Chapter 1

       Baiardo's Legacy

      Lodovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516) begins with an encounter arranged by a horse. Having lost her protector to an onslaught of heathen warriors, the princess Angelica escapes the fray on her palfrey and falls into the company of the horseless Sacripante, King of Circassia, who has loved her long and unrequitedly. As the two make their way together, they are startled by an uproar in the nearby undergrowth, from which emerges the riderless Baiardo, steed of another suitor to Angelica, Rinaldo. Sacripante attempts to mount Baiardo, but the stallion submits only at the behest of Angelica, whom he greets, literally, “with human gesture” [“con…gesto umano” (1.75.2)]. Then, as the couple fare forward once more, Rinaldo appears, on foot, challenging Sacripante to combat for the theft of his horse and his lady.

      Sacripante, astride Baiardo, turns to attack the disadvantaged Rinaldo, but the horse will have none of it:

      The beast did know thus much by nature's force,

      To hurt his master were a service bad.

      The pagan could not nor with spur nor hand

      Make him unto his mind to go or stand.

      [(I)l destrier per instinto naturale

      non volea fare al suo signore oltraggio:

      né con man né con spron potea il Circasso

      farlo a volontà sua muover mai passo.]

      (2.6.4–8)

      Thus obliged to dismount and fight hand to hand, Sacripante falls to blows with Rinaldo, and Angelica once more uses the confusion of battle as a cover for escape. As the episode concludes, Rinaldo regains his horse and sets off in pursuit of his beloved, and Ariosto's narrator pauses to explain Baiardo's bizarre behavior:

      The horse (that had of humane wit some tast)

      Ran not away for anie jadish knacke.

      His going only was to this intent

      To guide his maister where the Ladie went.

      ….….….….….….….…..

      He followed her through valley, hill, and plaine,

      Through woods and thickets for his maisters sake

      Whom he permitted not to touch the raine

      For feare lest he some other way should take.

      [Fece il destrier, ch’avea intelletto umano,

      non per vizio seguirsi tante miglia,

      ma per guidar dove la donna giva,

      il suo signor, da chi bramar l’udiva.

      …. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. .

      Bramoso di ritrarlo ove fosse ela,

      per la gran selva inanzi se gli messe;

      né lo vlea lasciar montare in sella,

      perché ad altro camin non lo volgesse.]

      2.20.1–8, 22.1–4)

      Only when the horse is satisfied that Rinaldo will indeed follow Angelica does he permit his master to mount him once again.

      This sequence of events, comprising canto 1 and the first part of canto 2 of Ariosto's poem, can occur only because Baiardo, the horse, makes a series of calculated decisions: to abandon Rinaldo and pursue Angelica; by doing so to lead Rinaldo to Angelica; to refuse to engage in unequal combat against his master; and to reunite with his master when circumstances appear to warrant it. In the process, Baiardo reveals himself to possess what Ariosto calls “intelletto umano” (2.20.5). He distinguishes between persons, responds to certain ones with loyalty and intimacy, and confronts others with willful resistance. He occasionally differs in opinion even with his intimates, and he is prepared to translate this difference into uncooperative behavior. He is self-aware, acts on personal motives, reaches considered judgments concerning the motives and behavior of others, and engages in hypothetical reasoning. By all of these measures, Baiardo is a fully drawn literary character: an agent, a subject, a person.

      Baiardo is not unique, either within Ariosto or to Ariosto. Other Ariostan horses—Orlando's Brigliadoro, for instance, and Astolfo's Rabicano—are endowed with their own literary personalities. And more generally, the Furioso unfolds in a quasi-Ovidian universe characterized by highly unstable species boundaries, in which nonhuman animals can exhibit the indicia of human character while human beings, on the other hand, can devolve into nonhuman forms. Thus, for instance, just four cantos after the opening encounter between Angelica, Sacripante, Rinaldo, and Baiardo, another of Ariosto's heroes tethers his mount to a myrtle tree, only to hear the tree cry out in pain. As the hero, Ruggiero, questions the tree, it identifies itself as a former knight named Astolfo, imprisoned in arboreal form by the Circe-like enchantress Alcina, who has likewise transformed other knights-errant into streams and animals (“altri in liquido fonte, alcuni in fiera” [6.51.7]). However, such scenarios prove so endemic to the genre of courtly romance as to exceed the purview of any single author.

      Indeed, it is the generic legacy, as this meets its English demise in the works of Shakespeare and Milton, with which the present chapter concerns itself. My interest here engages the fate of animal characters such as Baiardo—the extraordinary yet also typical fauna of the romance tradition—at the hands of England's two greatest Renaissance poets. Equally responsive to this tradition, both Shakespeare and Milton repudiate it in different ways, the former with a certain Tory wistfulness, the latter with a Whiggish contempt. In doing so, both these authors arguably respond and contribute to the intellectual tensions that enable the Cartesian moment. In the process, they also lay the groundwork for future literary conventions that will strive for new rigor in distinguishing between human and nonhuman life by depriving the latter of any claim to sentience or conscious agency.

      Horse-Sense and Chivalry

      I begin with Ariosto's Baiardo for two reasons: because the Orlando furioso, more than any other literary work, may claim to stand as the apotheosis of the courtly romance tradition; and because within the Furioso, Baiardo offers a particularly rich example of that tradition's approach to the character potential of nonhuman animals. Like much else in Ariosto's poem, Rinaldo's horse carries with him the weight of history—a history that in his case encompasses some three and a half centuries of literary portrayal. In effect, he embodies a specific legacy of equine representation, one that derives from a chivalric culture centered on the relationship between warriors and horses and which, as a result, tends to assign enhanced subjectivity to certain privileged exemplars of both groups. Indeed, one might object that the very qualities which render Baiardo a fitting subject of chivalric song—his preternatural intelligence, loyalty, strength, and speed—prevent him from serving as an illustration of medieval attitudes toward horses or nonhuman animals in general. That, however, in a sense is the point. Baiardo is a literary product of a highly and self-consciously stratified social order.