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. He appears in courtly romance for the same reason as do the genre's human protagonists: because he is distinctive, superior, exceptional—in a word, heroic. In this respect he embodies the ideals of the courtly elite that romance as a genre is designed to celebrate. To this extent one could argue that in Orlando furioso—and more broadly within the romance tradition it epitomizes—rank trumps species as a marker of difference between persons.
On this view, Baiardo would, in fact, appear to be more suitable as a companion and peer for Rinaldo than would the vast mass of humanity. Certainly the romance tradition insists on a special linkage. Baiardo first appears, as Bayard, in the early thirteenth-century Quatre fils Aymon, traditionally attributed to Renaud de Montaubon, and here the horse already possesses the qualities that distinguish him as a literary figure. On one occasion, for instance, Renaud and Bayard compete in a grand horse race whose prize includes the crown of Charlemagne. Before the race commences, both horse and rider have been subjected to insults by other members of the field, so pride is particularly at stake. When the starting trumpets sound, Bayard and his master quickly find themselves at the rear of the field, and Renaud takes time to give his horse a pep talk:
[W]han Reynawde saw that it was tyme for to renne after the other: he spurred his horse, & said to bayarde, we been ferre behynde ye myght wel abide. For if ye be not soone afore: ye shall be blamed, whan Bayarde heard his master speake thus: he understoode him as well as thoughe he had been a man. Than he grylled his nosethrels and bare his head up and made a long necke, and tooke his course so fast that it semed the erthe should haue sonken under hym, and within a whyle he was passed all the other horses a ferre waye. (Right plesaunt…historie, fol. 49v)
[“Baiart, ce dist Renaus, trop uos alons tarjant.
Se cil i vont sans nos, blasme i averons grant;
Reprovés vos sera à trestot vo vivant.”
Baiart oï Renaut, si va le cief dreçant;
Ensement l’enten li com mere son enfant.
Il fronce des narines, le cief vait escoant.
Renaus lache les regnes, Baiart s’en va bruiant,
Tot à col estendu, le terre (porprennant);
En trois arpens de terre en a trespassé tant,
Que trestot le plus cointe se tient por (recreant).]
(4927–36)
Here the bond between horse and knight manifests itself in a common language and a harmony of interest, with the former acting as an expression of the latter. The La Vallière Manuscript of the Quatre fils has Bayard understand Renaud “com mere son enfant,” that is, as a mother does her child; William Caxton's 1489 English translation, perhaps drawn from a different copy text, renders the same line as “he understood him as well as thoughe he had been a man.” Like Renaud, Bayard is concerned with honor, his own and his master's, and the two figures base their claim to heroism on the determination to maintain their good name through exploits of the sort described in this episode. In the process, however, the Quatre fils Aymon also celebrates resistance to authority, situating itself within the tradition of the Old French “epics of revolt” (Calin 113), which take feudal injustice and rightful disobedience as their subject matter. From this standpoint the poem retails the exploits of Renaud in resisting the persecution of Charlemagne, whose nephew Renaud has slain after quarreling over a game of chess. In the action that follows, Bayard and Renaud emerge as equally resourceful opponents of Charlemagne, and when the two human antagonists are finally reconciled, it is at the expense of the horse, who effectively takes Renaud's place as the object of Charlemagne's punishment:
[Charlemagne] made be brought afore hym the good horse of Reynawde Bayarde. And whan he saw him: he began for to saye in this wyse. Ha Bayarde, bayarde, thou hast often angred me, but I am come to ye poynt, god gramercy for to auenge me…. And whan the kyng had sayd so: he made a great milstone to be fastened at the necke of bayard, and than made him to be cast from the brydge downe into the water, & whan Bayarde was thus tombled into the ryuer…the kynge…made great Ioye and so said. Ha bayarde nowe haue I that I desyred and wysshed so lo[n]g For ye be now dead…. And whan the fre[n]che men sawe the greate cruelnes of Charlemayne that auenged himself upon a poore beast: they were yll co[n]tent. (Right plesaunt…historie, fol. 146v)
[Puis (Charlemagne) fist mander Baiart que Renau li fist rendre.
“Baiart, dist Charlemagnes, ta vigor m’(as) fait vandre
Maint jor m’as (fait corrout), maint povre, disner, prendre.”
................................................
Li rois fist Baiart penre iluecques maintenant.
Une mu(e)le li pent à son col par devant,
Et il fu sor le pont, si lo bota avant.
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(Quant
