A Cock and Bull Story, released in the United States and Australia as Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, is a 2006 British comedy film directed by Michael Winterbottom. It is a film-within-a-film, featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves as egotistical actors during the making in a screen adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s 18th century novel Tristram Shandy. Gillian Anderson and Keeley Hawes also play themselves in addition to their Tristram Shandy roles.
Coogan is playing the titular role in an adaptation of Tristram Shandy being filmed at a stately home. As Alexis Tadié has pointed out, Tristram Shandy is full of sounds that Sterne would like readers to hear quite literally, from a speaker’s vocal inflections to the tuning of Tristram’s fiddle (20-23). This scene is just one example of the key role that music plays in establishing Tristram Shandy as a catalyst of mid-eighteenth-century sentimentalism.
The functions that music performs in this novel all seem to reinforce the perception of Tristram Shandy as a work of sentiment. Music animates the speeches in Tristram Shandy, enabling them to communicate emotion to the auditors, subtly impressing listeners with emotions they would not have felt otherwise. Tristram says of these markings, “they impressed very distinct ideas of their several characters on his [Yorick's] fancy” (387). Yorick composes sermons with their performance in mind, recognizing a musical element in language and using it to make his sermons more emotive. Tristram Thomas received his first land patents in Alabama in 1834 for parcels of land in both Jefferson County and what is now Greene County.
There is a single parcel in Jefferson County of 40 acres in the same township and ranges of Etheldred W. and William Thomas, but not near the land of George Thomas or John or Benjamin Thomas who also received land patents in Jefferson County. Tristram’s first land patents in the Greene/Pickens County area were issued in 1834 falling entirely in what is now Greene County (but then was Pickens County) as does one of the land patents of the three that he received in 1837. Benjamin Thomas and Wilson Eatman had jointly patented this parcel of land in. All of these land patents of Tristram Thomas totaled approximately 720 acres over a five-year period.
