“Cock and a Bull”
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman“Cock and a Bull” is Yorick’s label for Obadiah’s rambling complaint about a cow that does not calve and a parish bull accused of failing at its duty. The episode’s comic force lies in the gap between the story’s ostensible question and its suggestive circumstances: what sounds like an agricultural grievance becomes a tale about sexual suspicion, professional authority, and the pleasure of an extravagant digression. Yorick praises it as one of the best of its kind, and its appearance at the end of the fourth volume makes the phrase a compact emblem of the book’s appetite for stories that wander while remaining pointed.
The Complaint and Its Circumstances
Obadiah interrupts a conversation already underway, demanding an immediate hearing. The narrator then introduces the case: Walter Shandy is obliged to keep a bull for the parish, whether by an old manorial custom or because he holds the great tithes. The preceding summer, Obadiah had brought his cow to the bull. The narrator hesitates over the date, saying it was one day or another, then adds the conspicuous circumstance that it was the day Obadiah married Walter’s housemaid. The encounter and the marriage, the narrator observes, thus counted as one reckoning for another—a sidelong association that sets the story’s sexual double meanings in motion.
When Obadiah’s wife gives birth, he thanks God and concludes that he will soon have a calf. He visits the cow daily and repeatedly expects it to calve: first on Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday at the latest. It does not. The expected birth is postponed until six weeks have passed, at which point Obadiah’s suspicions settle on the bull. The chronology turns an ordinary delay into a comic investigation, while the juxtaposition of his wife’s childbirth and the cow’s anticipated calf quietly complicates the apparent subject of his complaint.
Blame, Expertise, and Innuendo
Obadiah reports that most of the townsmen think the bull is at fault. Walter asks whether a cow might be barren, turning to Dr. Slop for an answer. Dr. Slop replies that this never happens, then offers a different possibility: the man’s wife might have delivered naturally before her time. He asks whether the child has hair on his head. Obadiah says that the child is as hairy as he is, and the narrator adds that Obadiah has not shaved for three weeks. The exchange does not settle the matter; it sharpens the insinuation by making the child’s appearance and the delayed calf part of the same comic inquiry.
Walter defends the bull as a capable animal, though he admits that a parish as large as his is more than the bull can adequately serve. The animal, he says, nevertheless entered the business somehow and performs it with a grave face, which has earned Walter’s good opinion. Walter imagines that, in purer times, the bull might have done for Europa herself, if only he had two fewer legs. The classical allusion, the bull’s supposed professional inadequacy, and Walter’s concern that an accusation could ruin its character all inflate a small parish complaint into mock-legal and mythological business. For a town bull, Walter says, the loss of character would be equivalent to the loss of life.
The Phrase and Its Placement
Yorick’s final judgment supplies the tale with its name: “A Cock and a Bull,” he says, calling it one of the best he has ever heard. The phrase gathers up the story’s shifting claims without resolving them. The bull may be inadequate, the cow may be barren, or the child’s premature arrival may be relevant; the exchange leaves its insinuations comic rather than conclusive. The tale’s point is less a finding of fact than the elaborate pleasure of making a case out of uncertainty.
Its position matters: the phrase is the final joke before the stated end of the fourth volume. A complaint that begins by demanding an immediate hearing ends not with a verdict but with Yorick’s appreciative classification of the whole performance as a kind of tale. The closing placement makes “Cock and a Bull” both the subject of Obadiah’s dispute and a sly description of the novel’s own digressive storytelling: an apparently wayward account can entertain through its tangents, double meanings, and refusal to deliver a neat conclusion.
