However, the topos reaches its most distinctive form in Boiardo and Ariosto, in the horse's flat refusal to enter into combat against his master.
As I have argued above, this refusal—together with the broader qualities of character it presupposes—serves to ally Baiardo with Rinaldo, establishing a cross-species bond between the two companions that is grounded in their shared heroism and nobility and that serves to distinguish them from lesser human beings and lesser horses. However, this distinction does not prevent Baiardo from also serving as a symbolic referent for all horses everywhere. Indeed, the extreme popularity of the romances that deal with Baiardo, coupled with Baiardo's own status in those romances as the paragon of equine nobility, virtually assures that he will enter into late medieval popular culture as a synecdoche for horses in general. In England, for instance, the noun “bayard” becomes established in the mid-1300s as referring to “a bay horse”—in homage, the OED declares, to “the bright-bay-coloured magic steed given by Charlemagne to Renaud”; thereafter the term generalizes as “a kind of mock-heroic name for any horse” (s.v. “Bayard,” sb. 1, 2). Yet even in this downscale popularization, the character of Baiardo can assert itself in complex fashion across the species barrier. That, at least, is what it does in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1380–88), where a humble namesake of Renaud's horse offers a figurative referent for Troilus's sudden and irresistible infatuation:
As proude Bayard gynneth for to skippe
Out of the weye, so pryketh him his corn,
Til he a lasshe have of the longe whippe—
Than thynketh he, “Though I praunce al byforn
First in the trays, ful fat and newe shorn,
Yet am I but an hors, and horses lawe
I moot endure, and with my feres drawe”—
So ferde it by this fierse and proude knyght.
(1.218–25)
Even as it marks boundaries and specifies limits, Chaucer's simile expands into an interspecies mise-en-abîme, tracing discriminations and affiliations in the same moment. For all his pride, Bayard discovers that a horse is a horse, that even the most exemplary specimen of the kind must endure “horses lawe” and draw in the traces with his companions, and yet this discovery is made possible by the unhorselike fact that Bayard—like his descendants in Boiardo and Ariosto—“thinketh.” His hard-won self-awareness thus traces a bond between horse and man, especially the love-captivated Troilus, with whom he shares both consciousness of his situation and an inability to escape its constraints. In this case, at least, the human-animal boundary seems especially significant for the differences it fails to mark.
On the other hand, Baiardo's literary legacy does seem to inspire at least one English writer to draw the boundary between species with a firmer hand. Ariosto's great early modern translator, Sir John Harington, appears determined to distance Rinaldo's horse from human capacities and human character; at any rate, Harington consistently downplays the moments in Ariosto's narrative that endow the horse with intelligence and agency. When, for instance, Baiardo greets Angelica in canto 1, Ariosto describes him as going “mansueto alla donzella, / con umile sembiante e gesto umano, / come intorno al padrone il can saltella, / che sia duo giorni o tre stato lontano” (1.75.1–4)—that is, approaching “the damsel gently, with humble appearance and human gesture, as a dog dances about its master when he has been absent for two or three days.” Harington's version of these lines suppresses the phrase “gesto umano,” leaving the horse much more firmly situated within a subordinate and separate order of creation:
But to the damsell gently he doth go
In humble manner and in lowly sort,
A spaniell after absence fauneth so
And seekes to make his master play and sport.
(1.75.1–4)
Likewise, when Ariosto excuses Baiardo's disobedience of Rinaldo by explicitly crediting the horse with human understanding, Harington lessens the force of the attribution. Ariosto's phrase “il destrier, ch’avea intelletto umano, / non per vizio seguirsi tante miglia” [“the horse, which had human intellect, did not follow such a course out of vice” (2.20.5–6)] reappears in the Elizabethan version as “The horse (that had of humane wit some tast) / Ran not away for anie jadish knacke” (2.20.5–6). 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
