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 equine civil disobedience. Shakespeare conjures up a nameless groom of Richard's stable to visit the deposed king and condole with him over his straitened circumstances, and perhaps inevitably, both Richard and his former groom turn to horsemanship for a vocabulary with which to describe what has gone wrong:
Groom. O how it ern’d my heart when I beheld In London streets, that coronation-day, When Bullingbrook rode on roan Barbary, That horse that thou so often hast bestrid, That horse that I so carefully have dress’d!
K. Richard. Rode he on Barbary? Tell me, gentle friend, How went he under him?
Groom. So proudly as if he disdain’d the ground.
K. Richard. So proud that Bullingbrook was on his back! That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand, This hand hath made him proud with clapping him. Would he not stumble? Would he not fall down, Since pride must have a fall, and break the neck Of that proud man that did usurp his back?
(5.5.76–89)
For Richard, the horse's behavior embodies a broader failure of relationship: a fracture of the bonds of gratitude and obedience that unite culture to nature and both to God. Thus the sin of pride binds Barbary and Bullingbrook together in Richard's imagination, and thus too Richard expresses particular surprise to find this sin disfiguring the singularly personal relationship he has shared with his horse. Barbary's willingness to bear Bullingbrook—his failure to refuse, in the manner of Baiardo, to turn against his true master—marks what one can only call a lapse of personal integrity. Indeed, if one views personal integrity as a function of personality in the modern, Cartesian sense of the term—that is, of personal agency grounded in introspective self-awareness—one must view the horse's lapse more broadly as the breakdown of a whole discourse of equine character, elaborated by the fabulous events of romance and subtended by the
