SOURCE: "A New Parliament of Birds: Aesop, Fiction, and Jacobite Rhetoric," in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2, Winter 1993-94, pp. 235-54.

[In the following essay, Hanazaki examines the function of animals, and particuarly bird characters, in eighteenth-century British Aesopic fables employed for purposes of political satire.]

I

The fable, one of the most popular traditional generes in English literature, assumes a newly distinctive character in the decades around the turn of the seventeenth century. This, when seen in perspective, has implications for post-Revolutionary political rhetoric and the subsequent history of imaginative literature. Its marked trajectory between 1630 and 1680 has been perceived and illustrated,¹ but from a rather misleading angle. Certainly, the political history of the fable had been generally understood by the 1720s, but Samuel Croxall's "new" collection (1722), with which Annable Patterson begins her essay, testifies to a change: the genre became, ostensibly, depoliticized in the mid-century in the hands of hired, mostly second-rate, writers. Rebelling against L'Estrange's Jacobite reading, but anxious for promotion, the Hanoverian chaplain rewrote Aesop with morals more general in their application. John Gay's 1727 collection of fables, the urbane irony of which made it deservedly celebrated at the time, was aimed primarily at amusement for a court audience, and Edward Moore's imitations of Gay, first published in 1744 both in London and Dublin, were intended to inculcate domestic virtues in a female audience. By contrast, fables published singly in broadsheet and collectively in pamphlet form during Queen Anne's reign had reflected ministerial feuds and party strife; they were clearly intended for a political audience and often for an audience familiar with Dryden's The Hind and the Panther. Some of them adopted his animal-types representing religious sects in order to satirize the factious and rebellious as well as to allude to the subject of toleration, which remained controversial long after the 1688 Revolution.²The Hind and the Panther, published in 1687, was felt at that time to go far beyond the acceptable bounds of imagination both in content and form, for in a highly complex debate between the two animals on religious policies since Henry VIII it expressed a heartfelt wish that the nation be united under the Catholic king James II. The poem's scope and depth of imagination continued to have a strong hold on the reader, and the vituperative fervor that Dryden's "intelligent animals" aroused in political readers at the time of publication may well have been-remembered and have had its impact on the succeeding political fables.³

The process of change in the early decades of the century was complicated, as is recognized, by two fundamentally opposing and equally long traditions in Aesopic writing; its combination of allusion with instructiveness had rendered it a proper form of advice to a prince, hence the educational purport, but the fable's political nature also resided there. Fables published after the 1688 Revolution demonstrate varied effects of the two impulses, though their major preoccupation is no doubt political. Concerns over the Revolution Settlement and the increasing economic power of the Nonconformists are duly expressed in fables mostly by "minor" writers now almost forgotten. Looking at those published toward the last years of Queen Anne's reign, we see that familiar birds emerged as a new convention of the English fable addressing a wider political audience, before the genre became a mere device for pedagogues. In what follows I shall document this burst of bird typology in the context of its literary as well as its sociopolitical genesis. While in agreement with Thomas Noel's main thesis that the Aesopic fable was widely popular in the eighteenth century, this factual focus will, it is hoped, give a much clearer view of the genre than his survey of fable theories in Europe: a clearer view showing that the path which the English fable took to advance its popular appeal was distinct from that of its continental counterparts.⁴

II

Fable publication surged ahead conspicuously in 1698 when a host of fable pamphlets assailed the Town, featuring a narrator, an ugly, hunch-backed sage, "Æsop," masquerading at various social and political centres, observing people's follies and quibbles. Some allude to current political and literary topics, such as the where-abouts of the former Surveyor of the Imprimerie, L'Estrange, recently released from his imprisonment.⁵ But the political intent of these fables is rather minimal; mostly they are quick to respond to "humors," fashionable topics, changes of manners, and the social structure in town. Some of them clearly voice the discontent of a hack who tries to sell his work by making the best of the gossip current in town. A confidential note and a personal interest in "Æsop" are characteristic of the 1698 Aesopic pamphlets satirizing the beau monde and intelligentsia. The anonymous author of Æsop Return'd from Tunbridge, for instance, intimates a wish "to write Truth" by saying:

But let me whisper one thing in thy Ear, upon condition of secrecy, if thou wilt give me thy Word and Honour not to disclose it to any Body.

("The Preface")

This is a little device for winning the reader's attention, since in full confidence the author at once reveals that:

Æsop, it seems, has been a little disturb 'd of late, and it has been argu'd Pro & Con, amongst the Virtuosi, whether his Indisposition was the effect of Tunbridge Waters, or Company. He himself has absolv 'd the Waters, and condemn 'd the Company, which has oblig'd 'em in their own Justification to send him to Bedlam to have his own Brains set right, for endeavouring to rectifie theirs.

(ibid., "The Preface")

"Æsop" is certainly inherited in the titles of many pamphlets published in the following decades reporting parliamentary debates and ministerial feuds over the succession.⁶ A distinctive tone, either surreptitious or provocative, is also echoed there. However, what is exploited in later works is not only the Aesop persona but also his fictitious and "innocent" beasts. They are a rhetorical means, for instance, by which to bait those in the "present administration":

He has too great an Opinion of our present Administration … to think that they'll take Offence at what a Parcel of irrational Animals, and volatile Creatures act, and talk among them-selves; or be angry at a few Innocent Fables.

("The Publisher's Preface" to Æsopat the Bell-Tavern in Westminster, or, A Present from the October-Club, in a few select Fables. From Sir Roger L'Estrange [1711.])

The lapse of the Licensing Act in the House of Commons in 1695 has been considered to relate directly to the sudden growth in the production of political literature in the succeeding decades,⁷ but the increase of Aesopic publication suggests inherent contradictions in the "tradition of the fable as the political language of slaves" (Patterson, 283): it must be inferred either that in the post-Revolutionary era, fable was published following Elizabethan precedents for "subversive critical analysis" (ibid., 278) of affairs of state and for advocacy of free speech (ibid., 296),⁸ or that fable's political purport and its very limited effect on the course of politics became so familiar that writers operated the vehicle in an increasing spirit of amusement. The extent of any legal impact on literary publication is hard to measure, and it is likely that the 1695 expiry of the Act was one of the factors contributing to the rash of fable publications in the period. Political events aside, there are at least three other factors which appear to have been influential in the revival of Aesopic fables during 1698 to 1720: the first is a recent topic in town,⁹ now known as the controversy between the Ancients and the Moderns; the second is a species of classical literature called "Vita Esopi"; the third is, in a sense, its modernized version, acontemporary drama, Æsop, by Sir John Vanbrugh, enacted at Drury Lane in January 1697 (or possibly "as early as December 1696").¹⁰

The controversy between Sir William Temple and the Hon. Charles Boyle on one side, and Richard Bentley and William Wotton on the other, was certainly a "battle of the books," since Temple's claims for the superiority of ancient literature had been based upon Phalaris and Aesop,¹¹ and Bentley's counterargument was demonstrated through his detailed professional dissertation.¹² However, merits of literature and scholarship aside, the battle aroused strong interest in society because of its class implications; Temple was a dilettante aristocrat and regarded Bentley, the grandson of a stonemason, as an insolent invader of territory naturally his own. The changing social structure in which the hacks emerged was reflected in contemporary Aesops. "The Mouse and the Lion" in Æsop Naturaliz 'd (Cambridge, 1697), for instance, tells of the marriage of a poor tradesman (a mouse) with a lady of quality. All ten fables in Æsop Return 'dfrom Tunbridge describe those who do not—and indeed cannot—earn their own living. The fable of "The Grasshopper and the Ant" (vi) recasts the old story in a modern scene where an idle beau (or man of quality) asks "the frugal grave Cit" for bread. The Cit advises him to go to "the Fleet, or King's-Bench" (18). The persona Æsop in these pamphlets represents a hack, and his fables occasionally in hudibrastics express frustrated ambition, sometimes tinged with self-pity. The "Ass," the declared author of The Life of Æsop of Tunbridge … Part II(1698), for instance, describes himself as "a poor moneyless Pretender to Poetry, which some people call an honest, others a foolish, and every body, a drunken fellow."¹³

On a political level, however, the question of Aesop's authenticity is understood to be alluding more specifically to the metamorphosis of L'Estrange.¹⁴ Though strongly Tory in the long "Reflection" added to each fable, his prose translation first published in 1692 proved widely popular, largely on account of his elegant, yet vigorously familiar style.¹⁵ His work might well have been encouraging to a pack of minor scribes awaiting a chance to rise. A "Jacob Dash" boldly justifies his new attempt at fable by satirically quoting his predecessor, an "IEsop," or a modern hack whom L'Estrange was seen to represent:

SINCE nothing now but Dogrel [sic] Rhimes
Will please the Readers of our Times,
And every Scribler of the Town,
Of Little, Great, or No Renown,
Pesters the World with Frippery Stuff,
And thinks his Verses well enough.
Since Æsop strols from Place to Place,
Like banish'd Tory in Disgrace,
And checks the Frenzy of the Age,
In Deathless and Immortal Page.

He took up Quarters in Whitehall,
And there, like Rochester of old,
Spoke Truth undauntedly and bold:
(Æsop at Richmond … A Poem in Burlesque, II. 1-18)^l6

In "The Preface" to Æsop Return 'd from Tunbridge, a text probably published earlier that year, the author puns on the word "title" by referring to the recent Aesopic issues by L'Estrange and competing hacks; there might well be a suppressed allusion to the Pretender's (il)legitimate claim to the throne:

Upon these comes yet another; whether with better Title than the former, is a question, Reader, we leave thee to decide. Only I shall take the liberty to give thee some Hints, for the better Information of thy Judgment. First then as to his Person, it has resemblance enough to old Æsop' s (or the Picture of him, at least, as Planudes, and others, have drawn it) that had he left any Legitimate Issue behind him, Ours might very well plead his Figure in evidence of his Descent from the old Beau of Samos; and the Posture and Condition of their Intellects, make out the Relation be-twixt him and the Bully of Tunbridge. For this confesses himself out of his Wits when he writ, and t'other, by universal Consent, mad to Write what he writ.

Aesop's genealogy herein questioned, whether politically or not, recalls another tradition contributing to the fashion of resuscitating ")Esop." The "Planude" above-mentioned is one of the alleged authors of "Vita Esopi,"¹⁷ first printed in 1505 and conventionally adapted through the seventeenth century, for instance in Francis Barlow's Fables published in 1666 and in L'Estrange's Fables. Vanbrugh's comedy, the third factor concerned, also adapts the topic. The story, now seldom appreciated,¹⁸ is one typical of Moliere and Restoration comedy.¹⁹ An old, rather silly father, Learchus, plans to marry his pretty daughter, Euphronia, to the famous sage, IEsop. His am-bition for fame through his daughter's marriage fails when Euphronia finally marries her handsome young lover, Oronces. Act III starts with a dialogue between Æsop and Jacob Quaint, "a Genealogist." Quaint boasts of his knowledge of all the pedigrees in the town, including that of "the Noble Æsop."

ÆSOP: Dost thou then know my Father Friend? for I protest to thee, I am a Stranger to him.

QUAINT: Your Father, Sir, ha, ha; I know every Man's Father, Sir, and every Man's Grand-father, and every Man's Great Grand-father.

(Act III)²⁰

Vanbrugh also characterizes Æsop by making him frequently resort to his fables whether requested or not²¹ and emphasizing his physical appearance, to much theatrical advantage. Informed of the marriage planned by Learchus between Æsop and Euphronia, Oronces blurts out:

ORONCES: Condemn'd? to what? Speak! Quick.

DORIS: To be married.

ORONCES: Married? When, how, where, to what, to whom?

DORIS: Æsop, Æsop, Æsop, Æsop, Æsop.

ORONCES: Fiends and Spectres: What, that piece of Deformity, that Monster; that Crump?

(Act II)²²

At the sight of Æsop, a Country Gentleman laughs:

Haux, haux, haux, haux, haux: Joular, there
Boy, Joular, Joular, Tinker, Pedlar, Miss, Miss,
Miss, Miss, Miss—Blood—Blood and
Oons—O there he is; that must be he, I
have seen his Picture.
(Act IV)²³

This picture, well-known at the time from the impressive frontispieces in John Ogilby's Fables of Æsop (first illustrated by Francis Cleyn in the 1651 edition) and Francis Barlow's own Fables, is described in more detail in "To the Reader" to Æsop at Richmond:

He [Æsop] added, that he was beholden, not only to the Poets and Painters for representing him to the World with such Charms, as a Scythe-Leg, Beetle-Brow, Goggle-Eye, Blobber-Lip, swarthy Phiz, &c.²⁴

III

Conventional as it was in 1698 to emphasize the sage-cum-writer Aesop both in his appearance and parentage, the early decades of the next century saw a more prominent role played by his creatures, in representing major scenes of political life both domestic and European. Fables in the period are mostly occasioned by the (impending) deaths of the monarchs William III and Anne, and recall previous parliamentary debates regarding the Revolution Settlement. This alone might seem to suggest that fable was a form of writing strongly favoured by Jacobites,²⁵ but when we look at a larger number of the fables then published, such a statement needs modification. The sixteen fables in Æsop in Masquerade (1718), for instance, contemplate on the one hand, theroyal succession in England and Europe, and on the other, the increasing numbers and influence of the Nonconformists, to whom satirists were soon conventionally to ascribe an inordinate love of money and attendant moral decay in the nation at large.²⁶ The first of the twelve tales in Canterbury Tales, rendred [sic] into familiar verse (1701) alludes to the new allegations made by William Fuller early in 1701 against the Popish Lords.²⁷ In December 1691 Fuller had "confessed" his Jacobite intrigue with the Lords then in the Tower, was examined in Parliament in 1691-92,²⁸ and convicted of libel on failing to provide evidence he originally claimed to have. The culprit, however, repeated his trick ten years later; his accusations, this time supported by four letters, were carefully examined and proved yet again that he gave the House of Commons "amusement."²⁹ The fable's intention is to deride anti-Jacobites as well as potential Jacobites. The Lion is here James II, the Tyger (now "the Sov'raign Beast"), William III. The Ape (Fuller) asserts that

The Lion has no Living Son.
I'le prove his Birth is Spurious.
Hold—said the Sov'raign Beast, thou Sot,
And strait withdraw thy Phiz,
Should such a Rascal say, he's not
Legitimate, and true Begot,
The World will think he is. Moral
 Thus for the Teller's sake
the Tale we slight, And F-1l-rs only Read
what F-ll-rs write.
("The Plain Proof," 29-37)

Mockery of all the participants in the anti-Jacobite paranoia pervades the text; it is in fact anticipated in "The Preface," which explains how these "Tales" fell into the publisher's hands, and why they are now entitled "Canterbury Tales" "when they seem Calculated for the Meridian of London": because they "were found in … that City" which "is the Metropolis of the County [Kent]." The twelve tales have beasts, birds, humans, and, unusually, fish as characters, and the political sentiments expressed are various. Likewise, The Chaucer's Whims (1701) have no relation to the poet, and his name in the title suggests some provocation on the part of the anonymous author, presumably William Pittis. Satirical pamphlets alluding to Chaucer and his works had been published since the civil wars,³⁰ and the provocative use of traditional narrators, Chaucer or Aesop, was common in the early eighteenth century: Brown Bread and Honour, A Tale. Moderniz'd from an ancient Manuscript of Chaucer (1716) is another instance.

The reign of Queen Anne, and her last five years in particular, however, contains more promising examples of Jacobite fables. A technique frequently encountered in contemporary political literature was to exploit Aesopic creatures to voice the authors' satiric reviews of domestic events such as the Sacheverell trials (e.g., The Bull-Baiting: or, Sach—¹¹Dress'd up in Fire-Works [1709]), the aggravating split between the Lord Treasurer and Secretary of State ('Tis Pity They Shou 'd Be Parted; Or the Fable of the Bear and the Fox [1712]), and partisan comments on graver issues such as the peace negotiation to end the War of the Spanish Succession Æsop at Utrecht [1712], which is also and more notably allegorized in John Arbuthnot's prose History of John Bull). Alongside conventional Aesopic beast types such as lion, eagle, wolf, fox, cat, dog, and frog, however, there appeared commonly between 1708 and 1716a relatively consistent use of bird typology: the Eagle represents Queen Anne; the Cock commander in chief, Marlborough; Jays and Pyes party factions and perjurers; the Owls supporters of the Hanovers; the Swan an eloquent and noble high Tory St John; and more familiar birds like the Robin and the Blackbird epitomize, if fictitiously, those faithful to the Queen, respectively Robert Harley and a bard (i.e., a hack), whose fables are published often with significant allusions printed in black letters. Edmund Stacy, "the Author of the Black-Bird's Tale (or Song)," has been identified as a Tory propagandist.³¹ Considering his other pamphlets, such as a fable on Guiscard's attempted assassination of Harley (1711), a partisan defence in verse of the Church of England (The Picture of a Church Militant [1711]), and a verse translation of L'Estrange's Fables (1717, second edition, 1720), it may be that he was one of the hacks hired by Harley, but he himself was undoubtedly a high Tory. Stacy's High Church position is consistently evident. His Black-Bird's Tale. A Poem, The Black-Bird's Second Tale. A Poem, and The Tale of the Robin-red-breast, all published in 1710, are in the "advice-to-princes" tradition; the bird, the author's persona, warns Queen Anne against the "parrots, jays, chattering pies" (2), and "all sorts of vicious fowls" (6). The Royalist birds in the Black-Bird's Tale are swans, as in convention,³² and the Blackbird warns the Queen that they

 took their Flight,
And all good Birds will leave you quite.
(The Black-Bird's Tale, 7)

Further, the Robin warns secretively:

Of the Cuckows take heed,
They're a villanous Breed;
But chiefly, Madam, be arm'd,
'Gainst the Fowls that of late
Would have seiz'd your Estate,
And so boldly the Village alarm'd.
(The Tale of the Robin-red-breast, 11-12)

"Cuckows" represent Dissenters,³³ and "Fowls," a reminder of the discontented and rebellious fowls in Part III of Dryden's Hind and the Panther, refer to Williamites. Stacy's fear that factious Whigs and Nonconformists may lead the country to another revolution is even more strongly expressed in The Tale of the Raven and the Blackbird (1715). Unlike the preceding tales, this mostly consists of a dialogue between the two birds on their "new Landlord" (George I) and repeatedly emphasizes the Blackbird's honest and faithful design to continue warning the monarch.

Stacy's fables with vivid images of "highflyers" apparently had considerable circulation among political readers. "The Mag-pie and Black-bird" in The Welchman's Tales (1710), for instance, defends the Black-bird whom "a certain Pye" persecuted because he advised, out of genuine concern, that she should make her nest higher. The Tale of My Lord the Owl, told by the Blackbird (1718), a mock imitation of the Blackbird series, enacts a dialogue between the two birds, and wryly illustrates that the Blackbird's high Tory patriotism and moral argument are no longer to prosper. The Owl, a newly elected Whig Lord (1. 8), is scornful of the Blackbird:

'Twas you the Party War began,
Which blindly still you carry on,
Without considering that by this
You only do us Services. (21)

The Blackbird signifies Harley's tools, Bolingbroke (a high Tory) and a high Tory hack (like Stacy), in Robin-Red-Breast's Answer to the Black-Bird's Song (1715). The poem satirizes the late minister now facing impeachment, in his mock answer to Stacy's work published in March that year; it accuses Harley of embezzlement, high treason, and treachery with regard to the Jacobites. Bolingbroke's flight to the court of the Pretender at St. Germain, mentioned early in this text, is told in a more notable adaptation of Stacy: A Tale concerning a Swan. How that Swan did swim; and several other matters fit for Babes to hear, and know, and be instructed in (1715). This prose fable, occasioned by Anne's death and George I's accession to the throne, shows intriguing rhetorical features. "The Translator's Preface" explains how he found the manuscripts, reminding us of the Scriblerian fiction in The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. The tale tells us of the court of the Phoenix (Queen Anne), of her minister Robin-red-breast (Robert Harley), his relation with other birds, and her trust in a beauteous bird, the Swan (Bolingbroke), that finally came to her, "laden with golden Feathers from distant Shores" (7). The fifth chapter, on the Phoenix's death, alludes to an expected Jacobite rising and is printed in a deliberately obscure manner (for example, "*** call the Owls ** dark Birds *** Mysterious Things ***great Expectation from Paradise*** Ashes scatter'd in Foreign Kingdoms *** will rise ***" [14]), a mode we associate with Swift. The tale closes with the Owl's speech to the Eagle on behalf of the Swan, the bird impeached for treason. One is left with a temptation to read a Jacobite plot into the Tale, but this the anonymous author mocks by adding a note:

N.B. There is a famous Chymist preparing a Spirit, by which 'tis hop 'd, in time, more of this Manuscript will be recover 'd, to be the unspeakable Benefit of Mankind.(20)

IV

The bird typology thus commonly exploited by Tory hacks and their opponents features in early eighteenth-century fables on the succession. Contemporary fables satirizihng Nonconformists use beasts as well as birds. The Geese are a satirical image of the Papists, who hold the doctrine of passive obedience.³⁴ "Volpone," the cunning and treacherous fox in Jonson's city comedy as well as French medieval lore, lends its satirical catch-name to Godolphin in his moderate church policies and in promoting the union with Scotland.³⁵ Though different in ministerial allegiance, those more or less sympathetic to the ancient theory of the divine right of kings were major exponents of bird typology. The Eagle and the Robin (1709), so popular as to be pirated as well as reprinted in the same year, for instance, uniquely attacks Robert Harley as "quarrelsome" Robin, but is complimentary to the queen in depicting her favour for Marlborough. The story begins thus:

A LADY liv'd in former Days,
That well deserv'd the utmost Praise;
For Greatness, Birth, and Justice fam'd,
And every Virtue cou'd be nam'd.
Which made her Course of Life so even,
That she's a Saint (if dead) in Heaven.
(II. 1-6)³⁶

The fable's strong hold on the Stuart supporters is a combined force of icons with extraordinary fiction in which birds and beasts "talk like you and I." A penchant for tales is certainly characteristic of the age, but unlike the Jacobite Tories, at whom Steele sneered,

'Tis incredible! with what ridiculous Joy the Tories invent and receive Stories of this Sort; Stories! so wild, so inconclusive, that they are too low for the silliest Nurse that ever fondled a Changling to entertain. Amongst a vast Number of these, the FAITHFUL (for so I shall call the Jacobites hereafter, who are arriv'd to believe every Thing that pleases) with great Delight give out, That Sir Richard Steele is gone over to their Party.³⁷

Walpolean writers liked stories that were not necessarily of the Aesopic stock. Joseph Mitchell, for instance, adopted only two well-known Aesopic fables, "Reasonable Fear: or, The Frogs and Fighting Bulls. A Fable from Phadrus Applied to All People of Inferior Condition" and "Ways and Means: or, The Belly and the Members. A Fable from Menenius Agrippa. Applied to the Subjects of Great Britain" in A Tale and Two Fables in Verse (1727); these warn the public to obey the government. Amorous tales and romances, which Mitchell and Croxall wrote in profusion, were apparently the form of story favored by Walpolean writers.

Fiction such as fable was subject to misreading, since you could easily amplify its allusion by way of allegory. When it was written by Tories, it was in particular liable to be (mis)taken, if half-mockingly, as relating Jacobite intrigues. Such a suspicion is certainly justifiable in an elegantly abbreviated version of Mother Hubbards Tale (1715) and William Meston's A Tale of a Man and his Mare, found in an old Manuscript, never before printed (second edition, 1721). The latter is very entertaining, its octosyllabics satirizing George I as a man ideally suited to digging turnips. The Renaissance Protestant tradition of condemning any poetry as no more than the devil's work was exploited to attack those Tory sympathizers sufficiently competent to write fiction.³⁸The British Blood-Hounds; or a Chase after the State Run-a-ways, A Fable, with a true Copy of the Pretender's Last Will (1715?), an allegorical dialogue in prose between a "Citizen" and a "Forrester" on Anne's death, the Jacobites' intrigue, and the "happy" prospect of the Hanoverian succession is deliberately given the misnomer "fable," to deride those who might believe in such a thing as "The Pretender's Last Will," herein revealed by the Citizen (12-16). The political implications of bird icons cannot be neglected in this context. The use of fictitious beasts to attack political powers or persons is the very essence of the Aesopic tradition (from which Swift's later invention of the Yahoo, the most repugnant animal on earth, may be considered to descend), but bird typology, a new convention, conjures up ideas of flight and freedom. It suggests the flight of the Jacobites after the 1715 rising on the one hand,³⁹ and on the other, the idea of "free speech," which in retrospect has been attributed to Aesopic fables in general. Gay's achievement aside, the decline of fable protesting against the fast-ascending Whig oligarchy in the 1720s involves interpretations of "power" and "free speech." The concepts can be deployed by both the revolutionary and the reactionary to implement their respective ideologies, but as interpretations of "liberty" in the eighteenth century necessarily involved those of "property"⁴⁰ so they were likely to be claimed more dominantly by those already in power to buttress their established authority: hence the growing return of the fable collection in the mid-century as an instrument of indoctrination, for enforcing the existing political order and codes of behaviour (as Croxall's Fables represented it), rather than for the subversion of them. The civilwar period, when the Aesopic machinery was exploited by Royalists to reassert the divine right of the king, and when familiar biblical icons served parliamentarians to report satirically on the cavaliers' conduct in battle, was far distant;⁴¹ traditional Aesopic icons such as beasts and trees (in particular oaks) returned but as an appropriate reminder of the great chain of being.⁴²

The short period during which bird icons flourished in England was a transitional time in which party politics were being established, and here the Tory hacks' role in promulgating bird typology cannot be ignored. Their presumed loyalty to the monarchy (and to individual ministers such as Harley and Bolingbroke) is, on a secular and poetic level, to be seen in their preference for the "ancient" English tradition of poetry; Chaucer's title is echoed in Stacy's Parliament of Birds, with an account of the Late and Present Ministry, published by John Morphew in London and reprinted in Dublin by C. Carter, both in 1713. This parliament is a daydream about the Stuart succession. The fiction, however, is delicately made, since it artfully collates the wishful ideology with actual parliamentary proceedings (June 1712-July 1713) on the peace treaty and the removal of the Pretender from Lorraine.⁴³ Stacy rewrites history by making "a wealthy Gander" (15) propose a motion to impeach all factious fowls that had joined the "Foreign Leagues" (16). In indicating his intention to publish a sequel, Stacy is certainly not optimistic. But he seems to have hoped that his fable might move a larger part of the political audience towards Jacobitism. The underlined parallel between the aftermaths of 1641 and 1688, which both worked to reduce the "old Hereditary Right" (4), becomes evident and evaluated when the first vote is disclosed for the constitutional monarchy over Republicanism:

The Question's put, and they divided,
And when it came to be decided,
Upon a Scrutiny the Sum,
Was Eighty Eight to Forty One.
(11)

The second vote, "Three Hundred against Forty five" (12), wins an overwhelming support for the Stuarts. Stacy's Parliament won popularity, indeed; a pirated as well as a third edition appeared in the same year as the first, 1713.

If the debate in the fable recalls the repeated tension during the pre-Revolutionary years, then the style in which it is couched also carries a note of familiarity. Speakers are depicted partly as birds, partly as individual ministers, to ensure that no contemporary readers will mistake their identities and implied satire:

A Jay, the Scandal of the Age;
A turbulent mischievous Bird.
That had been Pander to a Lord.
Who got him to the Oak preferr'd
This Antick by his Tricks and Sport.
Had gain'd a Favourite at Court;
And, as 'tis said, had sometimes been
The Junto's Spie upon the QUEEN.
(9)

Other rhetorical features are variations on the double structure (praising virtues and blaming vices) of formal verse satire, familiar sayings, proverbial expressions,⁴⁴ and stock ideas of birds:

a Cock, that lost his Battle
Stands up, and thus began to rattle.
(8)

The partisan content aside, the style in the following address to the Queen made by "a Linnet, hatch'd in Hertfordshire" (6) is simple and accommodated to a larger political audience:

We likewise [sic] our own Constitution
Has been impair'd by Revolution;
Our antient Rights, and Forrest Laws
Mangled to serve a Modern Cause:
And many treach 'rous Matters done
To lessen or subvert the Crown;
Madam, to these we will apply
A sure and lasting Remedy.
(7)

The familiar tone thus created recalls an oral tradition (in which fable probably originates) and helps to enforce the political message arguing for the ancient constitution: both point to an esteem for the ancient.

The modern element, however, is also present in bird fables. In retelling public events they are original in plot and fundamentally self-referential. The "Brethren of the Quill"⁴⁵ who fought for the peace treaty are listed here with contempt by the belligerent Cock:

The Robin-redbreasts and the Larks,
The Blackbirds, Linnets, and such Sparks
May, with their artful Notes a while
Some thoughtless Fowls and Birds beguile.
But we, with all their Cunning. [sic] know
They're labouring their own Overthrow,
And this a little time will show.
(The Parliament of Birds, 8)

More than beasts, birds readily lend themselves to verbal plays and puns (such as birds and bards), and these feature in later bird fables, which were occasioned by less public events, but which nonetheless show the writer's allegiance to an old set of morals—good sense and loyalty. As is well-known among fable readers, Swift's An Answer to Delany's Fable of the Pheasant and the Lark, published in 1730 in Dublin, was occasioned by charges against his friend, Delany, for writing an epistle to Carteret insinuating that the Lord should increase his salary. Swift's fable expresses his respect and admiration for Delany on the one hand, and on the other, his contemptuous irritation at those who had no wit to appreciate good poetry; it is conducted in a characteristically Swiftean mode, self-mockery hinged on a series of puns and verbal games upon which fable finally rests. After punning on the word "Nightingal," with ostentatious elan, the author-bird flies off leaving the intended reader, Sheridan, in the silent darkness of the owl:

One Clincher more, and I have done,
I end my Labours with a Pun.
Jove send, this Nightingal may fall,
Who spends his Day and Night in gall.
So Nightingal and Lark adieu,
I see the greatest Owls in you,
That ever screecht or ever flew.
(II. 101-7)⁴⁶

The frequent appearance of birds in English political fables only tantalizes the modern reader with glimpses of the ideal of fable as a democratic mode of speech. "Aesopian writing" might be an increasingly common form of political resistance in Eastern Europe recently (Patterson, 273),⁴⁷ but insofar as early eighteenth-century England is concerned, fable looms large as a medium for traditional moralists who fought to restore the Stuart sovereignty and vigorously ridiculed Whigs by pinning them down as a variety of impious, squalid, noisy fowls. A spirited variation on the stock-opening common in tales ("In ancient time")—such as

IN Ancient Days when Birds cou'd speak
As plain as Men do now,
And learned Sayings us'd to break
From ev'ry Hedge and Bough.
(A Tale of the Finches [1716], 11. 1-4)⁴⁸

—marks a brief but memorable period in which "birds" (talented writers) and "bards" (hacks) both participated inpolitical discourse and represented the Jacobite cause, before they disappeared and the fable, an ancient form of fiction, became a largely dogmatic kind of writing intended for women and children.

Notes

¹ Annabel Patterson, "Fables of Power," Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 271-96. Subsequent references to this article cited more than once will appear in parenthesis in the text. Patterson's recent book, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1991) seems, one may add, an extension of this article, and is rather weak on eighteenth-century fables.

² See pp. 12 and 13 below. Among other numerous examples are "The Panther and his Son" in Æsop the Wanderer (1704); "The Revolution" in [William Pittis] Canterbury Tales (1701) and A Tale. Robin's Tame Pidgeons [sic.] Turn 'd Wild (1713), both of which draw on Dryden's inlaid fable of the pidgeons; "E sop's Thanks" in Bickerstaff's Æsop (1720), where the two universities are alluded to as "Two Milkwhite Hinds" (1. 1). Cf. A Poem in Defence of the Church of England, In Opposition to the Hind and Panther. Written By Mr. John Dryden (1709).

³ For a short catalogue of abusive pamphlets published during the year 1687, see Hugh MacDonald in Essential Articles for the Study of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), 22-53. The present essay does not concern itself with a detailed discussion of The Hind and the Panther, for reasons indicated below.

⁴ Thomas Noel, Theories of the Fable in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1975), in particular chapter 3.

⁵ See "To the Reader" in Æsop at Richmond, recovered of his late illness. A poem in burlesque, and also George Kitchin, Sir Roger L 'Estrange: A Contribution to the History of the Press in the Seventeenth Century (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truibner & Co., Ltd, 1913), 372. Other Aesopic pamphlets published in the year include: Æsop at Tunbridge; or, a few select fables in verse. By nar person of quality;. Æsop Return 'd from Tunbridge: or, Æsop out of his wits. In a few select fables in verse; Æsop at Epsom, by a cit; Æsop at Bath; or a few select fables in verse by a person of quality; Æsop at Whitehall, giving advice to the young Esops at Tunbridge and Bath; or, some fables [in verse] relating to Government. By a person of what quality you please.

⁶ See, for example, Æsop in Paris (1701), Æsop in Spain (1701, 1703), Æsop at Portugal (1704), Æsop in Scotland (1704) and Æsop in Europe. Or a general survey, of the present posture of affairs in England, Scotland, France (1706).

⁷ J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 1.

⁸ See also Joseph Jacobs, The Fables of Aesop. As first printed by William Caxton in 1484 with those of Avian, Alfonso and Poggio, now again edited etc., 2 vols. (1889). Vol. 1, History of the Aesopic Fable, 38-40.

⁹ Swift, A Full and True Account of the Battel Fought last Friday, Between the Antient and the Modern Books in St. James's Library (written 1697, printed 1710), in The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-68). Vol. 1, 1939, p. 145; G. V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688-1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury Bishop of Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 41.

¹⁰The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, the Plays edited by Bonamy Dobree, the Letters edited by Geoffrey Webb, 4 vols. (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1967), 2:7.

¹¹ "Ancient and Modern Learning" in Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple, edited, with an Introduction, by Samuel Holt Monk (Ann Arbor: The Univ. of Michigan Press, 1963), see p. 64 in particular.

¹² Bentley, A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris … and the Fables of SEsop (1697, to-gether with Wotton's Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, 2d ed.), 146; see also Boyle Dr. Bentley's Dissertations, (1698), 236. For a detailed and comprehensive account of the battle see Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991).

¹³ The "Epistle Dedicatory." See also Æsop at Richmond (11. 15-16).

¹⁴ Kitchin, L 'Estrange, 392, and further, 393-400; H. J. Blackham, The Fable as Literature (London and Dover, New Hampshire: The Athlone Press, 1985), 84-87; Patterson, "Fables of Power," 271-74.

¹⁵ Reviews by Motteux in The Gentleman's Journal (1691-92) and De la Crose in Works of the Learned (1692) (mentioned in Kitchin, L'Estrange, 400). L'Estrange's Fables were reissued repeatedly(1694, 1699, 1704, 1708, and 1714), commentated on in detail, possibly by James Gordon (1701), and adapted by other Tory writers, probably William Pittis in Æsop at the Bell-Tavern in Westminster (1711) (D.F. Foxon, English Verse 1701-1750. A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), 1:425]) and Edmund Stacy (1717), whom I shall discuss later.

¹⁶ This poem, not an Aesopic beast fable in the conventional sense, starts by referring to "Æsop" as an honest outspoken Tory (1-2), but in the main it portrays social types (such as the "modern Beaux"—"a cully'd Man o'th' Law," "a sneaking sniv'ling Cit," "the Country-Lass," "a Man of Wit" or just "Dick"; "most" of these are, the narrator says, courting "in Prose" or "in Chime") gathering at Richmond Wells, merely "to show" "their Foppery" (6-7), and unconcerned with the current moral or political state of affairs.

¹⁷ There is one other version, which was translated into Latin by Rinuccio de Castiglione in 1474, and then, through French and German texts, into English by Caxton (published in 1484).

¹⁸ Madeleine Bingham, Masks and Facades: Sir John Vanbrugh The Man in his Setting (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), 58-60; Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 419-20; and Leo Hughes, A Century of English Farce (Princeton N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956), 126. For a brief but good introductory account, see Kerry Downes, Sir John Vanbrugh: A Biography (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987), 133-38.

¹⁹ It is largely an adaptation of a French play written by Boursault, enacted as Esope a la Ville on 10 January 1690, but printed at Paris in 1693 under the title of Les Fables d Esope (see Vanbrugh's Prologue).

²⁰ Dobrée, Works, 2:33

²¹ For instance, see Act III in Dobree, Works, 2:29. For the frequent digression in the work, see Bingham, Masks, 59; Hume, Development, 419-20; and also Mahlon Ellwood Smith in PMLA 46 (1931): 225-36.

²² Dobree, Works, 2:22.

²³ Ibid., 45.

²⁴ See also the "Preface" to Æsop Naturaliz'd & Expos'd to the Publick View in His Own Hape and Dress.

²⁵ For thematic traits in Jacobite writing, see Paul Kleber Monod Jacobitism and the English People 1688-1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 49-54.

²⁶ See, for example, "The Consequences of a Standing Army" (ii), "Trade and Empire Inconsistent" (vi), "The Effect of Naturalizing Acts" (xi).

²⁷The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (London, 1806-1820), 5 (1809), 1336-37.

²⁸ Ibid., 671-75, 689-90.

²⁹ Ibid., 672, 1337.

³⁰ See, for example, A Canterbury Tale translated out of Chaucer's old English into Our Now Usuall Language … by A.B. (1641), Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers, and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, etc., collected by George Thomason, 1640-1661, 2 vols. (London: William Clowes & Sons, 1908), 1:29.

³¹ Foxon, vol. 1, S702.

³² Ogilby's Royalist swans (Fable V) in Esopics (1668).

³³The Fable of the Cuckoo (1701), 96-99 wherein the Cuckoo represents the malicious, stubborn and barbarous element among the Dissenters.

³⁴ "The Passive Goose" in Three Belgic Fables; or, Hieroglyphic Ridles [sic] (1729).

³⁵ See, for example, Joseph Browne's The Fox Set to Watch the Geese (1705; reissued under the title Volpone, or, the Fox [1706]), and an anonymous prose Vulpone [sic]: or The Scotch Riddle (1707).

³⁶ The text is taken from the one published by J. Bradford.

³⁷Chit-Chat (1716), no. 3, Richard Steele's Periodical Journalism 1714-16, ed. Rae Blanchard (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), 266.

³⁸ "Time was, when it was question'd much in Story,/Which was the Worst, the Devil, or a Tory?" (The Tripe Club. A Satyr [1706]).

³⁹ As one might expect, imagery of rape, suggested by H. Erskine-Hill as a "defining characteristic" of Jacobite writing ("Literature and the Jacobite Cause: Was There a Rhetoric of Jacobitism?", Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks [Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd, 1982], 49-69), is not found in Aesopic writing.

⁴⁰ H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Methuen, 1977).

⁴¹ See, for example, Be Wise as Serpents, innocent as Doves (20-26 July, 1644), A Dog's Elegy; or, Rupert's Tears for the Defeat at Marstonmoore (2 July 1644), England's Wolfe [sic] with Eagles Clawes (1646).

⁴² For a wider acceptance of the idea in the eighteenth century, see Arthur 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970; first 1936), 183-207.

⁴³The Parliamentary History of England, 6 (1810), 1141-44, 1165, 1207-14, 1224-26, 1232-37.

⁴⁴ See, for example, The Eagle and the Robin, 11. 120-23; The Emulation of the Insects (1754), the penultimate couplet. Some fables are also quoted like familiar proverbs. For instance, "'Tell him he may e'en gan his get, I'll have nothing to do with him I'll stay like the poor Country Mouse, in my own Habitation.' So Peg talkt," John Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull, ed. Alan W. Bower and Robert A. Erickson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), part 1, chapter 4, p. 55, 11. 23-25; see also chapter 6, p. 58, 11. 25-27.

⁴⁵ "The Dedication" in Bickerstaff's sop: or, The Humours of the Times, Digested into Fables [1720].

⁴⁶The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), 2:515.

⁴⁷ See also Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature (Munchen: Verlag Otto Sagner in Kommission, 1984)

⁴⁸ See also "The Succession" in Chaucer's Whims (1701), 11. 1-6; Volpone, or, the Fox (1706), 11. 1-10; The Eagle and the Robin (1709), 11. 1-6; "The Mag-Pye and Black-Birds" in The Welchman's Tales (1710), 11. 1-4; the opening of Delany's fable; and Pope's Dunciad, Book I, 11. 9-12.