The Lion and the Mouse
The Scottish poet Robert Henryson, in a version he included in his Morall Fabillis[1] in the 1480s, expands the plea that the mouse makes and introduces serious themes of law, justice and politics.
In this case, Marot has been imprisoned and begs Jamet to help him get released, playing on his friend's forename and styling himself the lowly rat (rather than mouse).
[4] In Ivan Krylov's version (1833), the mouse, instead of disturbing the lion, requests permission to make a house upon his territory, stating it might one day prove useful in return.
Resentful of the idea that a creature so pitiful might provide him a service, the lion angrily tells the mouse to flee while he's still alive.
[5][6] One of these used to hang in the Great Hall at Chequers, the country house of the British prime minister, and was supposedly retouched by Winston Churchill so as to highlight the barely visible mouse,[7][8][9] though the veracity of the story is in doubt.
The Austrian artist Gustav Klimt incorporated a reference to the beginning of the story on the left hand side of his painting "The Fable" in 1883.
He did this legitimately in the Church of Our Lady and St Michael in Workington, Cumbria, where the underside of one of the seats in the choir stalls, installed in 1926, depicts the fable of the lion and the mouse.
[14] Another American sculptor, Tom Otterness, has made the fable the subject of an equally child-friendly sculpture among the 23 he installed on the outdoor terrace of the seaside Beelden aan Zee museum in Scheveningen, The Netherlands, in 2004.
His lion lies on its back with its legs bound and is perched on a plinth round the sides of which is carved a translation of Ivan Krylov's version of the fable.
[16] Other treatments of different versions have included Mabel Wood Hill's in her Aesop's Fables Interpreted Through Music (New York, 1920) for high voice and piano[17] and Werner Egk's Der Löwe und die Maus for small orchestra and children's choir, performed in 1931.
[22] In 19th century Britain the political cartoonist John Doyle adapted the fable to one of his monthly series of prints in February 1844.
In it the mouse nibbling at the net is Earl Russell, who prevailed on the House of Lords to free the leonine Daniel O'Connell from the imprisonment he had incurred for trying to repeal the Irish Act Of Union.
[27] 10 years later the animated short The Lion and the Mouse appeared, directed by Evelyn Lambart and with an original score by Maurice Blackburn.
[28] Though the fable is frequently a subject of children's literature, Jerry Pinkney's The Lion & the Mouse (2009) tells it through pictures alone, without the usual text of such books, and won the 2010 Caldecott Medal for its illustrations.
[31] Where Aesop's fable teaches that no-one should be despised, however low in the social scale, this reinterpretation suggests that one should not try to rise out of one's class through marriage.
The fable is introduced as an illustration into a longer Egyptian myth [34] in a papyrus of indeterminate date towards the start of the Common Era.
