The Pantomimic Cock

From 'The Glastonbury Romance' (1933) by John Cowper Powys:

"Thus, in immediate juxtaposition with Pilate's prolonged soliloquy and also with the pantomimic fooling of Capporelli, as the clown moved from group to group, Christ was led before Caiaphas and Peter denied Christ. The part of the  cock was introduced. This was a too dangerous experiment even for the two Dubliners. They maintained that there was such a deep and primordial poetry about the crowing of cocks, drenched in the dews of ten thousand dawns of human suffering, full of such equivocal, treacherous, and yet Homeric braggadocio, carrying memories of women in travail, of dying soldiers, of millions of tortured, imprisoned and executed victims of Society, -- that it would be vulgar, sacrilegious, a blasphemy against the dignity of the human spirit, impious, gross, offensive, ridiculous to introduce a pantomimic cock upon the stage. Besides -- the two Dubliners had argued -- no human eye ever actually sees the cock that makes its eyelids open. The crowing of the cock brings with it the passionate revolt of all the desperate lovers who like Romeo and Juliet would fain, if they could, hold back the coming of the dawn! It has become -- so the Dubliners protested -- one of the eternal symbols of the human race, recognised from Ultima Thule to Thibet, from Greenland to the Cape of Good Hope; and to introduce a *visual mockery* of such a thing in any performance would not be merely Aristophanic. It would be diabolic."

More favourite quotes of mine from this book: HERE.