Cato and the Crisis of Rhetoric

Reading Addison’s Cato (1713) as dramatizing a sequence of failed speech acts, this chapter finds the manifest ambivalence towards rhetoric in the play to be symptomatic of pervasive cultural anxieties about the nature of speech in an age marked by ‘the rage of party’. Addison’s tragedy asks: in a world in which eloquence no longer serves to defend or illuminate truth, can words do any good? In such a world, can words any longer serve the good man? Yet Cato does far more than merely reflect contemporary concerns about eloquence. It searches for a means of reclaiming the civic utility of rhetoric and tentatively incubates an alternative model of speech: one capable of persuading, moving, and unifying competing constituencies within the publics of and beyond the playhouse.