Addendum: ‘Lest Men, Like Fishes’

Extract

Further instances of the topos of big fishes devouring the little, cited in previous issues of Traditio, include the following, in addition to those given in M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, Mich. 1950), which appeared too late for inclusion in the previous discussions. Tilley offers a significant number of references under the headings: F 311 (‘The great fish eat the small’), and, analogously, L 354 (‘The little cannot be great unless he devours many’), Ο 63 (‘There would be no great ones if there were no little ones’), R 102 (‘The rich devour the poor, the strong the weak’), and Τ 507 (‘Great trees keep under the little ones’). See also the allusions in Kenneth Muir's 1952 edition of Shakespeare's Lear, annotating 4.2.49-50 (p. 156), and deriving some instances from F. P. Wilson's essay, ‘Shakespeare's Reading.’ We may compare aiso Plutarch, Cleverness of Animals 964, citing the already-noted Hesiod, Works and Days 277-79. The fifteenth-century Lanterne of reads: ‘But as þ greet fisches eeten þè smale so riche men of J)is world deuouren þe pore to her bare boon…’