Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays Book

This play was hard for me to rate. I know Washington loved it, and perhaps during his time, and with his plight it would have been more effective. The love story conquers the play and really draws away from what could have been a more useful setting that the author wished to present his tragic hero in. The idea was good and the writing is good, it's not too much or over the top for a drama of the period, but it's too distracted. It wants o portray stoicism and patriotism, a pining for liberty and virtue, but it ends up saying this more than displaying it.

The ending is extraordinarily underwhelming, and if it weren't called "Cato A Tragedy" one might have a hard time discerning whether Cato was really the tragic hero or not, and the ending leaving them questioning whether it were a tragedy or not. It's style ends in a grim death, with a looming doom, but consummates itself with the Shakespearean comic success of love and marriage for the characters that seem more important to Cato.

Cato is put backstage for most of this, they mention him a lot, trust me it gets somewhat tiresome to hear of him and his virtue. The last part has him legitimately reading Plato and adhering to the immortality of the soul--the play, needless to say, lacks subtlety.


It wasn't great, but it also wasn't horrible.