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TITLE DEED HOW THE BOOK GOT ITS NAME 'a tale of a tub' by jonathan swift

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20080629
Author:GARY DEXTER

A Tale of a Tub sounds simple, but isn't. Jonathan Swift explained that it derived from a nautical tradition in which sailors, when menaced by a whale, would throw a tub overboard for it to play with; symbolically, the whale was Hobbes's atheistical tract Leviathan, and the tub Swift's own book, intended to distract it from scuttling the ship of state. But this can only be a partial explanation. The phrase 'a tale of a tub' was slang for 'a cock-and- bull story', and had been the title of a 1596 comedy by Ben Jonson, as well as featuring in works such as Webster's The White Devil. A 'tub', ...

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