Animal Characters. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
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…. …. ……
Feed not thy sovereign's foe, my gentle earth,
Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense,
But let thy spiders, that suck up thy venom,
And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way,
Doing annoyance to the treacherous feet,
Which with usurping steps do trample thee.
Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies;
And when they from thy bosom pluck a flower,
Guard it, I pray thee, with a lurking adder.
(3.2.6–20)
As Gabriel Egan has observed, “Throughout the drama of Shakespeare, characters speak of the world around them as though it is alive” (22), and Richard's speech provides an exemplary instance of this habit. Its logic derives from the Piconian assumption that “God has sown and planted” throughout the fabric of nature a “harmony of the universe which the Greeks with greater aptness of terms called sumpatheia” (Pico 57). On Richard's view, the same divine will that ordained the natural order also ordained his own privileged position within that order. Thus any act of rebellion against Richard is equivalent to rebellion against nature itself, and the way is cleared, in Richard's imagination, for spiders, toads, and adders to fight on his behalf. Putting the same idea more directly to Bullingbrook and his allies, Richard elsewhere frames it in epidemiological terms:
[T]hough you think that all, as you have done,
Have torn their souls by turning them from us,
And we are barren and bereft of friends,
Yet know my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot.
(3.3.82–88)
Elsewhere still Richard urges the very same notion via an astronomical analogy:
[W]hen this thief, this traitor Bullingbrook
Who all this while hath revell’d in the night,
Whilst we were wandering with the antipodes,
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day.
(3.2.47–52)
Nonhuman animals, plagues, heavenly bodies—Richard imagines himself as intimately aligned with all of these by virtue of their common status as expressions of the divine purpose. Within this context his own royal nature emerges as an object of revelation rather than attainment: something to be displayed and admired, not maintained and contested.
It should be immediately evident that the chivalric bond between horse and master with which this chapter is concerned—what I have called Baiardo's legacy—relates to Richard's general self-presentation as does species to genus. If, that is, the king's preeminence is written into the fabric of nature, it should be recognizable not just by toads and adders but by more exalted beasts as well, and chivalric equestrian culture lends special importance to the horse as a case in point. That is why the Alexander romances insist that Bucephalus would admit only one rider;7 in a universe imbued with divine harmony, the prince of horses instinctively recognizes the prince of men and submits to him and him alone. Likewise, Baiardo's refusal—in both Ariosto and Boiardo—to do battle with his master speaks to the same model of sympathetic nature; the extraordinary horse, understanding himself as such, recognizes his counterpart in the extraordinary man and obeys no other. In a sense, Shakespeare's Richard II can be understood as an extreme embodiment of this model of the universe: a dramatic figure whose governing principle is the law of universal harmony, a character created to take this law seriously and tease out its implications for all to see.
Understood in this way, Richard opens his play by enacting a problem intrinsic to his mode of self-apprehension: if the king stands preeminent within the order of nature, to what extent may he preempt that order? Has the divine will fashioned royal privilege as a principle of self-negation empowered to suspend, supersede, reconfigure, or simply ignore its other manifestations? Richard's own view of the question is made clear by his conduct of the dispute between Mowbray and Bullingbrook with which his play begins. “We were not born to sue, but to command” (1.1.196), he tells the quarreling peers and then prepares to adjudicate their differences via the definitive ritual of courtly romance, the trial by joust:
Be ready, as your lives shall answer it,
At Coventry upon Saint Lambert's day.
There shall your swords and lances arbitrate
The swelling differences of your settled hate.
Since we cannot atone you, we shall see
Justice design the victor's chivalry.
(1.1.198–203)
Of course, this is not how things turn out. Instead, Richard aborts the trial by combat, replaces it with royal fiat, and thus fashions himself into the first and most ominous antichivalric principle in his own play:
Let them lay by their helmets and their spears,
And both return back to their chairs again.
withdraw with us, and let the trumpets sound
While we return these dukes what we decree.
(1.3.119-22)
One may argue endlessly (and, in my opinion, pointlessly) whether Richard's behavior justifies Bullingbrook's rebellion; to my mind, Richard II concerns itself less with what should be than with what is. To this extent, the opening disruption of chivalric ritual sets the tone for everything that follows, placing the play's events in a world at odds with the logic and gestures of courtly romance. In this world even the most vocal advocate of the chivalric ethos, Richard himself, lacks the courage of his convictions. Unwilling to rely on trial by combat as an instrument of divine justice, he replaces it with royal decree. At Barkloughly Castle his extreme assertions of divine right prove so patently out of step with circumstances that he feels obliged to defend them, both to his companions and to himself:
Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords,
This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones
Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king
Shall falter under foul rebellion's arms.
(3.2.23-26)
Of course, the defense is vain, even when taken on its own terms. Richard's hopeful expectation that “[t]his earth shall have a feeling” in itself admits the contrary: that egan's notion of a living, feeling world exists in this play, even for Richard, only as a function of the hypothetical subjunctive. Richard does falter, the stones do not rise up, and the chivalric ideal of a monarch at one with his environment yields to the image of a resistant natural world, figured through a flawed relationship between horse and rider:
Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaëton,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades.
(3.3.178-79)
Critics have long read these lines as a glance at “Richard's failures of self-rule,” which “have already deposed him from the solar chariot” (Watson, “Horsemanship” 284). However, at its heart, the tale of Phaethon is one of disharmony between man and nature: not just the ecological catastrophe of a sun-scorched earth but the more intimate strife between horse and rider locked in a fruitless contest of wills. As such, it marks the opposite of the Rinaldo-Baiardo dyad, horse and man in a harmony beyond dominance and submission.
If Richard II opens by invoking yet disabling the conventional expectations and topoi of chivalric romance, it ends in the same way. Indeed, Richard's final conversation is focused on the failure of the horse-rider relationship as exemplified in Boiardo and Ariosto by what I have called the topos of