Animal Characters. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
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And as if it were not enough to reduce “intelletto umano” to “some tast” of “humane wit,” the edition of 1591 supplies a wholly misleading marginal note at this point, likening Baiardo's mental abilities to those not of any human being but of another horse: “Bayardo is compared with Bucephalus for wit.” In fact, Ariosto draws no explicit comparison between Baiardo and Bucephalus, here or anywhere else in his vast romance, nor does Alexander's horse appear by name anywhere in the Orlando furioso. Even so, Harington goes out of his way at this particular moment to introduce the parallel. It seems to derive from Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights (c. 169), which offers the following description of Bucephalus's death in battle against the Rajah Porus:
It is…related that Alexander, in the war against India, mounted upon that horse and doing valorous deeds, had driven him, with disregard of his own safety, too far into the enemies’ ranks. The horse had suffered deep wounds in his neck and side from the weapons hurled from every hand at Alexander, but though dying and almost exhausted from loss of blood, he yet in swiftest course bore the king from the midst of the foe; but when he had taken him out of range of the weapons, the horse at once fell, and satisfied with having saved his master breathed his last, with indications of relief that were almost human.
[Id etiam de isto equo memoratum est, quod, cum insidens in eo Alexander bello Indico at facinora faciens fortia, in hostium cuneum non satis sibi providens inmisisset, coniectisque undique in Alexan-drum telis, vulneribus altis in cervice atque in latere equus perfossus esset, moribundus tamen ac prope iam exanguis e medies hostibus regem vivacissimo cursu retulit atque, ubi eum extra tela extulerat, ilico concidit et, domini iam superstitis securus, quasi cum sensus humani solacio animam expiravit. (5.2.4)]
It is a stirring picture of equine fidelity, and like Ariosto's depiction of Baiardo and Rinaldo, it speaks to a form of heroic companionship that transcends the species barrier. As Gellius remarks just prior to this anecdote, Bucephalus “would never allow himself to be mounted by any other than the king” [“haud umquam inscendi sese ab alio nisi ab rege passus sit” (5.2.3)]; under the circumstances, it seems right to speak of the horse as literally giving up the ghost [“animam expira(rens)”], for he and his master share a very particular spiritual bond. Likewise, in the conventional Aristotelian vocabulary of species differences, it appears reasonable to suppose that the “animam” Bucephalus surrenders is, in fact, something like the immaterial “anima rationalis” that supposedly distinguishes human from nonhuman animals.2 Yet even so, to credit Baiardo with “intelletto umano” seems a far more capacious claim than to endow Bucephalus “quasi cum sensus humani solacio” [literally, “with relief of an almost human character”], and at any rate Harington's marginal gloss reroutes Ariosto's original comparison of horse and human being into a comparison of horse and horse. By contrast, when Ariosto declares that Baiardo refuses, out of “instinto naturale,” to fight Rinaldo (2.6.5), Harington faithfully preserves this explanation: “The beast did know this much by natures force, / To hurt his maister were a service bad” (2.6.7–8).
The general purpose of these peculiar renderings becomes clearer if we consult the interpretive endnotes appended to each canto of Harington's 1591 translation. At the conclusion to canto 1 (and again after canto 2) the endnote on “Allegorie” fits Baiardo into an emblematic tradition stretching back to Plato whereby Rinaldo's mount, “a strong horse without rider or governour, is likened to the desire of man that runnes furiously after Angelica as it were after pleasure or honor or whatsoever man doth most inordinately affect” (1.Allegorie). Standing here for “mans fervent and furious appetite”—his “unbridled desire” (2.Allegorie)—Baiardo is in manifest need of rational—that is, human—governance, and Harington's local renderings of specific lines from Ariosto help to fit the verse, as it were, to this particular construction. In so inclining Ariosto's poem, Harington integrates it into a popular mode of Platonic allegoresis, grounded originally in the Phaedrus, to which I shall return soon. However, he does so at the cost of Baiardo's own claims to rational motivation, which have led other readers of Ariosto to view “the wise horse” as “a sly pun on ‘Boiardo,’ whom Ariosto is ‘following’ much as Rinaldo pursues his (apparently errant, actually purposeful) steed” (Ascoli 28n52). Harington's translation and glosses open up the former line of interpretation at the same time that they foreclose the latter, and apparently all because Harington was comfortable assigning instinctive motivation to Baiardo's behavior but drew the line (or tried to, at any rate) when it came to endowing the beast with a human mind.
Of course, drawing the line between species was not a concern for Harington alone in the early modern period. As Erica Fudge has observed, the conventional early modern discourse of species difference was riddled with conundrums, exceptions, contradictions, and downright absurdities—a set of “logical breakdowns” that “the reemergence of skepticism” in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly via the philosophy of Descartes, “offers…a way of thinking through” (Fudge, Brutal Reasoning 122). In this broad cultural context, the persistence of animal characters like Baiardo—endowed with the capacity for language, with self-awareness and awareness of others, with the ability to reason in the abstract, with personal and political agency, and with a privileged position in complex social networks that cut across the boundaries of species—emerges as one aspect of a much larger philosophical dilemma. Simply put, horses like Rinaldo's make it impossible to think of humanity as a distinct category with exclusive attributes. Baiardo's legacy puts the question, as it were, to humanism, suggesting on the intuitive level what Giorgio Agamben has asserted more directly: that “the humanist discovery of man is that he lacks himself, the discovery of his irremediable lack of dignitas” (30). Form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form.
It remains finally impossible to demonstrate beyond any doubt that Harington's decisions as a translator of Ariosto were driven by discomfort with the Italian poet's implicit challenge to human dignitas. Harington has left no express declaration on the subject, and his position on it can be inferred only from his interpretive practices. However, these practices all move in the same direction, all seeking, in their way, to reaffirm the categorical distinction between human and nonhuman animals. To this extent it seems reasonable to read Harington's translation as participating in broad cultural anxieties concerning the character of humanity, anxieties that were also coming to the fore in the philosophical discourse of Harington's contemporaries. Beyond Harington, moreover, other writers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries clearly found Baiardo's legacy ever more untenable and reacted to it in a variety of consistently negative ways. In England, Shakespeare and Milton provide the most prominent cases in point.
Chivalry's End
Among the available studies of Shakespeare's horses, the paradigm-setting work may be an essay on the first tetralogy produced some twenty-five years ago by Robert N. Watson.3 There, in typically meticulous fashion, Watson argues that “literal and figurative references to horsemanship serve to connect the failure of self-rule in such figures as Richard II, Hotspur, Falstaf , and the Dolphin with their exclusion from political rule,” while parallel references “connect Henry IV's and Henry V's self-mastery with their political mastery of England” (“Horsemanship” 274). For Watson, the equation of horsemanship with self-mastery and, by extension, with political authority finds its locus classicus in Plato's Phaedrus, with its metaphor of the human soul as a winged chariot ideally governed by the charioteer Reason.4 As Watson demonstrates, this text was widely dispersed in the early modern period, generating responses and adaptations in contemporary verse, iconography, and even riding manuals. The running allusions to horsemanship in Shakespeare's second tetralogy arguably participate in this pattern of metaphorical reference. More broadly, one could also argue that Shakespeare's equestrian references speak to the early modern English gentry's ongoing translation from a warrior class to a leisure class by associating horsemanship with the “defunct ideology” of chivalry (Ralph Berry 105).5
Without doubt, Plato's metaphorical association of self-mastery with horsemanship has left its mark on Shakespeare's work, as it has done on early modern culture more broadly. Albert Ascoli, for one, has also traced its influence on the equestrian symbolism of Orlando furioso (382–83), and as we have seen, Sir John Harington was pleased to detect its influence there