The purpose of this book has been, in part, to increase readers’ critical sensitivity to the myriad nuances that the horse illuminates in early modern culture. To argue for the prominence of the beast is simple: one look at a Shakespeare concordance folio, for instance, shows that the word “horse” alone needs nearly two pages of small-fonted writing for its manifold appearances to be listed.1 The culturally constructed, early modern horse, however, enjoys a vitality—to use Bent Sorensen’s word—that bounds out of the Renaissance, embedding itself in subsequent histories. Sorensen, in a recent, abundantly illustrated article, demonstrates that one particular Renaissance representation of a horse has been copied for centuries.2 An anatomical illustration of a flayed horse (1598) by the Italian Carlo Ruini has been used as a model by a host of followers and plagiarists, from the Englishman Andrew Snape in 1683, right up to the designers of a trophy for a prestigious, recently instigated horserace. Ruini’s dissected beast, then, leaves a visible legacy in fine arts and veterinary sciences, but the intellectual legacy of the metaphorical horse can, I argue, imprint a more deeply constituted effect on our understanding of the early modern—and of the present. At a rare, outdoors performance of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, during August 2002, the audience was incited by the actor playing Gower, when doubling up as a “Master of Ceremonies,” to “act out the horses.” In a meta-theatrical conceit, the audience galloped, neighed, and snorted, as the conspicuously horseless “riders”—the actors—marched across the stage to commence the joust at Pentapolis. Although comically diverting, the harnessing of the equine-like capacities of the audience was no mere gimmick. Rather, forced to behave in a ludicrous, nonhuman manner, audience members become aware that they are being manipulated, as a rider orientates a horse or as a government manipulates official narratives and public opinion. Forcing the viewers to behave like orderly, managed horses ultimately makes them more sensitive to the controlling tactics that the plays’ characters are presented as using to gain advantage over others. The audience becomes more cynical, as, forced to act out a transparently imaginary idea that horses are present, they begin to comprehend that all modes of discourse in and surrounding the play become less trustworthy. Cynicism predominates because horse management is a cynical pursuit. Horses and humans have, in some senses, a coeval relationship, but when it comes to holding the reins, the human will always reign supreme. The bridled horse, in early modern culture, is a symbol of domination; metaphorically, the animal is appropriated as if it were a foodstuff, gendered as an analogy for human suppression of the female, and politicized as a potent material and metaphorical tool of ideological and physical warfare. The theme of horse management, as it is configured in this book, can be summed up with one word: consumption. In this closing part of my intervention, I tie up the five chapters according to the discourse of consumption and, later, offer an instance of how a more modern horse has become politicized by interested parties.
In his book-length study of Renaissance animal representations, Shakespeare Among the Animals (2002), Bruce Boehrer argues that anthropomorphism is probably the least worst facet of early modern writing on beasts. Rather than boosting animal potential, anthropomorphism degrades humans because, Boehrer suggests, “anthropomorphism emphasizes humankind’s nature and the unique capacity of human beings to sink below type.”3 So, humans lose status when their behavior is seen as animal. Human arrogance and superciliousness is compromised as women and men become reminded of their latent beastliness. This, for Boehrer, is more favorable than announcing and sustaining a sense of all-reigning superiority. Unsurprisingly, then, when Boehrer seizes on an equine discourse, he focuses on an apparent construction of similarity between beast and man. Boehrer discusses a hawkish speech by Hotspur, a figure represented as being immersed within revolutionary fervor, in 1 Henry IV:
Come let me tast my horse,
Who is to beare me like a thunderbolt,
Against the bosome of the Prince of Wales.
Harry to Harry shal hot horse to horse,
Meete and neare part til one drop down a coarse [corpse].4
Boehrer offers a reading of these lines that is sensitive to formal effects, to oral sounds, and to theatrical ramification. Noting various stylistic effects, such as the “fulcrum of the caesura” and the “unifying alliteration,” the critic argues that the speech “conveys not so much a sense of antagonism or opposition as of amalgamation: of rider with horse, of warrior with opponent.”5 With all parties wrapped up in martial spleen, Boehrer maintains, the animals and humans conjoin in action and intent. I agree with this sentiment to some extent. In fact, I can go further than Boehrer, and suggest that the rhyme of “horse” and “coarse” rather brings together the demarcated concerns of horse and human slaughter. When Hotspur asserts that one party in the conflict will “drop down a coarse,” the character speaks regarding the fate of himself or Henry. But the unspecific language also allows for the “one” to possibly refer to a horse. Like humans, horses can die in these wars of national politics. In opposition to Boehrer, however, I maintain that this does not render the equine position to be commensurate with the human. Humans can die in these wars, like the horses, but the voiceless horse can have no choice whatsoever. Fashioning himself as a willing warrior, Hotspur appropriates the language of horsemanship, asserting his personal supremacy explicitly and that of his whole species implicitly.
Two key words in Hotspur’s speech—both of which Boehrer passes over—illustrate the theme of equine exploitation: “tast” and “beare.” One of these two verbs is active; the other is passive. The dominator tastes, while the dominated bears. The horse is not an equal partner, as it has to “beare” the ambitions of Hotspur. Given the rebel’s name, which itself implies a tendency to spur horses with ruthless, intemperate inconsideration, the notional horse is revealed to be a victim of a press ganging into involvement in dangerous and demanding martial work. “Beare” alludes to sexual authorization and, indeed, the rhetoric of tasting is highly suggestive of carnal enjoyment (OED v I 2.b). When contextualized with an early modern Puritan’s treatise on the “tasting” of Christ, Hotspur’s speech can be seen to articulate a sort of erotic, quasi-religious rehearsal of the horse-dominating actions of human agents. Robert Dingley’s tract, The Spirituall Taste Described (1649), written by the Puritan divine while working on the Isle of Wight, records a desire for readers to disregard the worship of clerical hierarchies and to instead approach Christ directly (ODNB). “God invites and allures you to taste him, it shall be no presumption,” Dingley writes.6 The human is constructed as the active agent: Christ is passive because it is the human’s choice as to whether or not he or she will “feed upon Christ.”7 Dingley goes on to represent Christ in language that affords a comparison of a receptive, spiritual God to a sexually available women: “Christ would willingly have sinners taste of his love, and smell to every flower in his bosome; he stretches out his armes all the day long, and would fain gather you into his embraces.”8 This is a God that is gendered as male and female—to enjoy Christ’s “flower” and “bosome” is to eschew worldly sexuality and to instead revel in the bliss of spiritual union. God is tasted by a human who makes the decision to put the receptiveness of Christ on trial. To taste is to examine, to test (OED sb1 I 2.a). The union with Christ is predicated on the person’s orientation, as Hotspur is the partner that has the means to decide that there will be a warlike accord between tasting, consuming human and bearing, consumed horse.
There is nothing incorrect or untoward about Boehrer’s reading of Hotspur’s equine discourse. Simply, this book has been written from a base of divergent assumptions; my five chapters demonstrate five various trends within the wider process of human, politicized expression via the trope of the bitted, consumed horse. In Woodstock, the hungry horse has similar needs to that of England’s impoverished populace: food. This sameness of requirement is exploited by the eponymous character in order to forge a politically expedient union between beast and man. It is, though, a union in which Woodstock—quite literally, if a horse is present on stage—holds the reins. Woodstock consumes and tastes the trope of equine undernourishment to focus and refine a critique of the Ricardian executive. The horse is a passive, uncomprehending bystander; when Woodstock’s fleeting moment of revolutionary intent evaporates, the beast is duly removed. The female figures of Patient Grissell and the Shrew plays are constructed as types that must bear the loads of their sometimes-brutal, wife-dominating husbands. Consumed and enjoyed through marriage, a union that contemporary conduct books insist is an unequal partnership, the distaff characters grapple with the reins and some leeway is plausible. But, invariably, the plays conclude with the rhetoric of the bridled wife; at moments of textual denouement, spurring, mounted males reign supreme and unchallenged even by the once stridently oppositional females. Banks’s horse is consumed by and subsumed within discourses of religious decline and sectarian, tribal conflict. Morocco is configured as a special beast, a being whose powers make him more than equine. He remains, however, a bridled, gelded beast. His legacy is one of intellectual appropriation by interested parties. Whether painted as devilish or innocuous, representations of Banks’s horse always betray a manipulation of his tale to suit a purpose. The lasting trace is that of disillusionment and fissure as competing narratives compete to recount. Morocco’s tale is an extraordinary one and is too disputable and elaborate for any simple account. Culturally mediated through the textually constructed tinkerings of distinct interest groups, Banks’s horse comes to showcase the impression that England can never speak with one unified agenda.
In Hide Parke, we are told about the progress of a horse race that happens offstage. It is a narrative that cannot be trusted, as the speaker has previously been discovered to have an energetic appetite for dishonestly accessed sexual consumption. Through the drama of egotistical and amorous dispute, the play’s characters are assembled as an insalubrious gang. Despite their genteel pretensions, their lusts are basic and bestial. Cheating at horse racing, where horses are maneuvered to effect a suspicious result, is just one of a number of forms of the represented society’s insidious enjoyment of the superficial pleasures of the Caroline park. The birds that bring Gonsales to the Moone of Francis Godwin’s fantastic prose are similar to horses in that they are managed by the peripatetic Spaniard’s “reins.” These avian horses are consumed by Gonsales as the character forges ahead with impossible-sounding journeys. In 1630s culture, the horse, at last, seems to have a particular momentum of its own, as its energy and mobility serve to undermine any notions of settled peace. By the beginning of war, however, the beast becomes haltered on the battlefield and manufactured in printed propaganda. As the horses of the Civil War fight unwillingly under Parliamentarians and Royalists, the fictionalized beasts in culture are bitted and managed to argue forth strident discourses of military, political, and religious import. The humans fight on, tasting the material and discursive capacities of the ubiquitous quadruped. The horses have no means of avoiding or instigating conflict. Bereft of agency, they bear the load of actual and metaphorical human riding. A canvas for the projected anxieties of humans, they soldier on, oblivious to the appetitive urges of ever-unsettled English men and women.
In an article published in 2002, Erica Fudge considered the current status of animal studies within the academy. Fudge was not encouraged: “The study of animals is still, it must be said, regarded somewhat as a sentimental eccentricity.”9 A decade later, it can be said that this is a situation that has improved. As the profile of the global environment increases in communities’ consciousness, academics have turned to ecocriticism and critical animal studies as a means to comprehend twenty-first-century crises within the contexts of readings of historical texts.10 A text’s representation of ecosystems is nearly always judged according to its representation of thriving or struggling fauna. A textual landscape that retains squadrons of lapwings and snipe will convey a sense of ecological health; nature’s unhappy plight can be figured through disappearing sparrows or the sorry-sounding howls of foxes. Horses are not necessarily a part of nature—if we take nature to be something that exists in contradistinction to human, societal contrivances. They have been almost wholly appropriated within man’s linguistic and physical dominions. Humans will suffer when the quality of life declines more sharply on this heavily overpopulated and biologically straitened planet. Horses, their very unequal partners, will share their fate. Future, interdisciplinary criticism will interrogate equine and human fortunes as the fortunes of both species change. Such envisioned concerns cannot be relegated to the status of the sentimental. As I have argued, the horse facilitates all manner of political interventions in early modern texts. To conclude, however, I feel that it is necessary to demonstrate how my thinking is relevant to material and textual horses that flourished long after the Renaissance; to achieve this, I center on representations of a horse that flourished during the 1950s: Dick, the Irish tram-hauler.
It is commonly thought that the coming of the steam engine led to a great reduction in the use of the horse for public transport. In fact, the horse and the railways coexisted together for many decades. Mechanically formulated horse power did not immediately or comprehensively replace corporal horse power. Indeed, freight had not always been moved within England by equine means—timber, for instance, was more usually shifted by canal, river, or sea.11 So, for goods movements, the internal combustion engine did not replace the horse. Passenger movements were facilitated by the nineteenth-century railroads, but equine hauling continued. In fact, as Theo Baker and Doria Gerhold point out, “Horse-drawn vehicles were undoubtedly greatly increasing the volume of passenger transport . . . in the heyday of the Railway Age.”12 So, the horse does not necessarily lose its status as a beast of burden after the Industrial Revolution replaces the early modern with the modern. Similarly, we find that the horse remains as politicized as it was in the Renaissance. One such politicized horse was Dick. This horse drew a passenger carriage on a standard-gauge track in Ireland, right up until 1957. A conventional, now-closed, railway line ran from Derry, running southward through Omagh, onto Enniskillen, and continuing south to connect with many other Irish lines. An offshoot of this line branched off from the track, commencing at Fintona Junction, close to Omagh; it ran for a mere three-quarters of a mile before terminating at Fintona. This Fintona branch was opened in 1855. The service was horse-drawn until its closure in 1957—Dick was the last horse to draw the branch’s one carriage. The railway historian, Fergus Mulligan, represents Dick as some sort of intelligent horse:
The horse was possibly the most pampered in Ireland. . . . Dick was tolerant of such liberties [of human boisterousness] and quite smart for he knew exactly how many trips he had to make each day; without prompting he would know whether to walk to the other end of the tram or to the stable if that was the last run of the day.13
Dick’s alleged abilities do not compare to those credited to Banks’s horse. What is important here is the rosiness with which Mulligan presents the horse’s working existence: he is “pampered” like a pet, renowned for his supposed intelligence, and presented as a creature of leisure—he goes on “trips,” not on commuting journeys, in Mulligan’s language.
A cynic may say that Dick’s “intelligent” capacities may actually represent the breaking down of the horse’s nature. He instinctively knows where to walk to because the sheer monotony of his existence has imprinted a deadening routine onto him. Indeed, an antique timetable, one that is accessible on the Internet if one searches for it, demonstrates the regularity of the service and therefore of the tedious circuitry of the quadruped’s labor. I would suggest that the treatment of Dick resulted in boredom for the animal rather than abject pain. The carriage that he pulled is extant and is on display in the Ulster Transport Museum. It is a heavy, solid-looking contraption: it is galling to think that a single horse hauled such a weighty item. But the horse strolled rather than ran. One particularly evocative photograph of Dick at work shows him dutifully hauling his passengers up the line. Just a few yards farther along, a crowd of hens are unconcernedly feeding on and around the five-and-a-quarter-foot track: Dick moves slowly.14 And further reading showcases Dick’s equine limitations. On January 17, 1953, for instance, Dick nearly caused carnage, damaging the carriage severely when he “bolted, having shied at a piece of paper.”15 Dick, then, was tolerant of demonstrative passengers, but was frightened by a mere scrap of dispensed-with paper. This was no Morocco-like wonder horse.
An episode that involved one of Dick’s predecessors, however, most assuredly points to the essentially subject position of the Fintona horse. On Friday, May, 17, 1872, a local newspaper report conveys the following narrative:
This morning this [horse-drawn, Fintona] carriage, having some occupants, was awaiting an up-train at its own siding when, owing to some points being left open, the heavy train came up on to the rails occupied by the carriage and with such force as to overturn the carriage. The driver of the carriage had time to withdrawn both himself and his horse from before it, ere the concussion took place.16
The horse, in short, was nearly killed. Being harnessed to the carriage, it had no opportunity to escape by itself. Its avoidance of injury was due only to the rather heroic conduct of the driver. The unnamed driver’s behavior is laudatory in that it saved a creature from hurt, but also because it lessened the financial ramifications of the incident for the railway company. The story is a warm one, as a fine animal is saved; but it is saved because it is an economic asset. This beast will live or die depending on the decisions of humans. In a material sense, then, the Fintona horses were as subject to human dominion as any early modern beast. An examination of the rosiness of the horse’s representations by historians reveals that the Fintona horses also become as prone to political appropriation as the horses represented in any seventeenth-century tract.
After his period of service was ended in 1957, Dick’s limitations—and those of the antiquated Fintona branch line in general—appear to have become forgotten. Both Fergus Mulligan and P. O’Gallachair comment favorably on the fact that “the [horse-drawn] vehicle introduced in 1883 lasted until closure.”17 A sense of approval of this achievement of continuity and longevity is more explicitly present in the work of O’Gallachair: “This [vehicle] was in constant operation for the next seventy-four years, until the line closed in 1957.”18 The line’s closure is presented, here, as abrupt and tradition-quashing. O’Gallachair’s elegiac tone continues with a comment concerning the horse’s handler: “It’s last driver, William McClean, has gone to his reward.”19 Initially, it seems unclear as to what McClean’s “reward” consisted of. It becomes apparent, though, that O’Gallachair means that Dick’s human master is now deceased; his “reward” is the granting to him of a permanent residence in Heaven. Managing Dick, for O’Gallachair, earns God’s approval. Some biographical research on O’Gallachair reveals that he was a Catholic priest. William McClean, the branch line, and, indeed, Dick the horse, are claimed for the Catholic community. The horse and his manager are politicized, as a local historian with an obvious Catholic agenda bemoans the abrasiveness and injustice of the Fintona Closure—an injustice enforced by an anti-Catholic, northern Irish administration.
At the time of Irish partition (1921), very many railway lines flourished all over Ireland.20 Since this peak, the system has become greatly reduced. The major closures have affected lines that crossed the post-1921 border.21 For economic and political reasons, the northern government, on its side of the divide, closed the relevant sections of cross-border lines, such as that which ran from Derry, through Omagh and Enniskillen, and on through to the southern networks. Since the early 1960s, only one cross-border railway line remains extant in Ireland. Closing the other links has made the two parts of Ireland seem farther apart—this is a legacy of railway closures that Irish nationalist commentators, such as Mulligan and O’Gallachair, profoundly resent. Dick, it is suggested, was stopped because he was one link in a railway chain that united Ireland through public transport. Dick becomes subject to a winsome sentimentality because it suits an anti-partitionist purpose. This honest, fairly unspectacular horse, is, textually, a bridled being onto which anxieties about the material and psychological infrastructure of a future reunited Ireland are projected. Historical, interested writing on this particular horse indulges, in Erica Fudge’s words, in a “sentimental eccentricity,” but our criticism involving horses need not be nostalgic or quirky. The horse may, in any period or place, be addressed in culture with an almost-flippant jolliness. Yet two cruces remain omnipresent. The first is that representations of the beast always facilitate discussions of topics, such as gender, politics, and power, that are as diverse as they are significant. The second is that despite perennial subjugation, the horse never loses its horsiness. A lingering irony of this book is, I feel, that the more one underscores the artificiality and metaphorical make-up of culturally constructed horses, the more one thinks about the role that the actual, corporal beast, Equus caballus, performs in the world that it shares with us unequally. And it is unequal. During 2013, Australian marksmen from the country’s Central Land Council began the grim process of culling some 10,000 surplus-to-requirements feral horses.22 In the context of such a murderously unequal battle in the material world, intellectual games that blur discursive boundaries between humans and horses and other animals seem really rather trivial and even delusional.
Notes
1. Martin Spevack, comp., The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973), I, 602–03.
2. Bent Sorensen, “The Enduring Vitality of a Flayed Horse: Carlo Ruini, Bouchardon and Others,” Apollo, vol. 155 (2002), 30–39.
3. Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 2002), 27.
4. William Shakespeare, The History of Henrie the Fovrth (London, 1598; STC 22280), H2r-v.
5. Boehrer, 23–24.
6. Robert Dingley, The Spirituall Taste Described; and a Glimpse of Christ Discovered (London, 1649; Wing D1501), H7v.
7. Ibid., H6v.
8. Ibid., H7v.
9. Erica Fudge, “Just a Plaything for Your Pet Cat?” Times Higher Education Supplement, August 16, 2002, 19.
10. Many other recent exemplary books in the field have been inspirational for me and can be added to the works already cited in this book: these include Bruce Boehrer, Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Margo Demello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Donna Landry, Noble Beasts: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); and Arthur MacGregor, Animal Encounters: Human and Animal Interaction in Britain from the Norman Conquest to World War 1 (London: Reaktion, 2012).
11. G. M. Trevelyan, Illustrated English Social History: Part Two: The Age of Shakespeare and the Tudor Period (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 98.
12. Theo Baker and Doria Gerhold, The Rise and Rise of Road Transport, 1700–1990 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 69.
13. Fergus Mulligan, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Irish Railways (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1983), 92.
14. The photograph is reproduced in Oliver Doyle and Stephen Hirsch, Railways in Ireland, 1834–1984 (Dublin: Signal Press, 1983), 85. Another portrait of Dick, showing the animal in an even more relaxed, unhurried mode, is reproduced in Tom Middlemass, Irish Standard Gauge Railways (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1981), 68. The definitive, much-illustrated account of the branch and its equine servants is Norman Johnston, The Fintona Horse Tram: The Story of a Unique Irish Branch Line (Omagh: West Tyrone Historical Society, 1992).
15. E. M. Patterson, The Great Northern Railway of Ireland (Lingfield: Oakwood, 1962), 118.
16. “Fintona Junction,” The Tyrone Constitution, May 17, 1872, not paginated.
17. Mulligan, 92.
18. P. O’Gallachair, Old Fintona: A History of the Catholic Parish of Donaghcavey in County Tyrone (Monaghan: Cumann Seanchais Chlochair, 1974), 56.
19. Ibid.
20. A map showing the Irish railway network, as it stood at 1923, is provided in Doyle and Hirsch, 90–91.
21. This is made demonstratively clear by a viewing of the present railway map of Ireland; this can be found on the website of Ianród Éireann, the present-day southern Irish railway franchise holders, www.irishrail.ie. The border areas of western Ulster and northern Connaught are conspicuously and woefully avoided by what is left of the surviving network.
22. A well-balanced account of this controversy is provided by Sophie Tedmanson, “Protests as 10,000 Wild Horses Face Cull in the Outback,” The Times, May 23, 2013, 47.