Stories of cocks and bulls: The Ending of Tristram ShandyMark Loveridge Tristram Shandy ends with Yorick's reply to Mrs Shandy's ingenuous question about the curiously mingled procreative histories of Obadiah's wife and the parish bull: L--d! said my mother, what is all this story about?— A cock and a bull, said Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.1 Yorick's joke also stands as mock-epitaph to the work as a whole, which Sterne thus apparently dismisses, via his fictional alter ego, as a cockand -bull story, a "long, rambling, idle ... concocted, incredible" tale.2 "It seems a particularly characteristic gesture," say the editors of the Florida edition of Tristram Shandy, "mat Sterne would end his work with a bawdy revivification of a proverbial expression."3 But it would be quite out of 1 The Life and Opinions ofTristram Shandy, Gentleman, 2 vols, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, The Florida Edition ofthe Works ofLaurence Sterne (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1978), 9, 33:809. References are to the original volume and chapter numbers, followed by the page number in the Florida edition. 2 See the oed, s.v. "bull." The entry records but does not credit the assertion of the British Apollo, established in 1708 to answer questions from the general public, that the word in its sense of "deceit, trickery, nonsense ... 'became a Proverb from the repeated Blunders of one Obadiah Bull, a Lawyer of London, who liv'd in the Reign of K. Henry the Seventh' "(no. 22, 1708). So Obadiah and the bull may indeed be one and the same thing, especially in view of Walter's reference to the London legal institution of "Doctors Commons" in the final chapter. 3 Tristram Shandy: The Notes, ed. Melvyn New, with Richard Davies and W.G. Day, vol. 3 of EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 1, October 1992 36 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION character for Sterne and Tristram to allow Yorick to close dieir narrative wim an unequivocally dismissive remark, even though self-mockery by proxy is well within Tristram's range of disarming and outlandish techniques. Tristram Shandy is notoriously a work in which everything of any importance may be grasped by two or more handles.4 It would be incongruous if the ending—very definitely an important moment— had nothing of this multifariousness about it.5 If it were a fully Shandean joke, it would be contrived to be both a throwaway remark and pregnant with latent meanings: a casual gesture, and a genuine attempt at an epitaph or summative moral, pointing towards Sterne's sense of what had been, or what had become, the central concerns and characteristics of his work. This doubleness would mean that Tristram Shandy was ending in a way which was at the same time conclusive and inconclusive; a conclusion "in which nothing is concluded," and in which the reader was invited bom to accept die work as closed and to reassess his or her reading.6 And this desirable (non-)consummation would, very probably , be achieved through me characteristic and highly favoured Shandean device of multiple, many-handled, occult reference or allusion. F One of mese layers of allusion is already clear. As Lodwick Hartley has pointed out, Yorick's joke operates as a discreet, virtually private reference to a poem by Sterne's highly indiscreet friend, John Hall-Stevenson, the original of Eugenius, Yorick's—and Tristram's— The Florida Edition ofthe Works ofLaurence Sterne (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984), p. 552, cited hereafter as Notes. 4 "Your walking stick is in no sense more shandalc than in that of its having more handles than one." Sterne to Dr John Eustace, 9 February 1768, on receiving the stick as a present from Eustace. Letters ofLaurence Sterne, ed. Lewis PerTy Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), p. 41 1. 5 The literature which bears on the vexed question of whether Tristram Shandy is a "finished" work begins with Wayne C. Booth's "Did Sterne Complete Tristram ShandyT Modern Philology 48 (1951), 172-83, where Booth argues that Sterne conceived of the story of Toby's amours with the widow Wadman as...