with the Sentiments of Cato” ([1740] 1968:267). And Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who read the play in manuscript, advised him to “have some stronger Lines on Liberty scatter’d through the Play […] I beleive [sic] it would have a very good Effect on the Minds of the People” (Montagu [1713] Reference Montagu, Halsband and Grundy1977:66–67). Addison evidently heeded this suggestion, for the word “liberty” appears some 14 times in the play. In the minds of those who urged Addison to put Cato on the public stage, there was no doubt that it was an urgently political drama.

Addison, though, was anxious that his play not be regarded as a party piece and he went out of his way to forestall the partisan appropriation. He evenhandedly tasked Alexander Pope—“a Tory and even a Papist,” as George Berkeley put it ([1713] 2013:87)—with the prolog and had Whig

wit and poet Sir Samuel Garth write the epilog. He also asked Pope to show it to Lords Bolingbroke and Oxford, two leaders of the Tory ministry, “and to assure them that he never in the least designed it as a party-play” (in Spence Reference Spence and James1966:1:62). When he dined with Bolingbroke just 11 days before the play premiered—at Drury Lane on 14 April 1713—Cato must surely have been among the topics discussed (see Swift [1710–13] Reference Swift and Williams2013:523).

Indeed, the play itself openly warns its audience of the perils of inflammatory rhetoric and political factionalism, with its closing admonition—“From hence, let fierce contending nations know, / What dire effects from civil discord flow” (5.4.107–08)—and Addison recapitulated his censure of partisan politics in The Spectator: “A furious Party Spirit, when it rages in its full Violence, exerts it self in Civil War and Bloodshed; and when it is under its greatest Restraints naturally breaks out in Falshood [sic], Detraction, Calumny, and a partial Administration of Justice” ([1711–12] 1965:1:510). So concerned was Addison not to exacerbate party tensions or incite political violence—again, the matter is one of risk—that he even asked Pope to revise a key phrase in Cato’s prolog, which had originally called upon Britons to “arise.” Addison, “frighten’d at so daring an expression, which, he thought, squinted at rebellion,” as William Warburton later put it, had Pope alter the verb to the restrained “attend” (1751:1:271).

Yet all such precautions proved in vain. In such politically polarized circumstances, a play about the fall of the Roman Republic from the pen of arguably the most prominent of all Whig writers was always going to become a source of partisan contestation. It was exactly this politics that guaranteed Cato’s electrifying success in 1713. As Pope recounts of the play’s premiere: “The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side the theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other, while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeded more [from] the hand than the head” ([1713] 1956:1:175). One enterprising publisher rushed out a political “key” to the tragedy, while Whig and Tory newspapers quarreled over how to read it. Was Cato, as the Whig media would have it, a cipher for John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, whose troops had defeated the French at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, thereby thwarting the absolutist Louis XIV’s attempts at European domination? Or, as the Tory media countered, was Marlborough, who had sought to have his post as captain-general elevated to a life appointment, rather to be found in the character of Caesar, the commander-turned-emperor (who never appears in Addison’s play and yet is a constant, shadowy presence)? Tory efforts to appropriate the play were most notably enacted by Bolingbroke himself, who, as Pope records, “sent for [Barton] Booth who played Cato […] and presented him with 50 guineas; in acknowledgement (as he expressed it) for his defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetuall [sic] dictator” (read: Marlborough; [1713] 1956:1:175).

Addison’s fears were thus vividly realized and he was to remain conspicuously silent about his play and its political resonance—silent, that is, until Queen Anne finally died. At that point, angling for preferment in the new Hanoverian regime, Addison presented a copy of his play to the Princess of Wales, along with a new poem addressed to her in which he praised the new King George I as a figure in whom the nation saw “Cæsar’s power with Cato’s virtue join’d” ([1716] 1914:1:332). What Addison could not possibly have seen, though, is how vital his political drama was to become to American political culture decades after his death, as the scholarship of Fredric M. Litto (Reference Litto1966) and Jason Shaffer (Reference Shaffer2003) has brilliantly shown. From 1771 to 1775, for instance, the masthead for the Massachusetts Spy featured Cato’s address to liberty in act 3: “Do thou, great liberty, inspire our souls,/And make our lives in thy possession happy,/Or our deaths glorious in thy just defence” (Addison [1713] Reference Addison, Henderson and Yellin2004:3.5.79–81; see Litto Reference Litto1966:446). Likewise, references to Cato are commonplace in the writings of key figures in the revolutionary period, including John Adams, Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, Henry Lee Jr., John Hancock, and Charles Thomson. George Washington, meanwhile, cited Cato repeatedly. In a letter to Sally Fairfax of 1758, for instance, he flirtatiously imagined himself “being the Juba to such a Marcia as you must make” (Juba, an African prince, is the protégé of Cato and is in love with his daughter, Marcia; Washington [1758] Reference Washington and Abbot1988:42); while in 1775 Washington assured Benedict Arnold that “It is not in the power of any man to command success, but you have done more” (1987:493), misquoting lines (Addison [1713] Reference Addison, Henderson and Yellin2004:1.2.44–45) that Arnold would himself paraphrase in 1779 in an early, coded letter to British agent Major John André (Commager and Morris Reference Commager and Morris1958:2:748). Most famously, Addison’s play provided the source for the final words of American soldier and spy Nathan Hale, who, moments before being executed by the British army in September 1776, is reported to have exclaimed: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” (rephrasing 4.4.81–82: “what pity is it/That we can die but once to serve our country!”) (Seymour Reference Seymour1941:310). Such was Cato’s remarkable currency during the revolution and in the early years of the new republic.

Why, though, did a decades-old tragedy by an Englishman become a play—perhaps the play—of the American Revolution? In part, its appeal lay in its particular combination of politics and classical subject matter. As Bernard Bailyn has shown, the rebelling colonists were especially drawn to classical ideals and rhetoric, in which the struggle between “provincial virtues” and the tyranny and corruption at “the center of power” is a recurrent trope ([1967] 1992:26). In this context, they readily fostered analogies between themselves and Roman figures such as Brutus, Cassius, Cicero, and Cato (while Britain was characterized as Caesar). Cato the Younger had a special place in American political discourse and thought thanks to the popularity of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s hugely influential “Cato’s Letters” (1720–23)—libertarian essays that were written under the pseudonym “Cato.” Addison’s tragedy thus both benefitted and further catalyzed what Bailyn describes as the rise of “what might be called a ‘Catonic’ image, central to the political theory of the time” ([1967] 1992:44).

Yet the play’s extraordinary embeddedness within revolutionary thought was also a consequence of its peculiar dramaturgy. As Shaffer observes, Addison’s crafting of nonpartisan theatre means that the confrontation between liberty and despotism that Cato stages, along with its endorsement of civic duty and virtue over private or familial interest, possess a special (and strategic) abstractness (2003:9–10). It is thus a play that readily lent itself to appropriation by and within very different political contexts from that in which it was first performed—all the more so as an ornately oratorical tragedy that is eminently quotable. For Shaffer, to understand the appeal of Cato to the American “worldview,” we need to think in terms not of Bailyn’s Catonic “image” but instead of a Catonic “effigy” (2003:10), the term that Joseph Roach uses to define how performing bodies “provide communities with a method of perpetuating themselves through specially nominated mediums or surrogates” (1996:36). In fact, Richard Steele, Addison’s friend and collaborator, saw in Cato the most complete realization of his model of an emulative drama that attained civic and moral efficacy by encouraging spectators to imitate the exemplary characters they witnessed onstage (see Taylor Reference Taylor2022:64–68). As Pope’s prolog instructed the play’s first audiences, they should “Live o’er each scene, and be what they behold” (in Addison [1713] Reference Addison, Henderson and Yellin2004:21). That this prolog was originally spoken by Juba, who is Cato’s chief acolyte, reaffirms the play’s emulative logic, whereby the non-Roman desperate to fashion himself as a Catonic Roman serves as a proxy for us, the audience, who must likewise aspire to such exemplary patriotic conduct and sacrifice. As a drama of liberty against tyranny that actively urges its audience to remake their civic selves in the image of the fleshed-out classical effigies they see onstage, Cato spoke to the political ideals and ambitions of revolutionary America in the most profound and intoxicating of ways.

Unsurprisingly, then, it is in performance that Cato’s transformation into an American play is most vividly seen. An epilog spoken at a performance of the play at the Bow Street Theatre, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1778, openly compared Roman opposition to Caesar with American opposition to the British and Cato with Washington. The epilog also notes—alert to the perils of equating the American cause with the fall of the Roman Republic—that “No pent-up Utica contracts your pow’rs,/But the whole boundless continent is yours!” (Sewall [1778] Reference Sewall, Hutton, Carey and Society1890:6; the first line here reworks 1.1.39). That this epilog was included, as Shaffer notes, in editions of the play published at Portsmouth (1778), Providence, Rhode Island (1779), Worcester, Massachusetts (1782), and Boston (1793) demonstrates just how important Addison’s Cato was to the construction of American identity and the mythologization of the Revolution during and after it (2003:21).

It is above all the staging of Cato by Washington’s troops at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in May 1778 that occupies a key place in this mythology. William Bradford Jr., a young lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army, wrote to his sister that “Cato was performed before a very numerous & splendid audience,” Washington included, and that the “scenery was in Taste—& the performance admirable” (in Bryan Reference Bryan2010:124–25). “For the ragged soldiers in Washington’s camp,” writes Randall Fuller, “Addison’s tragedy offered a salient version of national destiny characterized by self-sacrifice, republican virtue, and an almost boundless devotion to the principles of liberty” (1999:128). Some 65 years after its premiere, the history of Cato still presented a risk. Not least, Washington’s troops were contravening the 1774 Congressional ban on performance (theatre, deemed a British import, was included in the prohibition of trade in all British commodities). But, perhaps the more immediate risk for those involved was that officers of the Continental Army might be perceived to be behaving rather too like the enemy (the British army regularly engaged in theatricals, including at nearby Philadelphia in the winter of 1777/78). Mark Evans Bryan’s revisionist account (2010) of the Valley Forge Cato has shown not only that the performance took place in a “bakehouse” that would have held a limited number of spectators, likely comprised of the camp’s elite, but that it was not presented at Washington’s direct behest. Bryan also posits that the staging deepened anxieties—including in the Continental Congress—that the officers at Valley Forge were adopting the prodigal habits of their British counterparts.

By this point in the 18th century, however, the British themselves had largely lost interest in Addison’s tragedy as a performable play, at least beyond the all-male schoolroom, where amateur stagings continued to be popular. The consensus in Britain by then, shared by critics and audiences, was that Cato was best appreciated on the page. It was performed just 28 times in London in the second half of the 18th century, though the actor and manager John Philip Kemble did successfully revive the tragedy in 1811. Samuel Johnson considered it “rather a poem in dialog than a drama” ([1779–81] 2006:3:76), while the writer Francis Gentleman judged: “It should be immortal in the closet, but cannot justly claim possession of the stage” (1770:1:459). Poet Edward Young, who jumped to lavish praise upon Cato in 1713, later damningly asserted that in the play “that which is most dramatic in drama, dies” (1759:88).Footnote ² There had, in fact, been those who held this opinion even before the play found its way onto the Drury Lane stage, and it is possible that Addison—whose ambivalence towards the material bases, what he calls the “Show and Outside” of theatrical performance, is evident in many of his Spectator essays—initially conceived of Cato as a closet play ([1711–12] 1965:1:180).Footnote ³

Cato, one might argue, is accidental theatre. It takes a singularly unpromising historical figure—a famous stoic—as its tragic hero and it locates itself at a point in the timeline of the Roman Republic’s fall when both the final battle and the cause have been lost, with the possibilities for dramatic action limited in the extreme. As the senator Lucius concedes in the play’s second act: “what men could do/Is done already” (2.1.75–76). In many ways, Addison’s tragedy, a tragedy in which nothing much happens or can happen, might be more appropriately called “Waiting for Caesar.”

However, this play did, in all its strangeness, succeed to a sensational extent on the London stage in 1713 and then again on the stages of early America in the later 18th century. More specifically, it succeeded as a drama that spoke to and animated audiences living through moments of acute political crisis when the very concept of “liberty”—that word to which Addison’s play returns again and again, always flickering between nebulous abstraction and the promise of something necessary and realizable—was being violently contested and defined. On these terms, the experiment of staging Cato in present-day America—where “liberty” is being fought over by the political left and right in the most internecine ways—might well be seen as a risk worth taking, artistically and politically.

II. Cato in Tennessee

(by Misty G. Anderson)

Cato was a political Rorschach test when it premiered in April 1713, and it proved to be one again in September of 2023. The original pitch in February of 2023 to the funder, the Institute of American Civics, was to stage Cato professionally in order to give a community audience the chance to see the play that had been staged at Valley Forge in 1778. The Institute had just been formed in May 2022 by the Tennessee legislature, in a bipartisan vote of 120–6 (three Republicans and three Democrats dissenting), to “model civil discourse and purposeful pluralism” (IAC n.d.). The first sentence of the institute’s website hopefully declares that “In a time of proliferating distrust and political polarization, the Institute of American Civics presents a remarkable opportunity to address these challenges” (IAC n.d.). At the time they funded Cato at $41,915 (a figure that does not include the generous in-kind support of the Clarence Brown Theatre), the institute’s board, leadership, and precise mission had not been defined, though the epigraph that opened the white paper about the institute’s purpose warned: “In a time that cries out for civic action, we are in danger of becoming a nation of spectators” (Wannamaker et al. Reference Wannamaker, Lyons, Scheb and Sale2022). It is remarkable, then, that the IAC’s first public event would be the staging of Cato to celebrate Constitution Day. In addition to the generous IAC funding, the feat was made possible by Charles Pasternak, artistic director of the Santa Cruz Shakespeare Festival. His deft direction found not just a playable but a compelling 21st-century Cato that could pose its own questions about its place in American history. The project was supported dramaturgically by the R/18 Collective; the in-kind gifts of space, costumes, and staff from the Clarence Brown Theatre and its artistic director Ken Martin; and additional speakers fund resources from the John C. Hodges Fund of the Department of English at the University of Tennessee.

The production explored theses advanced by Ginger Strand and Daniel O’Quinn, particularly, that the early US nation mediated its self-conception through theatre by regarding the audience as an active and participatory republican project (Strand Reference Strand, Jeffrey and Ellen Gainor1999:19; O’Quinn Reference O’Quinn2022:24). Audiences participate, query, and vote through applause, nervous laughter, and ultimately, with their feet. Pasternak’s direction seized on this insight from the 1713 production: that Cato’s main action is, in fact, the affective interplay of actor and audience. This production furthered that process by directly asking each audience to stay for 30 minutes and discuss the play. Night after night, multigenerational audiences explored the tensions that the play surfaces between liberty and slavery, tensions that unfold between the promise of an American principle of equality and the realities of empire and race that steer the nation’s formation. These tensions activated both progressive and conservative frames of memory as well as memory’s formative relation to possible futures.

Our sense of Cato’s timeliness included the concern, parallel to Addison’s, that the play could be exploited to partisan ends in yet another politically febrile moment. By the time the Knoxville production opened at the Clarence Brown’s Lab Theatre, the 2024 presidential campaign was underway; Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York was on the immediate horizon; criminal indictments against him had been filed in the hush money, federal election, and classified documents cases; “Red Caesarism” was about to break as international news; and social media was awash with reports of men who were, evidently, thinking about the Roman Empire every day (Wilson Reference Wilson2023; El Aassar Reference El Aassar2023). The political associations with “Cato,” built up through the use of the name on the mastheads of prorevolutionary colonial American newspapers; the early libertarian Cato’s Letters; the 20th-century think tank, The Cato Institute; and the association of George Washington with Cato had the potential to shade into a more recent “forefather mania,” on display in the January 6th insurrection, in which online merchandise brandishing 1776, “We the People,” and the word “liberty” circulate, like Cato’s pull quotes, as emotionally charged soundbites. Wendy Brown calls such objects and ideas “affective remains” in the ruins of neoliberalism, a past in pieces, cathected onto instrumentalized affective investments in the present (2019:187).

The show both participated in and disrupted these expectations by featuring Horatio Greenough’s provocative 1841 bare-chested, toga-wearing, sandaled Washington on its poster (fig. 2). Greenhough’s sculpture was based on the now-lost statue Olympian Zeus, but it is inspired by the myth of Washington as the “American Cato,” which was still current in the 19th century. The sculpture originally scandalized onlookers when it was placed in the Capitol rotunda, so it was moved outdoors, where it faced the Lincoln Memorial during its construction. Then, in 1908, it was moved into the Smithsonian and, eventually, relocated to the National Museum of American History, where it resides now (Rand Reference Rand2020:xi). The statue’s peripatetic path is a reminder that, as Kirk Savage observes, neither monuments nor their meanings hold still (2009:22). We live in an age of relocating, relabeling, removing, or destroying statues praising slavers; of rethinking American origin stories through works like Hamilton and the 1619 Project; and of battles over how American history is taught (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2020; Green Reference Green2023).

Figure 2.

Cato poster, Clarence Brown Lab Theatre, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 2023. (Poster design by Julie Summers)

In addition to the ideological risks embedded in Cato’s legacies, the Knoxville production also had to thread the needle of the full Clarence Brown Theatre regular season, the IAC’s timeline, and the limited availability of our actors, several of whom were flying to Knoxville between their summer Shakespeare seasons and the start of fall rehearsals. The cast list included:

This cast of nine met for the first time on 4 September 2023, and, after a brutally compressed rehearsal period, Cato opened on 15 September 2023 for a week-long run that sold out after the first show. A safety copy of the script, dressed up as a leather-bound folio edition of Cato, was passed from actor to actor as they took turns serving as prompter.

Pasternak’s casting decisions foregrounded the racial and gendered lines of power. The cast, with 55% white and 45% BIPOC-identified actors, embodied the ethnic multiplicity of early and postrevolutionary America, which is written into plays like Aphra Behn’s The Widdow Ranter (1689), a dramatization of Bacon’s Rebellion; and Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787), which satirizes Americans who follow British fashions by mocking their extreme whiteness—as well as the demographics of contemporary US American society. Eiland, a Vietnamese American actor, played Cato, and four women played the military leaders: Munson (Sempronius), Duckles (Lucius), Archer (Decius), and Jackson (Syphax) (see fig. 3). Munson and Jackson delivered some of the most sexually violent, disturbing lines of the play in performances that asked the audience to confront the space between their embodied gender presentation and the sexual or political violence Addison’s play describes.

Figure 3:

From left: Charlotte Munson as Sempronius, Raine Palmer (background) as Marcia, and Shinnerrie Jackson as Syphax in Cato by Joseph Addison, directed by Charles Pasternak. Clarence Brown Lab Theatre, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 2023. (Photo by Taryn Farro)

The show’s design attempted to take the fragments of Cato that audiences might have brought to the theatre, including Nathan Hale’s apocryphal last words (“I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country”), Patrick Henry’s generous closing quotation from Cato in his 1775 speech (“give me liberty or give me death”), and Valley Forge mythologies, and make them intelligible in the present. Pasternak approached the mythology of the Valley Forge Cato by using a simple play-within-the-play strategy that avoided nostalgia or 18th-century costume drama. Kaelyn Williams’s designs were grounded in the narrative of resistance and failure within Cato and won the 2024 Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) Graduate Costume design award. Her base costume for each character, dubbed “protester costumes,” used contemporary street clothes to translate the affective touch points between battlefield, resistance, protest, historical change, and race as each actor then took on their Cato character onstage, pulling their Cato costume out of a trunk to move from the present to a past that felt like a foreign country (fig. 4). These costumes, inspired by science fiction and Afrofuturist films like Black Panther (2018), created a visual palette that suggested both an ambiguous past and a dystopian, militarized future. Williams was able to execute her plan in this compressed time frame and integrate it into a bare set: two low platforms, a few chairs, a trunk, and a muslin screen. The lighting design by Kayla Moore had to make use of the rigging for an upcoming production; her creative solutions went on to win the SETC’s Undergraduate Lighting Design award. A temporary screen, held by Numidian general Syphax (Jackson) and Roman senator Lucius (Duckles) in the opening sequence, displayed five slides with the framing historical information about the Roman colonial North African setting in Numidia, a plot sketch, and information about Cato’s significance in colonial America, including the Valley Forge production, at the top of the show. The design thoughtfully moved the audience from the frame story in the present, through the Valley Forge associations, to a temporally uncertain space in which the story unfolded.

Figure 4:

From left: Ithamar Francois, Jonno Eiland, Charlotte Munson, Jordan Gatton-Bumpus, Nancy Duckles, and Raine Palmer in Cato, by Joseph Addison, directed by Charles Pasternak. Clarence Brown Lab Theatre, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 2023. (Photo by Taryn Farro)

Music created ludic entry and exit points that softened and thinned the space between past and present. The show began with Vermont’s revolutionary anthem “The Green Mountaineer” (1779) sung by Munson, a Vermonter herself, and played on guitar by Eiland. Actors joined in the chorus as they entered in their base costumes. The opening folk ballad rollicked along with martial optimism that dissipated with the first exchange between Marcus and Portius, in a state of despair as Caesar approached. Other sound queues peppered the spare production to productively blend past and present. A quick military drum cadence introduced Cato. But soon, helicopter blades were whirring as Syphax described the rising storm of a desert war, with echoes of the London blitz, of the Iraq war, and of Ukraine. Finally, two mournful verses of the mid-19th-century hymn “Abide with Me,” sung by Munson, closed the show as she and the cast placed their costumes back in the trunk, shedding their roles before the audience and providing a bridge into the community conversation that followed each performance.

The editorial task behind this adaptation was, first of all, to wrest a compelling cut of Cato out of Addison’s text, which, as Dennis, Johnson, Gentleman, and Young had all argued, needed editing (Taylor makes this case above). Cato presents a host of dramaturgical problems as a play of speeches built around the titular character who is remarkably static; characters enter and exit without clear motive to make ineffective rhetorical arguments that change no minds. Pasternak summarized the problems neatly during an early production meeting: “what the hell are these people doing?” The severely cut Cato we presented (with 10,992 of the 17,258 words in the first edition of 1713) used David F. Taylor’s edition as its basis. After paring the Ciceronian tricolons down to the story’s throughline, it played in one hour and 18 minutes. The cut had to make visible a buried storyline that would have been immediately familiar to 18th-century audiences but not to 21st-century viewers: that the old Roman senate is about to fall to Caesar as his army marches through the Roman colonial outposts of North Africa on their way to Utica. The cut refashioned monologs into dialog to help audiences follow the character relationships that form the story. Addison’s rhetorical elaborations—conventional in heroic tragedy and above all a symptom of his adherence to a Senecan model of tragedy—traffic in more similes than an audience could reasonably follow. The cut foregrounded the contest of characters as they embodied debates over political goods and the vulnerability of democracy to the power of persuasion. Portius’s scene-setting opening speech, for example, was pruned back to plot essentials that could still give the audience that sense of dread at the approach of Caesar’s army through his sense of urgency and outrage deprived of action:

Our Portius (Gatton-Bumpus) opened with a restrained sense of grief and gravity that distinguished him from his fiery brother Marcus (Wright), who was charged with thunderously performing the rhetorical excess that spells his doom as clearly as Portius’s cut lines above predict Cato’s death:

Marcus’s elaborations preserved the force of his rhetorical rage and signaled to contemporary audiences, who could not be expected to have any familiarity with Pliny’s account of Cato the Younger or of Addison’s play, that Marcus is an angry young man ripe for a battlefield suicide mission, a prelude to Cato’s more stately death.

When editing the script, we also had to address the greatest risk inherent to any modern production of this play: its racial and racist social imagination—and so we dispensed with lines no actor should be asked to speak again. The production team agreed we had a responsibility not to hide the racism of a play so significant in American history, but also a responsibility not to inflict further injury. Several changes in the rehearsal room about how to manage the play’s language surrounding the Numidians came from conversations between Pasternak, Anderson, Francois, and the cast about how to acknowledge the language of power saturating Juba’s lines without reproducing racist injury. One of those scant word changes was the substitution of “higher views,” a term of quantifiable superiority, for the slightly archaic “lofty views,” which suggested a critical but appreciative reading of a Roman worldview. The success of these and other choices to let the dirty laundry air became apparent in the audience reactions to Juba, including audible “hmms” and small exclamations each night. When Juba (played by Francois, who is Black) approaches Cato about Marcia (played by Palmer, who is white) with “Cato, thou hast a daughter,” Cato’s quick reply “Adieu, young Prince,” proved to be a nervous laugh line in every performance. The familiarity of this racially fraught “not my daughter” dynamic includes an experience of our historical difference as well as of the present lived experience of racism. Eiland (Cato) and Francois (Juba) exemplified what it meant to be embodied stewards of history and agents of possible futures. They found the portal between past and present that runs through language, affect, and history and moved audiences through an experience of recognizing moments both of continuity with and difference from the past each night.

Pasternak’s gender-fluid and racially conscious casting also helped this 21st-century Cato confront what Peter DeGabriele explores in Drone Enlightenment: The Colonial Roots of Remote Warfare: that debates about sovereignty, colonialism, and territory in the anglophone 18th-century world spoke the language of equality for white male subjects but practiced a politics of asymmetry for all others, while enforcing the entire system by war. As DeGabriele puts it “any possible balance of power within Europe was always unbalanced by an irreducible asymmetry between Europe and the world beyond the line” (2023:33). Sound cues, costumes, and Addison’s own references to desert sands made the connection to this long and ongoing colonial history unavoidable. But to what end? The question of where a colonial war leaves both the indigenous subjects and the resident colonizers is an unresolved chord in Cato, though it tends toward a major key through the love plot. Once Cato dies, Juba and Marcia, as well as Portius and Lucia, can proceed toward their respective futures. In Portius’s closing report, we hear that Pompey is bringing enough military aid to enable the escape from Utica that Cato had offered, if not the military victory he wanted. Pasternak left the audience with this future-oriented thought in a final tableau of the young lovers at the forestage corners, grieving Cato’s loss yet also rejoicing in it as the only way to advance the plot, to move on. As Munson sang a haunting a cappella rendition of the early American hymn “Abide with Me,” the cast removed their Cato costumes back down to the base costume, placed them in a trunk, and joined hands around it, in reverence, in grief, in solidarity, in an ending that was also the beginning of what came next: the conversation.

At the start of each performance, the audience received a program that included the discussion question, a political question framed as a personal response, like “What did liberty mean for Cato and for George Washington? What does it mean now, for modern Americans?” By far, the question that succeeded the most in generating engaged and substantive discussion was the one that appeared the most personal: “In its time, Cato was cheered by people with opposing political views, all of whom saw their values represented in it. Does it still work that way? Who did you want to cheer or boo?” The questions for the audience were constructed to invite conversation and to assuage fears of being politically set up or entrapped, a reasonable concern while talking about an 18th-century tragedy, with 44 mentions of “liberty” or “virtue,” set in North Africa and central to American history, in what we now call a “red” state, with a room full of strangers. The conversation was moderated by a different panel of four to five each night, including at least two actors and two scholars. ^Footnote

Audiences proved more than willing to stay and talk to each other, often taking those conversations out to the sidewalk when we had to close the theatre. But audiences also confessed that they were unsure who to boo or cheer. Over the course of the run, every character in the play was named by an audience member who wanted to cheer or boo them. The most popular answer, however, was Syphax, the Numidian general who speaks to the truth of unjust colonial power relations. Just as in 1713, Cato did not deliver the stable pedagogy of exemplarity that Addison encouraged his readers to embrace in his moral essays. Pope’s prolog, spoken by Juba, urged audiences to “be what you behold,” but the fact that Whigs cheered the traitorous Sempronius and Whigs and Tories desperately attempted to out-applaud each other at every mention of “liberty” indicated the pedagogical failure in his theatrical success. At the 15 September invited dress talkback, David F. Taylor quoted Pope’s admonishment in response to an audience member’s observation about the problem of identifying good characters in the play. As Taylor pointed out, Addison, also a moral essayist, is “not just giving you the story but also examples you should be following.” But the examples are problematic. Cato is “like a God” who does not know “how to wink at human frailty,” leaving little room for humanizing identification. Juba, who is trying to emulate Cato, is the most approachable character, “the character you could be like,” in Taylor’s words, yet Juba’s fulsome praise of Rome and rejection of Numidia goes down hard in the 21st century. The performance’s meaning at Valley Forge, with the outcome of the war still uncertain, must have likewise loomed inconclusively for those who watched it. The audience’s reactions, their questions, and each postshow conversation illustrated Daniel O’Quinn’s point that while theatre mediates history, the causal relationship between historical events and their mediation is inchoate, even in a particular moment of experience (O’Quinn Reference O’Quinn2022:15).