Cato's Tears

Abstract

Addison's Cato (1713) and Thomson's Sophinisba (1730) make a spectacle of political cultures absorbed by the emotional dilemmas of empire. They dramatize, for British subjects, complicated Moors in an imaginary North Africa. Set within a politically divided, unstable Roman sphere situated in Mediterranean Africa, Cato and Sophinisba lead one to conclude that strategic uses of post-republican Rome fueled the development of important strands of British sensibility. Long an empire in the sense of being a conqueror of other peoples, but just lately facing government by an emperor, this version of Rome exhibits the untidy connection between tyrants at home and outposts abroad. In the long eighteenth century in Great Britain, this connection is particularly generative of masculine anguish. The conflicts over political succession in which modern political agency develops imply an international arena-the total geography of diplomatic, military, and mercantile action. Race serves late Stuart high culture as a way of signifying crises of identification and many degrees and kinds of power. In England, the Age of Sensibility begins with the adjustments of masculine experience in a parliamentary and expansionist culture during the Restoration. The literature of sensibility, conventionally assigned to the middle of the eighteenth century, is just one episode in the long cultural history of the sensitive man. The specific eighteenth-century upsurge of tender masculinity depends on a cast of characters developed through conflicts over political succession. Succession is a family affair, but England's family is international in character, enmeshed in the cousinly networks of incipient empires. In Cato and Sophinisba, liberty, love and suffering persistently combine in the figures of erotic aliens whose racial difference is also an emotional difference. Well before 1713, therefore, race is an operative term in the politics of emotion. At first glance, it appears that racial difference operates in these plays to distinguish Great Britain (in the guise of Rome) from uneasily subjugated cultures. In other words, it looks as though race is not yet internal to national