The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse" is one of
Story
In the original tale, a proud town mouse visits his cousin in the country. The country mouse offers the city mouse a meal of simple country cuisine, at which the visitor scoffs and invites the country mouse back to the city for a taste of the "fine life" and the two cousins dine on white bread and other fine foods. But their rich feast is interrupted by a cat which forces the rodent cousins to abandon their meal and retreat back into their mouse hole for safety. The town mouse tells the country mouse that the cat killed his mother and father and that he is frequently the target of attacks. After hearing this, the country mouse decides to return home, preferring security to opulence or, as the 13th-century preacher Odo of Cheriton phrased it, "I'd rather gnaw a bean than be gnawed by continual fear".[3][4]
Spread
The story was widespread in Classical times and there is an early Greek version by Babrius (Fable 108).[5] Horace included it as part of one of his satires (II.6), ending on this story in a poem comparing town living unfavorably to life in the country.[6] Marcus Aurelius alludes to it in his Meditations, Book 11.22; "Think of the country mouse and of the town mouse, and of the alarm and trepidation of the town mouse".[7]
However, it seems to have been the 12th century Anglo-Norman writer
British variations
British poetical treatments of the story vary widely. The Scottish
The one in the country envies her sister's rich living and pays her a visit, only to be chased by a cat and return home, contented with her own lot. Four final stanzas (lines 190–221) draw out the moral that it is better to limit one's ambition and one's appetites, warning those who make the belly their god that "The cat cummis and to the mous hes ee".Henryson attributes the story to Esope, myne author where Sir Thomas Wyatt makes it a song sung by "My mothers maydes when they did sowe and spynne" in the second of his satires.[13] This is more in accord with Horace's description of it as "an old wives' tale" but Wyatt's retelling otherwise echoes Henryson's: an impoverished country mouse visits her sister in town but is caught by the cat. In the second half of the poem (lines 70–112) Wyatt addresses his interlocutor John Poynz on the vanity of human wishes. Horace, on the other hand, had discussed his own theme at great length before closing on the story.
By contrast, the adaptation in La Fontaine's Fables, Le rat de ville et le rat des champs (I.9), is simply told.[14] There it is the town rat that invites the country rat home, only to have the meal disturbed by dogs (as in Horace); the country rat then departs, reflecting, as in Aesop, that peace is preferable to fearful plenty.
Adaptations dating from Britain's "Augustan Age" concentrate upon the Horatian version of the fable. The reference is direct in The hind and the panther transvers'd to the story of the country-mouse and the city mouse, written by Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax and Matthew Prior in 1687.[15] This was a satire directed against a piece of pro-Stuart propaganda and portrays the poet John Dryden (under the name of Bayes) proposing to elevate Horace's "dry naked History" into a religious allegory (page 4ff).
Part of the fun there is that in reality the Horatian retelling is far more sophisticated than the "plain simple thing" that Bayes pretends it is, especially in its depiction of Roman town-life at the height of its power. It is this aspect of Horace's writing that is underlined by the two adaptations of his satire made by other Augustan authors. The first was a joint work by the friends
In the following century the friends Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope combined in a similar imitation of Horace's Satire in octosyllabic couplets, with Pope playing the part of the story-teller from line 133 onwards and attributing the tale to contemporary fabulist Matthew Prior.[17] The point of the piece is once again to make a witty transposition of the Classical scene into present-day circumstances as an extension of the poem's anachronistic fun. At a slightly later date Rowland Rugeley (1738–76) was to imitate their performance in much the same manner in "The City Mouse and Country Mouse: a fable to a friend in town".[18] The argument has been made that, for all the fable's championing of country life, the emphasis on the urban and urbane in these poems is fully in the spirit of the Horatian original.[19]
In all versions of the original fable, much is made of the poor fare upon which the country mouse subsists. Dried (grey) peas and bacon are frequently mentioned and it is these two that the early 19th-century author Richard Scrafton Sharpe (c. 1780–1852) uses in a repetitive refrain to his lyrical treatment of "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse".[20] He was the author of Old friends in a new dress – or Familiar fables in verse, which went through different editions from 1807 onwards. The stories are told in song measures rather than as a narrative, and it was in a later edition that this retelling appeared.
Eastern analogies
A similar story appears among the fables of
Later adaptations
In 1927 the story was made into a French silent film, with puppet animation by the director
In 1980, the fable was whimsically adapted by
In the UK, Vicky Ireland dramatised the fable for Merseyside Young People's Theatre in 1987. The 80-minute play has since been acted in the US, South Africa and New Zealand.[26] It features William Boot, a country mouse bored with rural life at his grandmother's house, who is visited by his city cousin and learns that he has inherited Tallyhoe Lodge in London. They leave to run a gauntlet of adventures, from which William returns to settle gratefully in his peaceful country retreat.
Among musical interpretations, there have been the following:
- Louis-Nicolas Clérambault set words based on La Fontaine's fable in the 1730s[27]
- Jacques Offenbach included it in Six Fables de La Fontaine (1842) for soprano and small orchestra[28]
- Benjamin Godard, the last of his Six Fables de La Fontaine (op. 17, 1872/9)[29]
- Auguste Moutin (1821–1900) set it as a song in 1876.
- Ernest Reyer set La Fontaine's fable for his own performance[30]
- Jean-René Quignard for 2 children's voices
- Isabelle Aboulker's setting of La Fontaine's words is on her composite CD Les Fables Enchantées (1979)[31]
- Ida Gotkovsky, the third fable in her Hommage à Jean de La Fontaine for choir and orchestra, commissioned for the tercentenary of La Fontaine's death (1995)
- Claude Ballif, the fourth of his Chansonettes : 5 Fables de La Fontaine for small mixed choir (Op.72, Nº1 1995)
- Debra Kaye set Richard Scrafton Sharpe's lyric version of the fable for mezzo-soprano and piano in 1998. She describes this as 'a mini-opera' that combines the simplicity of folk music and operatic styles.[32]
- Dominique Rebaud choreographed the story in Annie Sellem's dance production of Les Fables à La Fontaine in 2004. It is set as a duo which contrasts the routines of contemporary dance and hip-hop. This segment also figures among the four included in the film of the same title made by Marie-Hélène Rebois in 2004.[33]
References
- ^ Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. p. 45.
- ^ D. L. Ashliman, Town Mouse and Country Mouse: fables of Aarne–Thompson type 112
- ^ John C.Jacobs: The Fables of Odo of Cheriton, New York, 1985, p. 87
- ISBN 9780300181913.
- ^ Michael Gilleland (19 February 2005). "Laudator Temporis Acti: Country Mouse and City Mouse". Laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ISBN 9780226067773. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ^ "The Internet Classics Archive | The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius". classics.mit.edu. Retrieved 15 April 2016.
- ^ "Fable 12. De mure urbano et rustico. (Walter of England – Nevelet)". Mythfolklore.net. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ^ Wanda Ostrowska Kaufmann, The Anthropology of Wisdom Literature, Westport CT 1996, pp.110–11; it appears at lines 1370–86 and there is a translation in Mediaeval Age, ed. Angel Flores New York 1963, pp.450–2
- ^ Murray Peabody Brush, The Isopo Laurenziano, Columbus, OH, 1899, pp.1–42
- ^ Mediaeval Scottish Poetry (Abbotsford Series), Glasgow, Scotland, 1892, pp. 130–8. The text can be found online at lib.rochester.edu
- ^ The reason for this difference and others is discussed in David West's essay "Of Mice and Men" in Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry, London, 1974, pp. 78–80
- ^ "Satire II:The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse by Sir Thomas Wyatt". Poemhunter.com. 1 January 2004. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ^ "Town Mouse and Country Mouse". Pitt.edu. 10 April 2011. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ^ Montagu, Charles; Prior, Matthew (1709). An online version ia at. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ^ Cowley's Essays, Kessinger Publishing, London 2004, pp.43–4; there is an online source at the first
- ^ pp.16-22
- ^ Miscellaneous poems and translations (1763), pp.1-9
- ^ Witke, Charles (1970). Witke, Charles: Latin Satire, Leiden, Netherlands, 1970, pp. 61–78. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ^ Text at Storynory
- ^ "The Baldwin Project: The Tortoise and the Geese by Maude Barrows Dutton". Mainlesson.com. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ^ "Available on YouTube". Archived from the original on 10 July 2014. Retrieved 14 April 2013 – via YouTube.
- ^ Available on YouTube Archived 10 July 2014 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "View online". Nfb.ca. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ^ Available on YouTube
- ^ "The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse (Ireland)". Dramaticpublishing.com. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ^ There is an excerpt online
- ^ There is a performance on YouTube
- ^ Performance on You Tube
- ^ The composer's interpretation (under his real name of Étienne Rey) is reported in Louis Lacombe's Philosophie et Musique, Paris 1896, p.262
- ^ "Performance on YouTube". 14 April 2011. Archived from the original on 19 December 2021. Retrieved 14 April 2013 – via YouTube.
- ^ "Debra Kaye, composer". Debra Kaye, composer. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
- ^ Arte TV archive
Further reading
- McKendry, John, ed. (1964). Aesop, Five Centuries of Illustrated Fables. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
External links
Media related to The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse at Wikimedia Commons
- Greek versions and European illustrations
- Book illustrations from the 15th to the 20th centuries online