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What would Shakespeare drive?

Like many Elizabethan gentlemen who had business in London but family in the provinces, Shakespeare would have spent a considerable amount of time on horseback. Few of his contemporaries, however, had Shakespeare’s talent for turning the vexations of travel into deathless verse. Sonnet 50 recounts a trip on horseback in which the poet’s reluctance to leave his beloved makes him keenly conscious of his body as a burden that increases the animal’s suffering: “The beast that bears me, tired with my woe, / Plods dully on to bear that weight in me”. According to Galenic medicine, black bile, or melancholy, was considered the heaviest of the four bodily humors. Sadness, then, increases the poet’s weight in a very literal sense. As he digs the “bloody spur” into its sides, its moans seem to express Shakespeare’s own sorrow, piercing his nerves in turn more sharply than the metal does the horse’s flank. If the poet’s psychological pain here exceeds the physical pain of animals, Shakespeare’s regret at leaving his beloved bleeds into remorse for the suffering he inflicts upon his mount.

Shakespeare was not alone in feeling a prick of conscience about the treatment of horses in early modern England. In Cavelarice (1607) Gervase Markham complains about the cruel use of the “broken port”—a curved bit that applies intense pressure on the tongue —and other methods of “strange torment and violence” deployed to tame horses: tying a cat to a pole and “thrusting it under the horse’s belly or between his legs to make her scratch, bite, and claw him by the cods [testicles]” ; binding a hedgehog to a horse’s hind legs in order to frighten it into galloping; spanking the horse on the buttocks with a “long piece of iron of a foot long, all full of pricks”; and looping a “cord with a running knot about the horse’s stones [testicles] … which torment being most insufferable hath made a horse to go forward violently”. A horse deemed to be a “dull bearer” or “willful slow” would have been routinely subjected to such tortures. Small wonder if early modern England was proverbially regarded as a living “hell for horses.” Such violent coercion begs the question of whether horse-breaking—the casual sadism of bits, spurs, and whips—contributed to early modern belief in human mastery over the non-human. Or did equestrian manège encourage respect for the animal’s agility, speed, and intelligence? Rather than attempt to answer these questions decisively, this blog entry will instead explore how Shakespeare’s uncanny sympathy with the horse and his ability to think in terms of cross-species networks may bring us closer to some inconvenient truths regarding the ethics of travel that are harder to access in the age of the machine.

Sloth
Desidia (Sloth), 1557 by Pieter Bruegel. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Shakespeare was also cognizant of another major cause of equine suffering: chronic malnourishment. In a curious interlude in 1 Henry IV, two carriers gripe about the poor quality of the fodder at a roadside inn:

Second Carrier: Peas and beans are as dank here as a dog, and that is the next way to give poor jades the bots. This house is turned upside down since Robin Ostler died.

First Carrier: Poor fellow never joyed since the price of oats rose; it was the death of him.

As the chief ingredient in fodder, oats were the early modern equivalent of petrol, and a horse’s recommended ration of a peck per day was roughly equal to nine litres. As with oil prices today, the cost of oats fluctuated in accordance with supply and demand. The latter would rise during war, which necessitated moving large numbers of cavalry over vast distances. Supply, meanwhile, was subject to the vagaries of the British climate. During the “Little Ice Age,” Britain experienced three dismal harvests in the mid-1590s. As a consequence, the already exorbitant price of oats doubled in 1596, vaulting to a rate more than tenfold what it had fetched at the start of the century. In fact in 1596 it hit the highest price ever recorded for oats in England between 1450 and 1649. Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV was written in the midst of what might be considered the most severe fuel crisis in early modern English history.

In light of these conditions, it is no surprise that Shakespeare’s history play would concern itself with the strain that travel and nation-building placed on energy resources, whilst dramatizing the use and abuse of horsepower. The revealingly named Hotspur embodies one extreme. Over the course of the play, he gallops from the Scottish border to Windsor to Northumberland to Wales: a journey of over a thousand miles. At Shrewsbury, he commits the strategic error of rushing into battle with “journey-bated horses”. His rebellion fails because he is oblivious to the suffering he causes and the energy he consumes by over-exerting his cavalry.

As the warrior class transformed into a leisure class throughout the early modern period, the horse underwent a corresponding metamorphosis from a weapon of war to a mere vehicle. The character in 1 Henry IV who best reflects this transformation is Falstaff. It is telling that his original name in the Famous Victories was not Falstaff or Oldcastle but Jockey. Shakespeare makes it clear that the obese knight rides everywhere he goes. To cure him of this habit, Hal intentionally assigns him a charge of foot, causing the fat knight to sigh: “would it had been of horse”. The knight’s gargantuan appetite drains the nation’s limited food supply (ale was brewed with many of the same grains fed to horses and on which the poor subsisted during times of scarcity) whilst his bulk appears to increase his reluctance to walk. So when Poins steals the horse of this “horseback-breaker” the prank is more than just a ploy to avoid bringing animals on stage. It is a theatre of punishment targeting environmentally reckless behaviour that was exacerbating an Elizabethan energy crisis.

In closing, early modern ecocritics should be alert to the ways in which the horse both is and is not a proleptic automobile. The use of cars spares us moderns from inflicting violence on unruly horses. But it also sublimates this violence into an invisible assault on the planet’s atmospheric health. The guilt that Shakespeare voices in Sonnet 50 for causing his horse to moan may not be precisely like that which goads academics to purchase carbon offsets for travelling to conferences, but his writing reminds us––with its pun on travail––that travel was not and should not be easy. What if our cars groaned in agony each time we stomped on the accelerator? In an era when transportation was fuelled by the sweat of sentient animals and local farmers who grew their fodder, the energy required to generate such horsepower could not be concealed under the hood. Although the medieval chivalric values perish with Hotspur, we are, nonetheless, committing the same mistake in the post-chivalric era of the automobile. We are all Hotspur now.

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