Early modern writing on the horse offers no mere representational account of what Edward Topsell, the period’s leading zoological commentator, calls “fovre-footed beasts.” Rather, the horse, in Renaissance texts, offers something of a blank parchment. It is a notional being, a construct that is ripe for variegated textual appropriations in writings that enlighten human concerns. As the historical horse was tamed and bridled, manipulated and subjugated, the culturally or literally produced quadruped is configured through and haltered by oral and written language. Artificially troped, the manufactured, metaphorically enhanced horse is an entity onto which contemporary men’s and women’s concerns are projected. The purpose of this book is, at root, twofold. First, in examining the manifold effects of the embeddedness of this animal in the early modern mindset, we can encounter, vividly, a range of contemporary anxieties that may have been largely obfuscated otherwise. Always constructed in the primary texts in a manner that suggests at least implicit political coloring, the Renaissance horse is an amorphous and malleable beast that we can use, in our secondary work, to help throw into relief the intellectual, political, and societal investments of our criticism. Centrifugal and centripetal, horse-facilitated forces are energized: the troped early modern horse can empower our negotiations with a range of historical and current concerns, and our critically mediated awareness of issues such as class, gender, and power can vitalize the hitherto-marginalized potential of this bodily and linguistically industrious “fovre-footed beast.” Second, I urge students of early modern culture to be more sensitive to and appreciative of the horse in that culture. Noting a challenging problem or impediment to agency in a Renaissance work can sharpen our engagement with what we perceive to be infelicities of our own society.
To begin the process of vitalizing the cultural agency of horse references, it is necessary to forge definitions of the key words of the book title. This introduction asserts my understanding of these terms, while coevally establishing the critical assumptions that underpin my approach to the horse. Defining “England,” even as a mere geographical place, is never easy—the disputed nationality of Berwick attests to the uncertainty of exactly where Albion’s border with Scotland lies. England is often seen in an inappropriate, simplified way, as if it was some sort of undisputed, ethnically uncontested noun. Perhaps because of its historical lack of internal devolution, England can be perceived as a monotone nation state. The regional diversity of early modern England is, to some extent, concealed by the prevalence of the southeast in the production of and preoccupations within the texts of early printed books. As the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) and the Northern Rebellion (1569) most overtly indicate, cohesion between the regions was not always apparent. And while the horse was the tool by which early modern citizens moved between the variegated shires of the country, I am conscious that the texts considered emanate mainly from London. The book does, however, point to the striving for a national identity through horse tropes. With, for instance, its platform for the symbolic omnipotence of a mounted monarch in an engraving, the horse is deemed to transcend national differences through national investment in the figure of a great ruler. But the horse can also work to expose fissures in early modern conceptions of nationhood. In a sense, nothing is settled in, particularly, late Tudor England: the sidelining of women from nondomestic spheres is challenged by new writing, and, most pertinently for the God-fearing times, the official sectarian identity of the state changes with the propensity of the current monarch. Early modern England is exciting because it is a site of flux, growth, and expansion. English history, prior to the Tudor era, was a history of invaders conquering the sea-bordering land. Romans, Danes, Saxons, and Normans came and infiltrated, contributing to the richly divergent genetic make-up of its post-Renaissance peoples. English explorers and soldiers had intervened in non-English affairs long before the long-distance journeying of Drake, Frobisher, and Raleigh. But it is reasonable to mark the early Stuart period as the starting point of a self-conscious imperialism. One lasting legacy of this expansionism is the prevalence of the use of the English language on an almost worldly scale. Without England’s early modern expansionist energies, for example, Irish people would not speak and write in English. Inhabitants of former colonies do not engage with English-language documents of the Renaissance from their own nations because few exist. Instead, we are drawn to the former heart of empire, to the early modern spring of the modern, international English language.
The early modern period is an accessible one: Renaissance English is relatively easy to read; the rise in new media instigated a rise in coherently styled publications; and with its myths of great princes and ingenious writers, the public is drawn to a massive afterlife of secondary reimaginings of the period. “Early modern” can refer to any period after the Battle of Bosworth and before the Industrial Revolution. For the purpose of this book, “early modern” is taken to refer to between 1558 and 1660. These are convenient dates in terms of monarchical succession. But they also mark a period of immense population growth within England—human and equine growth. Historical inhabitant figures are notoriously difficult to estimate. However, the calculations of E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield are generally accepted. These demographers surmise that, between 1550 and 1650, the English population rose from 3 million to over 5 million.1 No historian has offered a figure for the numbers of horses during the same period. Such a task, I would suggest, would be eternally frustrated. Horse-selling transactions of the time are recorded in masses of toll-book records. This can give some indication of numbers, but how would one-owner, statically possessed horses be accounted for? It is clear, however, that the commercial demand for equine livestock increased in tandem with the human population.
Human habits of commerce and travel required more and more horses. As J. Crofts informs us, methods of moving goods and people were changing. From the 1560s onward, new, four-wheeled wagons were superseding traditional, hand-drawn carts.2 This led to a new, highly visible prominence of the beast. The horse does new things in early modern England. That is, partly, why I generally favor the terminology of the “early modern” over the “Renaissance.” Horsemanship did not cease during the Middle Ages; it simply became more conspicuously denoted as an art form in the Tudor era. And pulling wagons was a fresh development of horse management, not a “rebirth” of some previous, putatively great era. The scale of the horse’s involvement in early modern England is tangibly novel. According to the surely rough, but convincing, estimates of J. A. Chartres, the roads of England in 1700 had three or four times as much capacity as they had possessed in 1500.3 The horse facilitates the advancement of a mobile, shifting populace of traders and travelers. Without being too progressionist, we can see the origins of today’s arterially clogged Britain in the enhancement of horse-using early modern mobility.
Elizabethan England remains, however, vastly different from twenty-first-century England. Today, Norwich has a marginal role in national society; in the period of Elizabeth and Shakespeare, it was “the second largest English city.”4 Although today’s media disregards the Norfolk city, the Elizabethan regime could not. During August 1578, Elizabeth was displayed to Norwich’s citizens. The impressiveness of her progress can be guessed at through equine numbers: the Queen’s retinue had a thousand horses, according to Zillah Dovey, who has done much to recover the significance of the regally fervent occasion.5 The event was stage-managed through a large-scale relocating of Norwich’s own horses. For the whole month of August, it was forbidden for any citizen to park a horse in the town ditches or lanes.6 Removing the horses and their excrements proffers forth a sort of censored, sanitized, uncongested Norwich, one fit for the sight of Henry VIII’s cherished daughter. But horses were put in place throughout Norwich, even as the presence of others was proscribed: extra post horses were drafted, and every innkeeper was ordered to withhold a fit horse in reserve, lest some unforeseen emergency necessitated a Queen’s worker to seize the utility beast. Norwich’s equine August reveals much about the self-consciousness of early modern engagements with the horse. The magnificence of the Queen’s equine entourage stresses the projection of an informed, mobile bureaucracy; the ugliness of the remnants of the airbrushed horses’ digestive habits is removed to foster the city’s national reputation as a salubrious participant within the body politic. Both ruling elite and ruled citizens use either the horse’s presence, or its absence, to ventilate a public-relations friendly visage. The horse is mobilized to unite the visual power of London/Westminster with the cooperativeness of the country’s second city. Horses’ movements are controlled, subsumed within and subject to very human concerns of dominion and reign. In this book, as at Norwich in 1578, the animals are represented as being forever subject to masterly rein and reign. The horse is troped as a dominated sot. Entirely domesticated and prone to human guidance and handling, the early modern horse is afforded no intrinsic agency of its own.
The OED retains a huge number and variety of meanings for “horse,” both as a noun and as a verb. Its first definition of the noun, “horse,” is, here, most helpful in two ways: first, it defines the unambiguous physiology of the equine species, and, second, it showcases the centrality of the horse as a factor in human agency. The horse is:
A solid-hoofed perissodactyl [having feet with an odd number of toes] quadruped (equus caballus), having a flowing mane and tail, whose voice is a neigh. It is well known in the domestic state as a beast of burden and draught, and esp[ecially] as used for riding upon (OED n I.i.a).
This animal, the definition insists, has powerful capacity—it can carry, it can pull, and it can bear. But it is a provisional power, one that is worked “upon” by in-control humans. The OED’s language posits a union between horse and rider that is a conjunction between positive imperative and negative passivity. This equine negativeness, for me, is suggested by my overreading of the OED’s description of the horsey voice as a “neigh.” At base, the term is a simple, onomatopoeic transcription of the aural evidence of one aspect of horse acoustics. But it also beckons forth an impression of a lacuna or a vacuum. Rather than giving the horse a “voice,” the term, “neigh,” instead discovers the voicelessness of the beast, its absence from opinion giving and decision making.
“Overreading” can be a controversial technique. Michael Taylor, for instance, in a study of modern Shakespearean interpretive strategies, argues for its pros and cons by approving of one scholar’s overreading and disapproving of another’s within a single paragraph.7 Individual words can mean many different things. As long as there is a recorded precedent for a particular reading of a word, then, I maintain that it is permissible to attach that reading, however far it may have been from any author or compositor’s intention. Writing about overreading in a broader sense, Carol Neely asserts that “feminism needs to overread, to read to excess, the possibility of human (especially female gendered subjectivity) identity and agency [to expose] the possibility of women’s resistance or even subversion.”8 Such a program has an evidently emancipatory appeal: locating and overreading a hitherto buried aspect of female influence can undermine the androcentrism portrayed in, for instance, early modern conduct books. Despite the sometime nauseating frequency of early modern comparisons between horses and women, the two can hardly be said to be equal groups, despite the protestations of some animal rights activists. The bridled female voice can be heard positively, whereas the early modern horse’s voice is a nay.
Whereas Neely’s overreading demands the equality of female humanity with the species’ masculine counterparts, my overreading notices the inferiority of Equus caballus. This is not because my text has speciesist assumptions about man’s innate superiority. Instead, this is a consequence of the relevant historical period’s textual record of sometimes brutal linguistic subjection of the splendid but underling beast. The Renaissance horse is not an equal of men and women because no contemporary text constructs it as such. Erica Fudge, in a preface to an influential monograph on the frailty of early modern human status, bemoans what she considers to be the substantive absence of textually conveyed beasts from books of the period. Preserved only in material traces—leather binding and vellum on the pages—animals’ inherent values are marginalized by human dominion and expropriation.9 It may be added that studying early printed books digitally through Early English Books Online or other electronic databases removes us even further from the material traces of these unthanked animals. It is not presently fashionable to look for a universal truth in literature or philosophy. But it is hard to resist the efficacy of a comment by Montaigne, made known to English speakers through a 1603 translation by John Florio. While engaged in a bilious attack on the presumptuous superciliousness of filthy, lustily motivated mankind, Montaigne digresses to privilege the incorrigibility of animals. Unreconstructed humans should not feel superior to animals because we cannot know what they are thinking, he writes. When playing with his cat, Montaigne cannot tell if she enjoys the “dallying” as much as her idling owner: “we understand them [animals] no more than they us.”10 We are not privy to early modern cats’ or horses’ thoughts on humanity, which is probably to be appreciated gratefully by sensitive humans. This lack of voice, and sometimes lack of visual presence, can paradoxically empower the horse, in that the absent animal can serve to undermine the self-fashionings of human figures in, for example, Renaissance plays. For instance, in the Fletcher and Shakespeare play of circa 1611, Arcite, one of The Two Noble Kinsmen, speaks, with false modesty, of his equitation skills:
I dare not praise
My feat in horsemanship: yet they that knewe me
Would say it was my best peece.11
Arcite’s horsemanship is a noun—a “peece,” a thing, a weapon for the character’s struggle for masculine primacy. But we do not see the figure mounted—the play’s many voiceless horses are kept off stage. The genre of the narrative’s Chaucerian antecedent, the tale, allowed a more present role for the horse in the story imagined. On the small, early modern stage, however, the horse is visibly invisible. Meta-theatrically absent, Arcite’s horses are discovered to be unsubstantiated subjects, prone to the unverifiable bravura of the play’s construction of dramatis personae. Not present visually, they cannot support the claims of their masters.
Likewise, the horse has no agitational role in the societal anxieties of early modern England. Its role is to be a blank canvas, a malleable object for human, cerebral manipulation through an equine-soaked culture. In a sense, then, this book is about human concerns; on one level, it does not involve horses at all. This critical approach has led me to some difficulties, particularly with some animal liberation-orientated members of the academy. I do not engage with real Renaissance animals because access to them is unattainable; they are invariably represented and mediated through artificial, human conduits of cultural production. In addition to this issue of blocked access, it can be argued that virtually all of the growing body of secondary work on the early modern animal is concerned not with the corporal beast, but with humanity’s appropriation of its economic and metaphorical utilities. In this connection, a number of important works on the Renaissance horse have been published in recent decades.
Joan Thirsk’s pamphlet, Horses in Early Modern England: For Service, for Pleasure, for Power, appeared in 1978; Peter Edwards’s monograph, The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England, was published in 1987. The latter, in particular, functions as a reservoir of all manner of information on myriad aspects of early modern equitation—horse selling, stealing, and catholic trends in breeding. By definition, Edwards’s book focuses on the economic value of the horse, on its passive role in humans’ fiscal affairs.12 In the century up to 1657, when the exportation of horses was lifted, Edwards notes, horse numbers and demand for equine property rose steadily. Edwards’s knowledge of the early modern horse betrays his reverence for the creature, but in his work he exclusively writes about its material role in the lives of humans. “By the end of the period,” Edwards asserts, “not only were more people using horses, but they were better able to choose one that was suited to their particular needs.”13 So, while the English horse is thriving in strictly numerical and differential terms, its status remains uniformly lesser than its human masters and mistresses. Joan Thirsk presents the horse in an equally dispassionate light. For her, the animal is a tool that is used in the gallop toward modernity—if we accept the prevalent view that modernization is the advancement of equality of opportunity. “Horse-keeping,” Thirsk concludes, “had become everyman’s business . . . [rising horse numbers] created work that distributed profits from the horse trade among large numbers of working people.”14 The horse is, in this formulation, a renewable resource, a fuel that can be expanded and recreated to assist the spread of and trickle-down within the capitalist market. It is a put upon, voiceless commodity. Similarly, language that alludes to equine management exists as a repository for manipulation through culture, a resource that is appropriated largely in isolation from the corporal horse. According to Anthony Dent, horse language is now an undervalued, even esoteric, cabinet of linguistic riches. Dent’s book, Horses in Shakespeare’s England, seeks to reveal the dramatist’s “employment of the now secret, but then open, horse lexicon within the English language. Only the initiated now know what is meant by an honest horse.”15 By “initiated,” I assume that Dent means a person with some knowledge of horses in the present. Dent, I feel, rather underestimates the comprehensiveness of explanatory footnotes in modern editions of Shakespearean plays and readers’ capacity for dredging information from dictionaries and glossaries. Dent assumes that, linguistically, the Renaissance horse is intangible for the modern “uninitiated” reader; he seeks to make horse language less strange. Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, contrarily, implore us to perceive the horse as an exotic other. The horse, they maintain, is an example of an artefact that can transcend national and even continental boundaries. So accepting are we of the English horse’s foreign elements of breeding in its make-up, that “familiarity has de-exoticised them for us.”16 Racial mingling of equine blood was acceptable in the Renaissance, Jardine and Brotton write, whereas human racial purity was still an imperative. Arabian semen was welcome for the impregnation of Andalusian mares—this, it is argued, is a positive totem of collaborative potential between otherwise oppositional cultures.17 The joint authors’ avowed purpose is to stress the constructive potential of partnerships between Occident and Orient, West and East. The ethnicity-transcending, early modern horse is a pointer to how we today can engage in “collaborations and contestations” between east and west.18 Given the hawkish posturings of some humans on both sides of this global fissure, it is an optimistic prescription. Again, the horse is not configured as an entity of intrinsic worth. Multiracialized by man’s interference, it is a beacon for human aspirations. However centralized in critical scrutiny, however much lauded as a site of functional, positive energy, the horse’s negative capacity for human manipulation remains ever apparent.
The bridled, haltered, subjugated horse is troped in early modern texts, and readings of the horse’s cultural work are troped in this book. Readings are generated through a process of mutual exchange between discourses in primary texts and the critical orthodoxies that inform my practices. In a sense, the human critic is a sort of rider, manipulating readings out of existing tropes. In a 1750 attack on Warburton’s edition of Shakespeare, Thomas Edwards imagines an idealized, masculinist mode of shared intent between creative writer and critic. “A Profound Critic,” he pronounces, “has a right to declare that his Author wrote . . . whatever he thinks he should have written, with as much positiveness as if he had been at his elbow.”19 Edwards’s is an intentionalist approach, finely in step with the corrective motivations of the period’s neo-classical proclivities. But he goes so far as to empower the critic over the primary author. Edwards’s critic can assert his interpretation through use of the elbow, as a stern horseman uses a whip with his elbow. Here, I consciously reject Edwards’s human-only model of intellectual meaning generation and instead appropriate his words to accelerate an image of a whipped horse—the author whose intentions are relentlessly determined by a secondary agent. Troping is a complicated linguistic process: it is a factor of language that has been generally neglected by Shakespeareans. Francis Fergusson, to take an example, in his study of poetic, spiritual affinities and divergences in Dante and Shakespeare, only uses the term “trope” twice, briefly and in passing, despite including it in his monograph’s title.20 Fergusson neglects to define “trope,” but I must.
“Trope,” a word I use a lot in this book, has both Greek and Roman origins. The Latin, tropas, translates quite vaguely into the English, “figure of speech.”21 This Roman legacy of imprecision, perhaps, leads to J. A. Cudden remarking, accurately, that “in general it [the trope] still denotes any rhetorical or figurative device.”22 The Greek antecedent of the term, trópos, affords a more pressing and tighter reading: it translates as “to turn.”23 Edwin J. Barton and Glenda A. Hudson employ the Greek derivation to account for the effect of troping. Tropes, they explain, “are figures of speech that change the literal meaning of a word by turning it toward another word or concept.”24 In Romeo and Juliet, first published in 1597, the heroine is, at one point, constructed as a sexually expectant, presently unfulfilled young lover. Yearning for nuptial bliss, she exhorts time’s mechanics: “Gallop apace you fierie footed steedes.”25 Sexual progression is manifested through the urgency of the represented equines. Speed is of the essence. Lusty, sexual desire is troped by the speeding horse imagery. Horses turn the discourse of togetherness and closeness into the discourse of physical craving. Romantic satisfaction is visualized, turned into insatiated sexual appetite by the loud, voracious animals bodied forth through metaphorical and mythical imagining.
As material horses are ready-made trailers of shapeable energy, the troped, metaphorical horse is a flexible instrument for use in summoning up related or even unrelated concepts—or “deviations of meanings,” in Jennifer Bothamley’s words.26 Some current scholars of James Joyce’s prose fiction have been demonstrative in centralizing and carefully defining the role of tropological language—this is hardly surprising given the Joycean predilection for suggestive, expressionist rather than representational writing.27 Susan Shaw Sailer argues that the innovation of Finnegans Wake resides in its confrontational capacity to enforce a reader’s awareness of troping. “All language is tropic,” Sailer writes, but not necessarily in a conscious manner.28 “Some texts foster the illusion that their language is mimetic,” but it is a delusional pose, she insists.29 Shaw’s criticism itself, like all normative secondary work, is written in a mimetic style, one that seeks recovery and stabling of meaning. But it, too, tropes words and phrases, collaborating and turning with its reader to suggest all manner of alternative affinities and suggestions. Such a paradox is, I hope, noticeable and legitimate in this book. Horse meanings are illuminated via processes initiated, or at least recorded, by an early modern writer and completed by the critic. The put-upon Renaissance horse is troped and used in primary materials and by the secondary critic, who uses the potential readings to trace anxieties newly exposed by archaeological digging of layers of horse meaning and allusion.
In a guide to the role of tropes in a 1767 book, Thomas Gibbons presents the trope as an implement that, he assumes, is always subject to the author’s intention. He urges writers to use the facility sparingly. Tropes “ought to be discreetly used, and rather sparingly sprinkled,” he commands with pedagogical assurance.30 “An hungry stomach would not choose to make a meal upon fine sauces and delicious sweetmeats,” without any substantial food, he writes, so a voracious reader would care little for a superficial narrative that is overdecorated with figures such as the trope.31 Too many tropes “deserve the character of . . . trifles,” Gibbons concludes.32 Clearly defined much earlier in his text, “troping” in itself can almost be forgotten after these three (abbreviated by my selective quoting) comments. Instead, we are met by an ingenious range of food metaphors. Over-ornamented but unnourishing food is repeatedly troped by Gibbons, turning the meaning of distasteful elaboration into a plea for a simple, wholesome diet. Given his and his period’s intentionalist mentality, Gibbons most probably contrives this gastronomic distraction. Whatever, we are left with a reinforced awareness that troping can render apparent a controversy or discourse about an issue that is seemingly unrelated to the topic being primarily written about. A text can construct a picture of a horseman on a good horse: through politically inflected language, we can suddenly feel that we are reading about the governance of a ruler who holds the reins of power as the rider holds the reins of his horse. The early modern material and metaphorical horse was turned by its rider, its breeder, or its painter. It is troped in very many ways. Five areas of equine troping are addressed in this book: each variety is turned by the critic’s hand and stabled in an individual chapter. The troped, servile horse is exercised to serve notice of five early modern preoccupations, each accounted for in chronologically organized, implicitly theoretical chapters.
In the first chapter, a hungry horse’s troping in the play, Woodstock, is argued for as a metaphor of a dispossessed human populace. The animal’s voiceless suffering is articulated by a supposedly sympathetic nobleman, Thomas of Woodstock. New historicist thinking is quietly mined in the chapter. The representation of limited, but at least beckoned to, starved inferiors in the play fertilizes a sense of political opposition to the hegemonic, exploitative government. But despite an ephemeral change in its handling, the horse remains bridled and brutalized, its subversive potential having been crushed by the effectiveness of the state in eliminating any threat posed by the animal’s dissident supporter. Chapter two is indebted to the feminist quest for recovered instances of female agency in past cultures. To compare a woman to a horse, fit only to be dominated by male aggrandizement, is to deny female vitality. But can female constructs be seen to shake off and even expropriate equitation-like restraints? The chapter agrees that they can, but argues that haltered females always succumb to patriarchal management in textual denouements. Because the voiceless horse is such a manipulated beast, it ultimately must serve as a symbol of broken subservience. Moments of release are transient and finally ineffective. The third chapter focuses on a mathematically numerate, church-climbing, terpsichorean quadruped: Banks’s horse, Morocco. Many early modern writings attest to the species-transcending abilities of this individual beast. One of Morocco’s stunts exceeds all others in its fame: his reported ascent of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. The reception to the event in contemporary narratives is mixed—some accounts express abhorrence at the irreligious nature of the God-ignoring action. The cult of an extraordinary horse’s power becomes a sort of secular substitute for godliness, a marker for the decline of the steeple-less Saint Paul’s as a building and as a unifying symbol of English Christianity. The fourth chapter leans toward cultural materialist assumptions, in that its purpose is to argue that the horse race in Shirley’s play, Hide Parke, uncovers a chance for a critique of perceived corruption in Caroline society. Because it is only hinted at through dramatic trickery, the dishonesty of the successful members of society goes unchecked by the comedy’s generically necessary, happy ending. The horses are manipulated to contrive a race result. The play’s subversive capacity is, I argue, not eventually haltered, because a jocular, grit-concealing, retrospective commentary on the race is accepted by the characters as an uncontested, official, and therefore true account. It is up to the critic to challenge this official version of gambling and sport in the playworld represented. Chapter five is discreetly flavored with post-structuralist anxieties about the inadequacy of language properly to distinguish between material disparities. In this case, the competing dialogues are of peace and war. The horse can be read as a contesting, unstable register of tension in 1630s texts. During more serious, national conflict, the animal is subject to all all-out propaganda battle, as Cavaliers and Royalists struggle to master the public’s perception of who is holding the reins. Through representations of the horse, a situation can be represented as being totally peaceable; a competing party can describe the same scenario as tinderbox and warlike. Troped as symbolic of harmony on one reading, the horse can be troped as martial in a competing account. In 1660, pro-establishment imagery tropes the horse to assert the stability of society under the reinstated Stuarts. But its opposite—violent equine tropes—are so imprinted on the critic’s civil war-aware consciousness that war is as visible as the opposite that is even then being projected forward. The horse, over the period, is urged into cultural work, an endeavor that nearly always, I argue, serves to undermine unity within the complicated peoples and identities of early modern England. Even when galloping for the status quo, the bridled horse is troped into opposing positions. Appropriately enough, the first voiceless horses to be troped in this book, then, are hungry beasts, stationed at that contested site: Elizabethan Berwick.
Notes
1. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 531–34.
2. J. Crofts, Packhorse, Wagon and Post (London: Routledge, 1967), 7–8.
3. J. A. Chartres, Internal Trade in England, 1500–1700 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 40–41.
4. J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History (London: Edward Arnold, 1987), 84.
5. Zillah Dovey, An Elizabethan Progress: The Queen’s Journey into East Anglia, 1578 (Thrupp: Sutton, 1999), 65.
6. Ibid.
7. Michael Taylor, Shakespearean Criticism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 33.
8. Carol Neely, “Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses,” English Literary Renaissance, 18 (1988), 15.
9. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 2.
10. Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, done into English by John Florio, ed. Thomas Seccombe, 3 vols. (London: Grant Richards, 1908), II, 173.
11. John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen (London, 1634; STC 11075), E4v.
12. Edwards’s more recent book fleshes out his interest in the early modern horse, assessing its cultural role in a nuanced manner, but he still focuses primarily on the horse as an economic resource subject to human demand. Peter Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England (London: Continuum, 2007).
13. Peter Edwards, The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 50.
14. Joan Thirsk, Horses in Early Modern England: For Service, for Pleasure, for Power (Reading: University of Reading, 1978), 28.
15. Anthony Dent, Horses in Shakespeare’s England (London: J. A. Allen, 1987), 166. I am indebted also to Elaine Walker’s quite generalized but lucid and marvelously illustrated historical and cultural study of the relationship between horse and man, Horse (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).
16. Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (London: Reakton Books, 2000), 145.
17. Ibid., p. 169.
18. Ibid., p. 185.
19. Thomas Edwards, The Canons of Criticism (London: C. Bathurst, 1750), B1r.
20. Francis Fergusson, Trope and Allegory: Themes Common to Dante and Shakespeare (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 4, 40.
21. Robert K. Barnhart, comp., The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1988), 1170.
22. J. A. Cudden, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 1007.
23. Walter Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), p. 238; Ernest Weekley, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1967), II, 1546.
24. Edwin J. Barton and Glenda A. Hudson, A Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 74.
25. William Shakespeare, An Excellent Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet (London, 1597; STC 22322), F3r.
26. Jennifer Bothamley, Dictionary of Theories (London: Gale, 1993), 535.
27. For example, Earl G. Ingersoll, Engendered Trope in Joyce’s “Dubliners” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1996).
28. Susan Shaw Sailer, On the Void of To Be: Incoherence and Trope in “Finnegans Wake” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 111.
29. Ibid.
30. Thomas Gibbons, Rhetoric; or a View of its Principal Tropes and Figures (London: Buckland and Payne, 1767), B4r.
31. Ibid., B2v.
32. Ibid., B4r.