SOURCE: "Aesopian Examples: The English Fable Collection and its Authors, 1651-1740," in The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651-1740, pp. 14-47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Lewis examines the ways in which British writers such as John Ogilby and Samuel Richardson either modified Aesop's fables or alluded to them in their own writing in order to reflect the political instability that occurred in the country during the late-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries.]

Prevailing Tales: The Major Collections

More than one European country adopted fables into a native literary tradition during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the major fable collections produced in England between 1651 and 1740 are no exception. Despite their differences from one another, they are very uniquely and deliberately English, and together they consitute a figural response, often self-consciously organized within the English language, to England's notoriously unstable political history and the crisis of signification that that history wrought.²³ Ogilby's own Fables "englished" the fable collection partly by incorporating political slang left over from the wars. Often posing as translators or teachers of written English, later fabulists consistently situated themselves amid the different competitions that characterized not only England's political experience between the Civil Wars and the death of Walpole but also its emerging literary marketplace and commercial culture generally.²⁴ In their very diversity, the fable collections reflected the demands and desires that vied in the world around them. They ranged in price from a penny to several pounds, and in size from a "Pocket Manual" to that of "a Folio more than double that Bulk."²⁵ Their authors could be as obscure as an anonymous Grub Street hack or as eminent as John Locke. Likewise, their illustrators could be unknowns or celebrated artists like Francis Barlow, their readers barely literate children or aged and illustrious poets. The object of a fable collection could be to teach schoolboys how to read English, French, or Latin. But it could also be to preach proper conduct to young ladies or to arguefor a complex political perspective that might, in turn, be Whig or Tory, Williamite or Stuart.

It is fitting that Aesop's fables themselves tell tales of competition among individuals of radically different stripe. Set in a world where power is never balanced and self-interest decides value, their themes mirror the instability of the England in which they were put to use. After beginning with the story of the cock who digs up a precious gem, only to announce that he would have preferred a barleycorn, a typical collection went on to tell of a wolf with a craving for mutton who accuses a lamb of sullying his drinking water and then devours him. A jay strutting in peacock's feathers is plucked apart for her pretensions. A frog explodes when she tries to puff herself up to the size of an ox. A wolf hires a stork to fish the lamb bones out of his throat and, when she demands remuneration, reminds her that his sparing her head should be compensation enough. A fox trapped in a well persuades the goat stuck with him to offer his head for a step ladder; gaining freedom, the fox leaves the goat to perish, jeering over his shoulder that his ex-partner has not "half so much Brains as you have Beard."²⁶ Since Aesop's plots uncover craft and machination in the service of brutal desire, the morals attached to them were usually cynical and pragmatic: "A Wise Man […] leaves Nothing to Chance more than he needs must." "In a Wallowing Qualm, a Man's Heart and Resolution fail him, for want of Fit Matter to Work upon." "Perfidious people are naturally to be suspected in reports that favour their own interest."²⁷

Skeptical and combative though their themes and morals might be, however, Augustan fable collections also practiced a strikingly conciliatory figural method. Structurally they employed a "Method of recommending […] Principles by pleasing Images."²⁸ Practically, fables provided primary reading material to most English grammar schools, thereby supplying a reservoir of shared figures to several otherwise divided generations of readers and writers. In other words, Augustan fable collections struck a delicate balance between a mode of representation so simple and sensible as to seem unmediated—almost non-linguistic—and the admission that all authoritative signs can be appropriated, manipulated, and inverted. A less than flattering view of the human reader prompted Ogilby's own commitment to this delicate equipoise. His famous epigraph maintains that fables' primary task is to "make Men lesser Beasts," to offer precepts "Men" can agree upon and that can forestall reversion to what we may fairly call a state of nature. Ironically, it is only by commissioning the sensible, familiar, but also belligerent elements of that state that fabulists may forestall such reversions, for only these elements are deemed genuinely and universally impressive.

It is not surprising then that Ogilby's first Aesopian quarto should have appeared in the same year as Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651). Hobbes found the germ of cultural stability in a rapprochement between human signifying practice and the state of nature. He argued that "Man"'s native penchant for conflict can be averted only when "Men" craft a consensual sign system. Thus a brutal and divisive "Nature" composes itself into the "Artificial Animal" of social order. What holds this prodigious beast together are symbolic tokens which its members have agreed to exchange. Hobbes allowed these tokens to be words themselves, as long as they remain grounded in the shared sensible world, and as long as those who use them consent to do so in the same way.²⁹ As Ogilby's epigraph makes clear, fables (particularly when "adorn'd" with impressive "Sculptures") are perfect candidates to become such tokens. And the persuasive image of Hobbes's own Leviathan predictably bears more than a passing resemblance to the beasts in Aesop's menagerie.

But Hobbesian theory also promises that clashing appetites will continue to drive, and divert, the traffic of signs. Especially when viewed in light of its metamorphoses over the 1650s and 1660s, Ogilby's fable collection acts out this promise and the paradox that attends it, In the first edition of Fables, the former dancing master, theater manager, and Royalist soldier offered Cromwellian London eighty-one "Tale[s] adorn'd with Sculpture." Alluding to the recent wars, he guaranteed that any one of these "Tale[s]" could "make Men lesser Beasts." Laudatory poems by James Shirley and William Davenant praised Ogilby's "humble Moralls" for their ability both to "convince the subtile, and the Simple gaine." In Davenant's far from unshared view, Ogilby's fables "invade[d]" their reader's "will" not with "force" but rather with homely imagery to which all and sundry are naturally amenable.³⁰

Despite the high aroma of conciliation emanating from Fables, however, Davenant sent his verses "from the Tower," and Ogilby pointedly dedicated the volume to the royalist Heneage Finch. As both Annabel Patterson and Mary Pritchard have shown, individual fables were fraught with royalist dogma. The Aesopian canon already housed simple stories about amphibian monarchies, ingenuous trees that lend woodsman wood for their axe handles, and foxes that grow so accustomed to the sight of "the Scepter'd Lion" that the latter loses all power to awe, hence rule. In Ogilby's hands, such narratives became intricate political allegories, some critically sympathetic to the royalist cause, others hostile to the government that had supplanted it.³¹ To complete the picture, ominous images of decapitation haunt Francis Cleyn's "Sculptures." Such gestures undercut the fables' superficial pursuit of the peaceable authority of the naturalized and textualized example by conspicuously, even violently, twisting the implications of individual signs.

Just so, in 1660, the fabulist himself was to be found designing ")Enigmaticall Emblems" for the triumphal arches at Charles II's coronation. He went on to become Master of the Royal Imprimerie and, at the end of the decade, Cosmographer Royal, in which capacity he devised elaborate atlases of the world's continents as well as road maps of England that instituted the statute mile. Ogilby took easily to a position of cultural authority, and his Aesop just as effortlessly traveled with him from the margins to the mainstream of seventeenth-century literary culture. The contemporary value of Ogilby's fables, in other words, was not restricted to the political critique they mounted. Rather, equally viable in two very different Englands, they offered literary figures that acknowledged the factional, and fictional, nature of all meaningful signs even as they continued to identify themselves with a natural world whose preceptive authority few wished to deny. Ogilby's fables thus confirmed the vision of efficacious symbolic order set forth in Leviathan. Unlike Hobbes's treatise, however, Ogilby's fables and others like them proved structurally equipped to comment on the ironic juxtaposition of two axes of signification, one combative and motivated, the other busy minting a new symbolic currency that could create cultural coherence.

For example, when Bernard Mandeville applied Hobbes's argument to a modern commercial society, he naturally did so in the form of a fable. It is even a lion who, in one of the footnotes to The Fable of the Bees (first complete edition, 1729), remarks that, in successful human societies, "Millions […] well-join'd together […] compose the strong Leviathan."³² Mandeville's fable earmarks "private Vices" as the predicates of "publick Benefits," injustice and disproportionate lack as prerequisites of cultural order. Fabulists like Ogilby had already made this paradox a feature of signification itself. Ogilby's headstrong, truculent animals often comment ironically on their own absorption into a stable and transmissible symbolic system: "Here I the Emblem of fond Mortals sit, / That lose the Substance for an empty Bit," one dog mourns, after he has dropped a shoulder of mutton by snapping at its reflection. The dog's own words reveal what made him a significant object. He is thus a convincing reminder not only of the follies of unbridled desire ("an Emblem of fond Mortals") but also of the greed and guile that turn meaningless "Substance" into meaningful sign.³³

Throughout all of Ogilby's collections, fables like "The Dog and the Shadow" meld sensible images ("Sculptures") with linguistic structures ("Tales") that document those images' progress toward the status of memorable and authoritative signs. A similar desire to demystify the act of attaching moral and political significance to phenomenal signs apparently motivated the other major collection of the Restoration period, the celebrated artist Francis Barlow's #Esop's Fables with his Life. While English readers identified Ogilby's Aesop with its writer, they associated Barlow's equally sumptuous and oft-reprinted volume with its illustrator.³⁴ For a first edition of 1666, however, Barlow commissioned the text of the fables (in English, French, and Latin) from one Thomas Philipott. Then for a new edition of 1687 he invited the "ingenious" playwright, poet, and romance writer Aphra Behn to "perform the English Poetry."³⁵ Behn obliged and the resulting collection flourished well into the eighteenth century.

In his dedication to the Earl of Devonshire, Barlow claimed aspecial symbolic status for "his" fables—"a thing," he declared, "much practis'd by the Ancient Greeks and the Orientals" who used them as "Portraitures in their Temples, design'd as Memorial Characters of Philosophic Notions to be the Subject of Adoration." In place of these antique idols, Barlow ostentatiously offers his own modern English readers a "Book, ascrib'd to Æsop in a Plain and Simple Form." As the "Plain and Simple" book supplants the arcane icons of the past, it openly confesses its own political and historical contingency; equally transparent are its fictive strategies for recommending "the conduct of Life." After all, Barlow points out, "'tis the Misfortune of Mankind, that the present Times as little dare to relate Truths, as the Future can know them." Obviously fictional and factional, Barlow's carefully fused "Ornaments of Sculptures and Poetry" further Ogilby's quest for a symbolic form that might wed a picture's immediate impact to language's power of skeptical exposition.

Each a quatrain with a moralizing couplet tacked onto it, Behn's fables deftly "perform[ed]" the Aesopian premises that Barlow's dedication had sketched. Behn feminized a number of Aesop's fables, somewhat improbably turning the "kingly Eagle" who steals a young fox into a female, along with the kid whom a wolf woos away from its mother. A female ape begs in vain for an inch of a fox's tail to "vaile" her "bum" and the fable of the dog in the manger is moralized as a story about how "aged Lovers" who court "young Beautys […] / Keepe off those joys they want the power to give" (p. 59). Behn's verses not only bent fables with the crowbar of witty feminism she had perfected in the Restoration theater; writing in the last days of the Stuart monarchy, which she supported, Behn also included barely oblique references to the Stuart predicament. To the brief chronicle of a family of adders whom "the Porcupines deceiv'd / Of their warme Nest which cou'd not be retriev'd," for example, she appended the observation that "Crownes got by force are often times made good, / By the more rough designes of warr, and blood" (p. 81). Other fables, like that of the mouse who saves a lion from a snare by gnawing through the ropes, caution their readers not to "despise the service of a Slave" since "an Oak did once our glorious Monarch save" (p. 47). More than veiled political commentary, Behn's fables fulfilled Barlow's dedicatory promise that the "Plain and Simple Form" of the Aesopian example ought to convey the impossibility of "relat[ing] Truths." Because each fable also appeared in French and Latin versions that were unmolested by tendentious reference, Behn's "Plain and Simple" English verses all the more plainly displayed their own distortions. And since these same verses were printed as captions to Barlow's illustrations, throughout the collection visual images were virtually soldered to tendentious English words. The resulting figures effectively ironized—even parodied—the very notion of an indisputable emblem.

The revised edition of Barlow's collection appeared just before James II's abdication and the accession of William and Mary. The next fifteen years saw a fresh flurry of Aesopian activity, particularly by writers who, like Behn, sympathized with the lost Stuart cause. The simplest explanation for the rash of fable collections during the Williamite period is that fables' seemingly innocent preoccupation with animal affairs made them safe, while yet exceptionally convincing, ways to resist the prevailing political tide. While many fables were written from the ruling side, this explanation can begin to account for the most copious, notorious, and widely read fable collection of the 1690s, Roger L'Estrange's immense Fables of Æsop and Other Eminent Mythologists (1692 and 1699).

By his own confession, L'Estrange was already "on the wrong Side of Fourscore" when he published the first edition of his Eminent Mythologists.³⁶ A Cavalier who had prudently spent the middle of the seventeenth century abroad, he became a prolific propagandist for the Stuarts after the Restoration, publishing a blizzard of pamphlets and two newspapers that, along with his watchdog post as Surveyor of the Press and Chief Licenser, presciently earned him the Aesopian nickname "Towzer."³⁷ Throughout the reigns of the last Stuart kings, L'Estrange's jobs as censor and propagandist put him in exactly the spot where old (centripetal) images of sovereign right met the new (centrifugal) cultural authority of the printing press. Predictably, his Stuart and Roman Catholic sympathies ousted him from this influential position in 1688. No less enterprising than Ogilby, L'Estrange thereupon launched a remarkably successful career translating Seneca, Tacitus, and Terence, as well as select modern texts in French and Spanish. Eminent Mythologists belongs to this paradoxical period of political dis-enfranchisement and swelling belletristic prestige. Officially L'Estrange's collection is also a translation, of Aesop and a number of "Other Eminent Mythologists," ancient and modern.³⁸ The identities of these other mythologists merge into that of Aesop, whose portrait and biography, as in Barlow's Fables, are an integral part of the collection. L'Estrange's own likeness—flowing Cavalier ringlets, canine bone structure and all—appears at the beginning of the volume, so that readers so inclined could also identify the motley and gargantuan collection with a single English author.

Rendered in a pithy and colloquial prose with morals and long "Reflexions" that offered a clandestine protest against the constitutional structure of the new political order,³⁹ L'Estrange's versions of Aesop's fables looked and sounded quite unlike Ogilby's intricate verses, or even Behn's quipping quatrains. Nor were L'Estrange's fables illustrated, though his preface described them as "Precepts in Emblem," as "Emblem[s] and Figure[s]," even as "Images of Things."⁴⁰ However, it is this very assumption that graphic signs—the words that communicate the fable, in conjunction with the words that moralized and reflected on it—can persuade as powerfully as images do that placed Eminent Mythologists in line with its recent English predecessors. As was the case with earlier Aesops, L'Estrange's collection was more than Jacobite propaganda tucked under "the Vaile of Emblem, and Figure."⁴¹ Like them, itmixes political reaction with an almost obsessive attention to the sensible and potentially mediatory properties of the printed page.

Whereas Ogilby and Barlow had dedicated their work to notable aristocrats, L'Estrange officially intended his collection to be used in English classrooms, where it might instill a proper sense of the English language. His long and lively preface scorns the "Book" of Aesop's fables as he maintained it had been "universally Read, and Taught in All our Schools" (sig. B4r). For too long, L'Estrange claimed, Aesop's fables had languished in the form of empty "Rhapsody," foaming with "Insipid Twittle-Twattles, Frothy Jests, and Jingling Witticisms." The English language had languished right along with them, for, rife with nonsensical word games, the old Aesops had taught children to read "as we teach Pyes and Parrots, that pronounce the Words without so much as Guessing at the Meaning of them; Or to take it Another Way, the Boys Break their Teeth upon the Shells, without ever coming near the Kernel" (sig. B2r).⁴²

Although his pedagogical approach makes L'Estrange a different breed of author from Ogilby or Barlow, or Behn, he shared their conviction that modern fables could coax signs away from obscurity and excessive figurality into a more durable and trustworthy symbolic register. As his contempt for "pronounc[ing]" suggests, that register is implicitly textual. L'Estrange even maintained that fables affect their readers as sense experience does, impressing reading minds as writing might a page: "Children are but Blank Paper, ready Indifferently for any Impression, Good or Bad, and it is much in the Power of the first Comer, to Write Saint, or Devil upon't, which of the two he pleases" (sig. A2v). As primary reading material, fables openly wielded "the Power of the first Comer." Like Ogilby's preceptive examples and Barlow's "Ornaments of Sculptures and Poetry," L'Estrange's fables capitalize on the materiality of the text, transferring to self-revealing graphic signs more and more of the powerful immediacy that iconic signs had once possessed. It seems unlikely that L'Estrange really expected his fables to be used in "the Schools." Instead, his speculations about how printed fables viscerally impress young readers build a trope for Aesopian authority. This trope in turn openly acknowledges the pages of the fable collection to be a proper arena of political activity. Once that activity is conceded to be a matter of making meaning, the physical body of the fable collection can be seen to participate in its moral, political, and thematic mission.

Though eighteenth-century readers complained about its raunchy and colloquial style, its Jacobite morals, even L'Estrange's fondness for the contractions and abbreviations that made it speak almost too current an English, Eminent Mythologists remained the most popular collection in the nation for the next thirty years.⁴³ Other Aesops came and went without attracting half the notice that it did. None was more often abridged, revised, and discussed. But in l722 the Whig clergyman Samuel Croxall decided that the time was ripe for a new collection of Aesop's fables. He proceeded to devise one whose political sensibilities aggressively countered and ultimately deposed L'Estrange's "eminent mythologists," with new editions proliferating well into the twentieth century.

Writing in the self-congratulatory pseudo-stability of early Georgian England, Croxall touted his Fables of Æsop and Others as a patriotic antidote to L'Estrange's Eminent Mythologists. His dedicatee was the five-year-old Baron Halifax, whom Croxall depicted as an English political hero in the making, already precociously adept in the "English Tongue" and "by Birth intitled to a Share in the Administration of the Government."⁴⁴ Croxall filched L'Estrange's trope of the Aesopically influenced English reader in order to promote his own Fables as a book with consequences for the nation: In theory, if Halifax ingested its contents early, then later the "Country [would] feel the Benefit of these Lectures of Morality" (sig. A5r). Thus would Croxall's Aesop personally advance "the Peace and Prosperity of my Country" (sig. A6v). Superficially, this approving image of a peaceful and prosperous Britain set Croxall against the confirmed malcontent L'Estrange, whom Croxall claimed had twisted the fables so as to exaggerate "Party Animosities" and "factious Division." It was in order to endorse and replicate the "liberal" politics of Hanoverian Britain that Croxall resolved to detoxify L'Estrange's "pernicious … Principles, coin'd and suited to promote the Growth, and serve the Ends of Popery and Arbitrary Power" (sig. B5v). His acrid preface parrots L'Estrange's diatribe against earlier collections to express contempt for the "Insufficiency of L'Estrange's own Performance." In Croxall's book, this frightful "Insufficiency" went beyond objectionable political views to encompass the "insipid and flat" morals and "course and uncouth […] Style and Diction" that, like those views, had diverted Aesop's fables from the "Purpose for which they were principally intended" (sigs. B4v-r). Insisting that this "Purpose" was to argue against political absolutism, Croxall revised L'Estrange's fables so that they would better suit the "Children of Britain," who are "born with free Blood in their Veins; and suck in Liberty with their very Milk" (sig. B5r).

It is not hard to catch the ironic resemblance between Croxall's conception of what a fable collection should be and that of his loathed predecessor. Like L'Estrange, Croxall implied that the future of England's linguistic and political integrity depended on the proper transmission of Aesop's fables to a new generation of English readers. To this end, he too stressed the material ties that bind the Aesopian text to the phenomenal world that it depicts. Thus one of Croxall's most strident criticisms of L'Estrange's stupendous folio was that it was physically inadequate to the task of impressing the appropriate "Morality" on the "blank Paper" of its reader's mind. L'Estrange, Croxall charged, had "swell'd [the collection] to so voluminous a Bulk, … I don't see how it can suit the Hand or Pocket, of the Generality of Children" (sig. B8v). L'Estrange's "noxious Principles" were inseparable from his "Prolixity." As cumbersome textual matter, his fables embodied their author's unpalatable political designs. Nonetheless, this very materiality became the condition of Croxall's own opposition to L'Estrange. It permitted him to point the fables plausibly in new directions and thus it demonstrated not simply the reassuring substantiality of written signs but also how easily they can be stolen and deformed. For example, Croxall took L'Estrange's version of "A Lyon and a Man," literally inverted its title to "The Forrester and the Lion," and applied its moral directly to writing, noting tersely that "contending Parties are very likely to appeal the Truth to Records written by their own Side."⁴⁵

As Richardson would observe, the "depreciating of Lestrange's Work seems to be the Corner-Stone of [Croxall's] own Building."⁴⁶ From an Aesopian perspective, this "depreciating" is both a natural action and a textual strategy; it is equally constructive and destructive. To show L'Estrange's unjust "Manner of drawing his Reflections," for instance, Croxall cited Old Towzer's version of the fable of a dog who describes his life of leisure to a wolf. In the fable, the wolf is nearly persuaded to join the dog on the other side of the fence—until he notices the marks that the dog's collar has worn into his fur. The wolf interprets these marks as badges of servitude and flees. In L'Estrange's view, the moral of the fable was that freedom of mind is preferable to mental bondage. Croxall disagreed, seeing such a conclusion as a debased apology for political oppression. Rather than simply shift, the moral, however, Croxall turned the fable itself into a vivid example of L'Estrange's willingness to "perver[t …] Sense and Meaning" (sig. B6r). Croxall himself becomes the wolfish reader who easily sees through the dog L'Estrange's "long, tedious, amusing Reflection, without one Word to the Purpose." The "Reflection" is, in Croxall's eyes, a flagitious attempt to "justify Slavery":

He tells us at last that the Freedom which Æesop is so tender of here, is to be understood as the Freedom of the Mind. Nobody ever understood it so … If the Wolf was sensible how sweet the Freedom of the Mind was, and had concern for the liberty of his person, he might have ventur'd to have gone with the Dog well enough: But then he would have sav'd L 'Estrange the spoiling of one of the best Fables of the whole Collection. However, this may serve for a pattern of that Gentleman's Candour and Ingenuity in the Manner of drawing his Reflections.

(sig. B7v)

For Croxall—as ironically for the Stuart-sympathizing fabulists of the last century—fables embody not only morals but also "Manner[s] of drawing […] Reflections." They translate often contentious literary relations into a sensible "Pattern." That pattern accommodates the new author himself, and it in turn becomes an integral part of the story a fable tells. Indeed, itmakes possible the fable's replication across parties and generations, creating a coherence within conflict—authorial integrity within a dispute about authority—that neither Croxall nor L'Estrange acknowledge directly.

In 1739, however, Samuel Richardson did acknowledge it. As Margaret Anne Doody suggests, the London printer's interest in Aesop, resulting in his popular Æsop's Fables, may betray a nascent sympathy to the Jacobite cause.⁴⁷ Certainly, it was L'Estrange, not Croxall, whose text Richardson finally decided to abridge and illustrate. In any event, Richardson was no mean entrepreneur, and he quite unapologetically aimed to mold his readers' morals. He thus naturally wanted to make the fables in this new collection as physically impressive as possible. Just as Ogilby had found Aesop's fables the kind of graphic "Examples" that may best "prevaile" over their readers, just as L'Estrange deemed them the most persistent of the primary characters that one could hope to engrave on children's brains, and just as Croxall pronounced them as digestible as the "Milk of Liberty," so Richardson, "sensible of the alluring Force which Cuts or Pictures, suited to the respective Subjects, have on the Minds of Children," took care to include "in a quite new Manner, engraved on Copper-Plates, at no small Expence, the Subject of every Fable." Illustrations would further "excite [readers'] Curiosity, and stimulate their Attention, […] especially as [they] are distinctly referred both to Page and Fable in every Representation" (p. xi).

But if the physical properties of the page promised to forge a happy coherence among author, reader, signifier, and signified, the fabulist still had to account for the split political personality of the English fable collection, as exemplified in the glaring discrepancies between Croxall's Fables and those of L'Estrange. Richardson's preface scrupulously weighs the relative merits of "the Knight" (L'Estrange) and the "Worthy Gentleman" (Croxall), and finds that the latter "has strained the natural Import of some of the Fables near as much one way, as Sir Roger has done the other" (p. viii). For Richardson, however, such "strain[ing]" may be explained as a consequence of historical accident, and he specifically defended L'Estrange by reasoning that, "were the Time in which he wrote considered, the Civil Wars so lately concluded in his View, and the Anarchy introduced by them, it is the less wonder that one Extreme produced another in the opposite Party, in its Turn" (p. vi).

As he conceded authorial vulnerability to historical and political circumstance, Richardson de facto admitted those same circumstances as key features of every figure. His own collection could yield "better-adapted and more forcible Morals' precisely because in both preface and in practice it recognized that signs acquire meaning in a contentious and reversible world. Richardson thus had no trouble imagining Croxall and L'Estrange in reversed positions: "Had [the former] lived when Sir Roger did, he might have been the Lestrange of the one Court; as Lestrange, had he been in his place, mighthave taken Orders and become Chaplain in the other" (p. ix). The two authors could have cancelled each other out; instead, they demonstrate the same provisional model of symbolic authority.

What made the fables in the English collection contestable was also what made them durable, reproducible, and effective—their "natural Import," their tendency to reduce complex symbolic systems into discrete, concrete, historically responsive terms whose maneuvers could be monitored and whose origins could be investigated. As he strove to reconcile Croxall and L'Estrange in the "natural" space of his own text, Richardson perforce conceded that an individual figure's "natural Import" is never entirely separable from its use, and therefore that symbolic authority survives only through its conscious alienation. This is in many ways the moral of the two epistolary novels that Richardson published in the 1740s, and it is no accident that the letter writers in both Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-1748) make liberal use of Aesop's fables. In the fifth edition of Pamela, an advertisement for Richardson's Fables even slyly footnoted Pamela's allusion to "the grasshopper in the fable, which I have read of in my lady's books."⁴⁸ The links between Richardson's novels (which looked toward the future of English fiction) and his fables (which mark the end of the Aesopian period as I have described it) are not only literal ones. First, Richardson's work has never been known for its tropological richness. On the contrary, he disavowed all sympathy with his most metaphorically accomplished character, Lovelace, whose narcissistic but self-immolating enthusiasm for convoluted imagery brands him a libertine. Aesop's fables, on the other hand, supply Richardson's correspondents with images so natural, so shareable, and so carefully and conspicuously invested with meaning that they seem to avoid the predatory centerlessness of Lovelacean figuration.

Furthermore, in both Pamela and Clarissa the most meaningful signs are the words that make up individual letters—minute textual particulars burdened with the task of representing their authors to a world of jealous and acquisitive readers. Both of Richardson's besieged heroines are anxious because they recognize that these graphic signs are continuous with their own bodies and minds—with "Virtue" in Pamela's case, and with moral and spiritual integrity in Clarissa's. For the same reason, both heroines understand, and experience, interpretation (readers' assignment of morals and meanings) as violence. As Terry Castle and other feminist readers of Richardson have shown, this is what makes the symbolic texture of Clarissa in particular so very agonized and agonizing.⁴⁹ English fabulists from Ogilby forward, though, had sculpted Aesop's fables into concrete textual figures that demonstrated these very trepidations and thereby stood a chance of weathering them.⁵⁰ In Richardson's novels, these same fables thus naturally supply a symbolic currency common even to characters as antagonistic as Lovelace and Clarissa. More important, they work almost as forcibly as sensible impressions to control and limit a letter writer's meaning, without denying the fragility of all claims to symbolic mastery.

Pamela offers an especially clear case in point. Because Richardson's laboring-class heroine cribs her fables from her dead mistress's library, Aesop demonstrably mediates between the aristocratic Lady B—and her nominal servant Pamela. And as Pamela claims to have consulted "a book of Fables" (p. 109)—not, for instance, the gossip of other household menials—fables' textual status supersedes even their conventional appeal to the natural world. Early in her one-sided correspondence with her parents, Pamela uses Aesop to figure her own deracinating upbringing by Lady B, an upbringing that, she claims, has made her "like the grasshopper in the fable." Pamela goes on to reproduce, verbatim, the tale of "a hungry grass-hopper (as suppose it was poor me)" who, "having sung out the whole season" of summer, come wintertime "beg[s] charity" of a colony of industrious ants (Pamela's reader-parents), only to be told to "dance in winter to the tunes you sung in summer" (p. 108).

Pamela applies the fable directly to herself: "So I shall make a fine figure with my singing and dancing, when I come home to you" (p. 108). The fable participates in Aesopian tradition not just because the author so ostentatiously adopts it as her own ("suppose [the grasshopper] was poor me") but also because in so doing she uses a piece of text, lifted from a different book, to foreground the process through which meaningful figures themselves are constructed. This in turn lets Pamela rearrange a conventional relationship between the figural and the literal. Pamela is literally as like Aesop's grasshopper as she can be, for she was taught exactly the arts—"singing and dancing"—that he perfected. But she uses the image of the grasshopper to project a personal future in which, returning to her parents' humble household, she wryly expects to "make a fine figure" as useless as the one the grasshopper cuts at the end of the story. The Aesopian example regulates a delicate exchange between the literal and the figural. It witnesses the transformation of the one into the other. This is why Pamela intuitively uses it to guide her parents' reading of her: It gives her authority over the self-portrait her letters compulsively paint. Significantly, in the long run Pamela manages to keep the most undesirable of future selves—the "figure" of the feckless servant girl ignominiously returned to her roots—from materializing. Seen from this perspective, Aesop's fable manages the ratio between the material and symbolic aspects of the author's own character.

In Clarissa, the stakes are higher, and Aesop's fables are accordingly much in evidence, in Lovelace's letters as well as in Clarissa's. Whereas Lovelace applies most of his fables to others, Clarissa shares Pamela's inclination to shield herself (or at least her social image) with Aesopian imagery.⁵¹ For instance, when Lovelace pretends to propose to dress her in his sister's clothes and take her to meet his family, Clarissa declines by comparing herself to "the jay in the fable" (p. 456) who masqueraded inpeacock feathers only to be stripped of her borrowed finery by its rightful owners. Like Pamela, Clarissa uses the Aesopian figure to control the figural destiny of her own body in the social and symbolic space where her letters too acquire their meanings.

Aside from Clarissa's body, those letters are the most imperiled and material signs in Richardson's novel. It is thus appropriate that Clarissa's most memorable fable appears in the "odd letter," written after Lovelace rapes her, that she "throw[s …] in fragments under the table" (p. 889). The "fragments" offer their own graphic testimony to the state of their author's mind and body; the scribbled fable condenses this terrible equation of mind, body, and letter into a single figure. In the story, "a lady [who] took a great fancy to a young lion, or a bear, I forget which—but a bear, or a tiger" is "tor[n …] in pieces" when the animal "resume[s] its nature" and seeks to "satisfy its hungry maw" (p. 891). Clarissa moralizes this chilling tale by asking "who was most to blame, [… t]he brute, or the lady?" She concludes that it was "the lady, surely.—For what she did, was out of nature, out of character at least: what it did, was in its own nature" (p. 891). Although Clarissa casts herself as the lady in the fable in order to maintain a sense of agency—and supplies a moral for the same reason—the fable itself serves less to protect its teller's physical body than to confirm the yoked fragmentations of body, letter, and meaning in a way that later will protect her symbolic body—her reputation.

Clarissa's fable of the lady broken to bits by the beast she befriended has itself begun to break down: Was "the brute" a lion or a tiger or a bear? Was the lady's "great fancy" for the creature as unnatural as she wishes to believe? Because it refuses to answer these questions, yet remains an impressive image, the fable takes us to the apocalyptic edge of the history of Aesopian figuration in England, at least as it had been theorized and practiced in the major fable collections from Ogilby to Richardson. As Ogilby's exemplifications of Hobbesian sign theory had made apparent, fables themselves reveal brutal nature masquerading in social and even typographical character. Via his epistolary heroines—the authors in his own texts—Richardson smuggled fables' power of revelation out of the fable collection and into the English novel. But unlike the other fabulists we have seen, including Richardson himself, his female fabulists are utterly powerless. In their hands, the talent for reactive mediation that had given the Aesopian example its cultural cachet was finally swallowed up by its capacity to demonstrate the violence that makes things mean.

Significant Miniatures: The Minor Collections

The fabulists we have met so far were only the most eminent Aesopians of their day. Along with their high visibility as "AUTHOR[S]" and the extraordinary longevity of their work, their self-consciousness as the sculptors of a new form of symbolic authority sets them apart from the droves of other fabulists whose collections inundated both the popular press and English classrooms between 1651 and 1740. Like their more illustrious counterparts, however, the "minor" collections made it clear that "things" do not "hold discourse" without some authorial hugger-mugger behind the scenes. At the same time, in order to impress their readers, these same collections relied on fables' well-publicized close kinship with natural signs to impress their readers. Particularly since many of them were designed for schools or for quick and easy consumption, the relatively obscure Aesops to which we now turn trained English readers to tolerate the resulting paradox, even to expect it. Both in their manner of ordering and moralizing their fables, and in their prefatory catalogues of fables' distinguishing traits, they thus paved the way for the more self-reflexive and complex collections we have been examining.

Among their distinguishing features, one of the most conspicuous was fables' urgent address to the eye. Despite their alleged origins in oral culture, fables were identified with "pleasing Images," not sounds. Edmund Arwaker's collection of 1708 described them in typically pictorial terms:

A Man that would describe another Man's Person to me, must need a great many Words, & yet after all perhaps give me but a very imperfect Idea of him; but he that shows me his Picture well-painted, though it be in Miniature, does all this much better at one View and in a Moment. It is the same thing in Writing: a Man may drag up the Artillery of twenty Heavy Ornaments to attack a Vice, one of which may strike by the Way, the rest be either not understood, or not remembered. But a Fable shall describe the sordidness of this Vice at once, and convince us pleasantly and quickly.⁵²

The preface to Robert Samber's popular 1721 translation of Antoine Houdart de la Motte's Fables nouvelles (1719) also described the fabulist as a writer who "by Discourse paints to the Ears."⁵³ In 1689 Philip Ayres found that writing fables is "like the Placing of Pictures before [readers'] Eyes, whereby more firm and lasting Impressions of Virtue may be fix'd in them, than by plain parallel Rules and Maxims." John Jackson compared a "Fable" to "a Picture or Image of Truth," and characterized every fable in his collection as a "painted Scene."⁵⁴

Ut pictura poesis is of course one of the oldest literary principles in the book, and it is not surprising to find so many fabulists staking claims to it. As they became more and more like images, fables were expected to make ever "more firm and lasting Impressions" on their readers. But, as La Motte hints, they were never expected absolutely to abandon the verbal register that lent them a skeptical reflexivity. Indeed, many of the collections whose prefaces treat fables as images actually lack illustrations. Instead their visible activity takes place typographically, in the form of demonstratively yoked typefaces.

Another reason that editors of fable collections likened their contents to "miniature" pictures was because they reckoned diminutive size a virtue: English fabulists readily adopted La Fontaine's maxim that "Brevity is the Soul of Fable." Addison described fables as "Pieces." Richardson and Croxall deliberately scaled their collections down to "such a Size, as should be fit for the Hands and Pockets for which it was principally designed."⁵⁵ Meanwhile, an extremely anglicized La Motte grumbled that fables' "laconick Original," Aesop could even be "too concise, and I have often wonder'd at it, for he was a Greek, and they are great Talkers in that Country, as witness our divine Homer." Æsop Naturaliz'd (1711) noted flat out that "One reason why Stories and Fables seem most suitably contrived to Inform the Understanding is … because they are unusually short; and the shortest way to Instruction is the Best; they only aim to teach us one Point at a Time, and are Quick in doing it."⁵⁶

Like their affinity with images, fables' brevity claimed them for a symbology which assumes that the perceptible world is itself organized in particles, and that therefore the most penetrating signs will also be the most irreducible and concrete. As they had been in the sixteenth century, fables were tirelessly likened to compact, palatable substances that, in L'Estrange's words, "go kindly down." They were touted as "Chymical drops," as nuts, as "Chinks" and "Crannies" of light, as "Gilt and Sweeten'd … Pills and Potions," as honey-rimmed cups. Traditionally such analogies suggested sweet deception, and could be applied, as in Sidney's Defence of Poetry (1595), to figurative language generally. Augustan fabulists used these metaphors more precisely to stress fables' likeness to particular small things. Their lilliputian size physically "adapted [fables] to the Palate and Capacity" of those who took them in.

But fables' compactness equipped them for cultural action as well as for natural impact: it made them easy to transport from text to text, and indeed from language to language. And it aligned them with a symbolic system in which items acquire authority, significance, and value according to their capacity for transportation and exchange.⁵⁷ The fact that fables were most often preserved in collections not only invokes a cultural system that identifies knowledge with accumulation. It also displays the instability of resulting systems of meaning, insofar as these consist of many discrete restless particles. Augustan enthusiasm for fable collections—as opposed to fables printed individually, or fables interspersed with other kinds of writing—suggests that skeptical display mattered at least as much as fables' materiality relative to other literary forms.

Such displays seemed to keep authors honest. Aesop himself was promoted as a "hireless Priest of Nature" who exposed "that which was by Art for Profit hid, / And to the Laities as to Spies forbid."⁵⁸ The eye-oriented and atomistic structure of the fable collections showed just how symbolic authority got cobbled together. By contrast, the long, sinuous moral tales of the Brahmin fabulist Pilpay were considered too esoteric and mystical for liberated English readers: Pilpay "lock'd up all his politicks; it was a Book of the State and Discipline of Inclosing," one preface noted with disapproval. And "besides his Fables are not distinct and separate enough; he crouds up one within another, […] an extravagant Romance of Brutes, Men, and Genii."⁵⁹Aesop's fables were always arranged in distinct sequence, as if to confirm Aesop's reputation for having "set the Truth in so clear a Light, as to make it stand in no need on any further Proof." For he "knew very well that Fable did not consist absolutely in Fiction but in a Collection of Circumstances which concurred to make a Truth understood." While on one level fables' brevity and resulting collectibility seemed to unite them with the physical world, on another level it also spotlit the canny contrivances that "concu[r]" to produce meaning.⁶⁰

Unless we remember that by 1688 the open negotiation of political authority had come to define the character of the English nation, it's hard to see how anyone could have deemed Aesop's talking animals more probable than Pilpay's "extravagant Romance of Brutes, Men, and Genii." Yet while, as one fabulist observed, "the only Word, Fable, awakens […] the Idea of Animals endowed with Speech," this "Idea" offended remarkably few sensibilities. Certainly, loquacious beasts could simply indicate a fabulist's willingness to employ a familiar and accessible style. La Motte, as liberally translated by Samber, interrupted one of his own fables to declare that "I who write of Brutes, a simple Fabulist, must write most plain and easy, and follow Nature in her Tracts" (p. 183). For "elevated Expressions impose upon and seduce us, tho" they are the best chosen, whereas the Familiar cannot gain any Respect but through Justice and a happy Application" (p. 44). But the "Familiar" style could also make rhetorical design explicit. As La Motte put it, fables "make Plants and Animals speak … so that if there is a Necessity for it, the Spring may complain against its Stream; the File laugh at the Serpent, the Earthen and the Iron Pot discourse with each other and swim in one another's Company" (p. 38). Such voluble bodies fail to "impose upon and seduce us" because they point out what human designs "necessit[ate]" linguistic invention. Hence John Dennis (a fabulist himself) with reason doubted that anyone could "be so simple as to believe, that Reynard, Bruin, Isgrim, and Grimalkin say really of themselves the things that Æsop puts into their Mouths."⁶¹ La Motte too assumed that the speaking animal pretense exposes its own cultural origins. One of the most important "Species of the Merry Stile of Fable," he decided, "transfer[s] to Animals, those extrinsical Denominations we make use of to one another" (p. 45).

Because it works at the sociable level of "extrinsical Denomination," the body of the Aesopian brute shares an important affinity with the manifestly invented, printed body of the fable itself. The frontispiece to John Jackson's 1708 collection depicts a potbellied Aesop surrounded by an admiring entourage of beasts. It announces that "in this Figure, the Fables are represented addressing themselves to Æsop, as their Prime Patron." Jackson's preface even more vigorously mixes textual and animal estates: "With great Judgement ['Esop] dresses up Brutes with humane Forms and Qualities. […] The Lyon, the Fox, the Horse, and other Animals, even the Mute-Fish, are his Speakers, and read Lessons of Morality for the Instruction of Youth in the Concerns of Life."⁶²

Despite their plea to be read like the pages that cage them, Aesop's creatures are most conspicuously distinguished by the power of speech. In turn, fable collections great and small naturally figured speech as a matter of power. The wolf upstream locks in verbal combat with the lamb below, whom he accuses of sullying the water that actually flows from his mouth to hers; the lion tries to convince the fox to step into his cave, the fox persuades the crow to drop her breakfast into his waiting mouth, and so on. As Joan Hildreth Owen has observed, the differences between Aesop's interlocutors often extend to ethical systems and ways of life; these, like discrepancies of power, are made visible by positional and morphological distinctions.⁶³ Aesopian animals of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were especially aware that spatial arrangement decides signifying potential: When one of Ayres's lambs stands at a window and berates a wolf as a "cruel and murderous Beast," the wolf "refuse[s] to be offended by his Abuses" and observes himself that "'tis not thou, but that secure Place wherein thou art, that injures me."⁶⁴

While places might be "secure" in a given fable, an animal's tenure there is less so. In fables, animals signify odly in opposition to each other, and in the context of the visible discursive field that they inhabit at a particular moment. They are not, that is, enslaved to traditions of static correspondence in which serpents always represent wisdom, lions power, diamonds knowledge, and so forth. While their bodies remain the same from fable to fable (and this could be literally true, since most Aesopian motifs were transmitted from illustrator to illustrator with little change), the meaning of those bodies is defined in a discursive field whose constituent terms can always be rearranged. Indeed, many fable collections openly rebelled against fixed correspondence: in the story of the farmer who warms a snake on his bosom and is stung for his pains, John Toland noted that "the Serpent is not always the Emblem of Wisdom, as that Passage of our Saviour seems to imply, when he charges his Disciples to be as Wise as Serpents and as Harmless as Doves." Even within a fable collection, a creature's significance can change from fable to fable, in response to his or her competition at a given moment. When an eagle outwits a fox, Toland concludes that "this Fable represents the Eagle in quite a different Character from what the former [where a crow imposes on him] did. There he plaid the part of a generous but overcredulous Prince… But here we see him put the Cheat upon the Fox."⁶⁵

In Augustan fables character is emphatically situational, not essential, and hence it is always open to dispute. A moral, thus, might hoard the possibility of contradiction until the lastpossible moment: "'Tis a Kind of School Question that we find started in the Fable, upon the Subject of Reason and Intellect," L'Estrange had noted at the end of the fable of the crow who drops stones into a pitcher until she manages to raise its contents to her beak.⁶⁶ Likewise, musing over another story, Toland wondered:

Does Æsop intend hereby to inform us of the great Family of Manking? Or is it to let us know [the eagle was] insensibly debauch'd by the Air of the Court? Or does Aesop by this Fable undertake to show that we are not obliged to keep our word with wicked Men? If the last be Aesop's intention, we entirely dissent from him; for, on the contrary, we are of Opinion, that if one must break one's word, 'tis more proper doing it to a good than to a Bad Man.

Even the less self-examining (and proportionally more conservative) collections of fables of the Augustan period throve "on the contrary" and on "dissent." As the anonymous preface to Fables, Moral and Political (1703) observed, "We may say of all human things, that they have two Handles, a right and a left: So we may with equal reason say of all the old Fables that they have an infinite number."⁶⁷ Readers caught on quickly. In the front of a collection of 1651, one of them scribbled that "Time brings opposites to pass/And various maxims teaches."⁶⁸

But while Augustan fable collections reflected a precarious world, they often did so for conservative reasons—to teach English readers a single habit of interpretation, to reflect to them a single image of themselves as interpreters and potential producers of signs. The preface to Fables, Moral and Political tells us that "that all Men might be sufficiently convinc'd of the above-mention'd Truths in one and the same Manner, the Wise Ancients invented many fictitious Stories, Comparisons, Apologues, Parables and Fables, to make them well comprehend and retain those Truths."⁶⁹ The possibility of inversion did not ultimately threaten a fable's authority, so long as that fable maintained a single, reliable "Manner" of representation, guaranteed to instill a single, reliable "Manner" of approaching written signs.⁷⁰

Even the editors of classroom Aesops reinforced this symbolic practice by introducing fables' caprices alongside their stalwart simplicity. At Dryden's Westminster School "Esops Fables" came first in Headmaster Busby's syllabus of texts by which "Schollers learne the rudimts of Grammer & Syntaxis in English."⁷¹ In 1736 the Gentleman's Magazine described how "Aesop's tales at once instruct and please" students in the "first and least" class. But fables' rudimentary virtues grew less important as students grew more accomplished: at Westminster, the mornings were devoted to "conster[ing]" and "transcrib[ing]" a "Fable in Esope"; but in the afternoons, schoolboys were to "peirce the lesson they construed out of Esope." Likewise, the Gentleman's Magazine reported that the very fables that "instruct and please" in the first form laterteach more subtle lessons about how business is actually conducted in a contentious symbolic field. In the second form

Aesop in a clearer light is seen,
Here they perceive to what his fables lean,
Can smoke the Fox comending from below
The voice, the shape, the beauty of the Crow;
Who perch'd on high, far from his reach was sat,
Bless'd (what he wanted) with a piece of meat.⁷²

Even in the classroom, Aesopian instruction was two-tiered, stacking interpretive skepticism (seeing "in a clearer light," "perceiv[ing] to what […] fables lean") on top of a rudimentary reassurance that written words can cohere with the physical world. Such a pedagogical strategy naturalized the myth of the discerning eye that keeps the viewer an ostensibly free subject of literary experience.

Aesopian instruction increasingly imbued the act of reading with the dominant political principles of an emerging England. This was true even when the language to be learned was not English. In a typical collection like Charles Hoole's Esop's Fables. In English and Latin (1687), "every [fable was] divided into its distinct period and marked with Figures, so that little Children may […] learn to imitate the right Composition, and the proper Forms of Speech, belonging to both Languages."⁷³ Hoole brooke Aesop's fables into small syntactic units whose counterparts in different languages were easy to pick out in matching typefaces. Superficially, this reinforces a fairly even exchange between the two languages: the fable of the fox and stork, for instance, typographically varies parts of the story so that they may be compared with corresponding Latin phrases. In the English version

1. A Fox invited a Stork to Supper.
2. He poured the meat upon a Table, which, because it was thin, the Fox licked up, the Stork striving in vain to do so with her bill.
3. The Bird being abused, went her way; she was ashamed and grieved at the injury.
4. After a few days, she comes again and invites the Fox.
5. A glass was set full of meat; which vessel, because it was narrow-mouthed, the Fox might see the meat, and be hungry, but he could not taste of it.
6. The Stork easily drew it out with her bill.
7. Mor. Laughter deserves laughter, Jesting, jesting, Knavery, knavery, and Deceit, deceit.⁷⁴

Across the page we find "De Vulpecula et Ciconia," a Latinversion of the story that corresponds to the English point for point, down to the moral: "Risus risum, jocus jocum, dolus dolum, fraus meritur fraudem." The fable's plot performs the acts of matching and exchange that occur linguistically. Symbolic elements become body parts (bills and mouths) and visible objects (the glass, the table, the meat). All of these signs move in three directions at once. They are tokens in a series of transactions between the stork and the fox. They signify a moral that presents reciprocity as a fact of life. And they are linguistic counters that can be exchanged for their Latin equivalents across the page. At the same time, however, exchange is presented thematically as cruel and aggressive deceit. Hence, like Aesop's pedagogical productions, the fable ironizes its own assertions about language. It is not self-conscious about the irony; this is what distinguishes Hoole from fabulists like Ogilby and Barlow. But collections like Hoole's inculcated the reading habits that make it possible to recognize the predatory subtext of modern English signifying conventions.

For this reason, fables like that of the fox and stork enjoyed a high life in the cheap political fables that flourished on Grub Street at the turn of the century. Contrived by hack writers no doubt raised on classroom collections, these penny pamphlets all responded to the "late Change of Government" in 1688. Their titles moved Aesop from place to place in order to protest against or to welcome the prevailing political wind "They were as likely to be written from the Whig as from the Tory side: Æsop at Tunbridge, Æsop at Whitehall, Æsop at Bathe, Æsop Return 'd from Tunbridge were all Tory; Old iÆsop at Whitehall, Æsop at Epsom, Æsop at Amsterdam, Æsop from Islington and Æsop at Westminster all were Whig, Some others—Æsop the Wanderer, Æsop in Portugal, Æsop at Oxford, Æsop at the Bell-Tavern, Æsop at Paris—exploited Aesop's itineracy to address more global political situations: when Aesop went to Paris, for example, he became a French undersecretary. Others, like Æsop at Richmond, stole the "Aesop at … formula for their titles but dished up social satire instead.

The bulk of the Grub Street Aesops, though, used the political climate of the day to justify their authors' choice to write in fables: "Who the De—I but a Modern Man would venture to write Truth this Time of Day?" one queried. Fables themselves were up for grabs in the recently renegotiated world of Williamite England. "I write Fables too," one Aesop noted, "only with this difference, mine are for the Government and his against it."⁷⁵ Fables' flagrant promiscuity went hand in hand with their materiality. One Aesop describes a rival's attempt to "squeeze itself into the press" and Aesop at Tunbridge reports the discovery of a "Parcel of Papers" dropped along Tunbridge Road: "Picking 'em up, I found they were the following fables."⁷⁶ Even the most ephemeral of all Augustan fable collections showed figures at the beck and call of a skeptical nation and a materialist age.

When Aesop at Epsom told the story "Of the Fox and the Stork," he captured exactly this preoccupation: writing against Aesop at Tunbridge, this Whig Aesop casts himself as the stork and his opponent as the fox, thereby demonstrating that it is now his turn to "make the Tallies even." He means that it is now his turn to eat, to speak, to laugh at the expense of the other. The fable turns the superficially egalitarian space of the dining table into an example of how power is organized in modern English culture. That culture's dominant political instrument is a press willing to spin its web of equally factitious and substantial signs for anyone who asks it to. In such a world, meaning waits on an imbalance that masquerades as parity: the fable would lose its own significance if the stork had the "narrow long neck'd glass" before her at the same time that the fox is supplied with his "liquid feast." Aesopian figuration repeats a national history that unfolds as a series of inversions and temporary subordinations.

Because all of the Grub Street Aesops speak the same language, only one of them can occupy Aesop's skin at a time. The conventional prefatory banter that always challenges an Aesopian predecessor of the opposing party invariably gives way to fables about unequal exchange, nervous compromise, contest over bodies which, like what one pamphlet describes as the "fine, empty" body of Aesop himself, are finally not worth the quarrel. As Æsop Return'd from Tunbridge" put it:

When the small ones give their Voice,
Who shall be most Empower'd,
They have but liberty of Choice
By whom they'll be devour'd.⁷⁷

Such jingles capture the tension between stability and subversion that organized both major and minor English fable collections between 1651 and 1740. Without denying the manifold differences among those collections, we can say that they shared at least one cultural aim—to create a common figural system. To the extent that reactive mediation between opposing sides was one perceived virtue of that system, these very differences may even be interpreted as marks of success.

Notes

²³ Gerard Reedy gives an excellent summary of this crisis in "Mystical Politics," in Studies in Revolution and Change, ed. Korshin, 20-46. Not overlooking Ogilby's own role in crafting the iconography of Charles II's Restoration, Reedy points out that the "symbolic texture of the day" (p. 20), thanks to the "demythologiz[ing]" mania of the Interregnum, was characterized by a deep skepticism about the "mystical nature of noumenal essence" and by a conviction that kingly authority was little more than "a concept to be manipulated" (p. 45) as a "political tool" (p. 21). We can generalize this insight to suggest that all previously unchallengeable correspondences between "phenomenal" signifiers and "noumenal" signifieds found themselves under fire by 1660.

²⁴ In Stability and Strife, W.A. Speck offers an overview of the conflictual structure of eighteenth-century English politics. Compelling essays on various conflicts of the period may be found in Culture, Politics, and Society in Britain, 1660-1800, ed. Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory (Manchester, 1991). Jean-Christophe Agnew's Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (New York, 1985) traces and theorizes the way an emerging market shaped symbolic forms in early modern England.

²⁵ This is how Roger L'Estrange described his own prodigious fable collection's metamorphosis from the diminutive to the mammoth, so that it might better "answe[r] all the Parts and Pretences of the Undertaking, as well Publique as Private." L'Estrange, Address to the Reader, in Fables and Storyes Moralized, Being a Second Part of the Fables of Æsop (London, 1692 and 1699), sig. A3v. Future references to this preface will be designated "Address."

²⁶ L'Estrange, "A Fox and a Goat," in Eminent Mythologists, 80.

²⁷Ibid.; Samuel Richardson, "A Cock and a Fox" in Æsop's Fables, with Instructive Morals and Re-flections (London, 1739), 20.

²⁸ Arwaker, Preface to Truth in Fiction, vi.

²⁹ Thomas Hobbes, "The Introduction" to Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson ((1651) Harmondsworth, 1968), 81. For Hobbes's elaboration of the "generall use of Speech," "Markes, or Notes," and "Signes," see Leviathan, I.iv, "Of Speech." Hobbes's discussion of language's culturally constructive uses actually begins with a discussion of writing—"a profitable Invention for continuing the memory of time past" (p. 100), and his discussion of words very often seems to assume that at their most efficacious they would be graphic. On Hobbes's use of the exemplary potential of the page, and on its centrality to his notion of obedience to certain forms of cultural authority, see Richard Kroll, "Mise-enpage: Biblical Criticism and Inference during the Restoration," in Sltudies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. O.M. Brack, Jr. (Madison, 1986), 3-40.

³⁰ William Davenant, "To My Friend Mr. Ogilby, Upon the Fables of Æsop Paraphras'd in Verse," in Ogilby, Fables (1651), n.p.

³¹ Ogilby, "Of the Fox and the Lion," in Fables, 194-195. Patterson analyzes several of Ogilby's fables as instances of his having "appropriated fabulist tradition," rendering individual fables "vehicle[s] of protest and solidarity for the Royalist nobility and gentry" and thereby eventually "alter[ing] the status of the fable"(Fables of Power, 86-87). Her close readings of several of Ogilby's most tendentious fables enhances Pritchard's interpretation of Fables as a sustained plea for cultural integration reflected in the "narrative unity" of the collection itself (p. 17).

³² Bernard Mandeville, "Remark P," in The Fable of the Bees (1705-1729), ed. F.B. Kaye. 2 vols. (Oxford, 1924), II: 178.

³³ John Ogilby, "Of the Dog and Shadow," in Fables of Æsop. 4.

³⁴ On Barlow's contributions to Aesopian representation in England, see Edward Hodnett, Francis Barlow: First Master of English Book Illustrations (London, 1978). Philip Hofer analyzes Barlow's fable collection as a "private venture" that was "in direct competition" with Ogilby's Aesop, even though Barlow apparently supplied illustrations for one of Ogilby's collections. Hofer sees Barlow as wishing to "produce a finer book" than Ogilby (pp. 281-282). See Hofer, "Francis Barlow's Aesop." Harvard Library Bulletin 2 (1948), 279-295.

³⁵ Francis Barlow, Dedication to Aesop's Fables with his Life, in English, French and Latin (London, 1687), n.p. Future references to Barlow's Dedication and to Behn's fables will be to this edition (in Bibliography see s.v. Behn).

³⁶ L'Estrange, "Address," sig. A3v.

³⁷ Contemporary lampoons depicted L'Estrange as a dog with "a thousand dog tricks, viz. to catch for the Papists, carry for the Protestants, whine to the King … and cring [sic] to the Crucifix," none of which could compare with his "damn'd old trick of slipping the halter." See the anonymous "Hue and Cry" appended to "Strange's Case Strangely Altered" (London, 1680), n.p.

³⁸ L'Estrange's biographer, George Kitchin, points out that, though L'Estrange was knighted much earlier, he only became "the celebrated L'Estrange" after he turned to polite letters. Sir Roger L 'Estrange: A Contribution to the History of the Press in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1913), 390-407.

³⁹ Patterson, Fables of Power (139-143), treats L'Estrange's Fables as political satire responding to England's return to constitutional government after 1688.

⁴⁰ Roger L'Estrange, Preface to Eminent Mythologists (London, 1692), sig. A2v. L'Estrange berates the "Morose and Untractable Spirits in the World, that look upon Precepts in Emblem" as trivial, the strict province of "Women and Children" and uses the terms "Figure" and "Fable" interchangeably. Future references to this preface will be to this edition and will appear in the text.

⁴¹ L'Estrange, "Address," sig. A3v.

⁴² L'Estrange's choice of words here is not original. In the preface to The Midwives Book (London, 1671), Jane Sharpe remarks on her own choice to communicate anatomical, gynecological, and obstetrical precepts in lay words: "It is not hard words that perform the work, as if more understood the Art that cannot understand Greek. Words are but the Shell, that we oft times break our Teeth with them to come at the Kernel. I mean our Brains to know what is the Meaning of them" (pp. 3-4).

⁴³ Mr. Spectator was voluble on the rampant "Humour of Shortning our Language" that, exemplified by L'Estrange, threatened to "have confounded all our Etymologies, and have quite destroy'd our Tongue." Joseph Addison, Spectator 135 (August 4, 1711), in The Spectator, ed. Bond, II: 35. For the most minute of many contemporary engagements with L'Estrange's fables, see Some Observations on the Fables of Æsop, as Commented upon by Roger L'Estrange (Edinburgh, 1700). The "Divine of the Church of Scotland" responsible for the Observations added morals to L'Estrange's fables, examined their sometimes contradictory relations to each other, and furnished details that he felt L'Estrange might have mentioned. The depth and detail of the Obser-vations show how deeply L'Estrange's fable collection engrossed contemporary readers and writers.

⁴⁴ Samuel Croxall, Preface to Fables of Æsop and Others (London, 1722), sig. B5v. Future references to Croxall's preface are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

⁴⁵ Croxall, "The Forrester and the Lion," in Fables of Æsop and Others, 96.

⁴⁶ Richardson, Preface to Æsop's Fables, iv. Future references will appear parenthetically in the text.

⁴⁷ As would his choice of names like "Charles" and "Charlotte" for protagonists in his last novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753-1754). For Richardson's uncommonly sympathetic response to L'Estrange, see Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study in the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford, 1974), 25-28. And on Richardson's possible Jacobitism, Doody's "Richardson's Politics," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 (1990), 113-126.

⁴⁸ Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded ((1740) Harmondsworth, 1980), 108. Future references to Pamela will be to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

⁴⁹ Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's "Clarissa' (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982).

⁵⁰ Richardson's footnotes to his novels notoriously multiplied over successive editions as he sought to protect the authority he had conceded by writing in the epistolary form. As they simultaneously assert and surrender the authority to control interpretation, we are thus encouraged to read the novels as we would fables.

⁵¹ For example, Lovelace cites a fable in which Mercury, disguised, asks a statuary "what price that same statue of Mercury bore," only to be told it is worth nothing. Lovelace applies this fable to his correspondent Belford, who like Mercury "prizes" Clarissa's "good Opinion" and whom Lovelace rewards with the bruising information that "she dislikes thee." Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or The History of a Young Lady ((1747-1748) Harmondsworth, 1985), 355. Future references to Clarissa will be to this edition and will appear in the text.

⁵² Arwaker, Preface to Truth in Fiction, vi.

⁵³ Antoine Houdart de la Motte, One Hundred New Court Fables, trans. Robert Samber (London, 1721), 331. La Motte, whose Fables nowelles appeared in an ornate and theoretically eloquent edition in Paris in 1719, was extremely important for English fab-ulists (particularly Whiggish ones); Samber ventured that this was because he "seem[ed] to have the utmost Allusion to Arbitrary Government, and dares say so; Through all his Fables may be discovered a spirit of liberty" (ix). (Of course, La Motte's fables were also dedicated to the king.) All fables being trans-lations at some level, English fabulists habitually made few, if any, qualitative distinctions between an original fable and a translation. I thus treat Samber's important collection as a full participant in English Aesopian conventions.

⁵⁴ Philip Ayres, "Epistle Dedicatory to Lewis Maydwell, in Mythologia Ethica, or Three Centuries of Esopean Fables in English Prose (London, 1689), sigs. A3r-A4v; John Jackson, Preface to A New Translation of Æsop's Fables, Adorn 'd with Cutts (London, 1708), lxvii.

⁵⁵ Richardson, Æsop's Fables, x. Like Richardson, Croxall likewise wanted his book to "suit […] the Hands of the Generality of Children." See Croxall, Fables of Æsop, B8v.

⁵⁶ La Motte (trans. Samber), "The Sheep and the Bush, in Court Fables, 248. Æsop Naturaliz'd: In a Collection of Fables and Stories from Æsop, Lockman, Pilpay and Others (3rd ed., London, 1711), sigs. A3v-A4r.

⁵⁷ Susan Stewart's On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection (Baltimore, 1984) touches on some of the ideological underpinnings of the culture of miniaturism in which Aesop's fables so openly participated. James H. Bunn gives a brilliant and persuasive account of how mercantilism informed eighteenth-century linguistic activity in "The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism," New Literary History 11 (1980), 303-321.

⁵⁸ William Davenant, "To My Dear Friend Mr. Ogilby," in Ogilby, Fables of Æsop (1651), n.p.

⁵⁹ La Motte (trans. Samber), Court Fables, 31.

⁶⁰Free-Thinker 47 (September 17, 1718), in The Free-Thinker 1 (London, 1722), 34; La Motte (trans. Samber), Court Fables, 61.

⁶¹ John Dennis, The Stage Defended (1726), in Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Hooker, II: 308.

⁶² Jackson, "Preface," xvii-xviii.

⁶³ Joan Hildreth Owen, "The Choice of Hercules and the English Fable," 57.

⁶⁴ Ayres, Mythologia Ethica, 74.

⁶⁵ Toland, "Of the Eagle and the Fox," in Fables, 427.

⁶⁶ L'Estrange, "A Crow and a Pitcher," in Eminent Mythologists, 208.

⁶⁷ Anon., Fables, Moral & Political (London, 1703), sig. Allr.

⁶⁸Æsop's Fables with their Morals in Prose and Verse (1651); facing page: British Library copy.

⁶⁹Fables Moral and Political, sigs. A4v-A4r.

⁷⁰ On the "oppositional seam" that structures standard discursive formations of the period, such as the maxim, see Roland Barthes, "Reflections on the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld," New Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1980), 3-19.

⁷¹ Shaftesbury document, reproduced in James Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven and London, 1987), 523.

⁷² "Westminster-School," in The Gentleman's Magazine 6 (October, 1736), 611.

⁷³ Hoole, Æsop's Fables.

⁷⁴ Hoole, "Of the Fox and the Stork," in Æsop's Fables, 22.

⁷⁵Æsop Return'd from Tunbridge (London, 1698), sigs. A2r-A3v; Æsop at Epsom (London, 1689), sig. A2v.

⁷⁶ "To the Reader," Æsop at Tunbridge (London, 1698), 1.

⁷⁷ "Sharpers and Cullies," in Æsop Return'd from Tunbridge, 13.