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 as well, some centuries before Ascoli. However, Plato's metaphor offers little scope for the exercise of animal agency, which it understands only as a set of appetitive impulses in need of rational governance. As a result, this metaphor remains in certain ways hostile to the equine characters of chivalric romance, horses like Baiardo and Bucephalus who provide their masters not just with unquestioning obedience but with something closer to considered and selective collaboration. For Shakespeare, at least, that may well be the point. The poet's work unfolds in a universe broadly uncongenial to the sentient animals of the romance tradition, a universe in which the actual beasts that now and then wander onto the Shakespearean stage—most notably Crab in Two Gentlemen of Verona—function as nontheatrical singularities, excluded from the logic of mimesis and the social interaction it enables. By the same token, Shakespeare's figurative references to beasts are riddled with the anxiety that accompanies composite forms: Caliban the fish-man, Shylock the cur-man, Bottom the ass-man, Othello and Desdemona making the beast with two backs. All of this taken in aggregate suggests a Shakespearean sensibility with little sympathy for the chivalric ethos or for the peculiar relationship between human and nonhuman nature that it presupposes.
This is not to say, however, that Shakespeare ignores the world of chivalry: on the contrary, he gestures toward it through a variety of equestrian references that participate in the romance tradition and that resist the binary of dominance and servitude deriving from Plato's Phaedrus. Take, for instance, Henry V's Dolphin. An anti-Gallic caricature redolent with aristocratic snobbery, he lavishes extravagant praise on his horse, describing it in ways that echo the Ariostan idiom: “I will not change my horse with any that treads but on four [pasterns]. Ça, ha! He bounds from the earth, as if his entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus, chez les narines de feu! When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk; he trots the air…. It is a beast for Perseus. He is pure air and fire, and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him…. He is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts” (3.7.11–24). With his allusion to Pegasus, the Dolphin places his horse within a mythic lineage that extends through Orlando furioso's hippogriff , “un gran destriero alato” (4.4.7), trained by the enchanter Atlante to convey his ward Ruggiero to the far ends of the earth, while also encompassing Baiardo, who in Ariosto's sixteenth canto flies toward the pagan besiegers of Paris as if he had wings [“il destrier volta / tanto leggier, che fa sembrar ch’abbia ale” (16.49.1–2)]. The associations here are, of course, literary and figurative, rather than biological and literal, but the Dolphin uses them to insist that a difference of degree (his horse is better than other horses) is, in fact, a difference of kind: “He is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts.” It is a familiar rhetorical gesture, participating in the chivalric ethos that conceives distinctions of rank to be irreducible, unalterable, and fundamental determinants of identity.
Of course, to say “My horse is not a beast as other horses are” comes very close to saying “My horse is more like to me than to other horses,” which in turn raises the possibility of saying “My horse is more like to me than are other men.” This is the extreme implication of the chivalric premise that differences of degree can confound those of species, and the Dolphin wastes no time in hastening toward it: “It [the Dolphin's horse] is the prince of palfreys: his neigh is like the bidding of a monarch, and his countenance enforces homage…. ‘This a subject for a sovereign to reason on, and for
