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 a sovereign's sovereign to ride on; and for the world, familiar to us and unknown, to lay apart their particular functions and wonder at him. I once writ a sonnet in his praise and began thus: ‘Wonder of nature’—(3.7.27–40). The Dolphin's kinsman, the Duke of Orleance, listens to this blather with increasing annoyance. When the Dolphin likens his horse's whinnying to human speech (and worse than that, to royal speech), further suggesting that the animal's “countenance enforces homage” (that is, that a mere look at the beast should compel inferior beings to revere him), Orleance calls time: “No more, cousin” (3.7.30). And when the Dolphin, not to be discouraged by lesser mortals, segues into poetic effusions, Orleance responds with deflating humor: “I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress” (3.7.40–41).
From here the scene devolves into a series of off-color jokes based on confusion of the species barrier: for instance, “Your mistress bears well” (3.7.45; this from Orleance to the Dolphin) or “I tell thee, Constable, my mistress wears his own hair” (3.7.60–61; this from the Dolphin to the Constable of France, who has entered the fray in support of Orleance). One could dismiss such stuff as coarse fare for the groundlings, but it arises out of tensions created by a specifically aristocratic discourse: that is, by the Dolphin's efforts to present himself and his mount in heroic terms derived from the chivalric romance tradition. It makes particular sense that Orleance, of all characters, should find this self-presentation most irritating; after all, a human member of the royal family has most to lose from the proposition that animals, too, can be human and royal. Responding with erotic innuendo, he invokes the language of sexism to reaffirm the logic of speciesism.
As it happens, this gesture—whereby difference of gender is conceived in terms of difference of species, and vice versa—occurs so often in Shakespeare as to comprise a signature motif of sorts. Moreover, it assumes its definitive form in the equation of women to horses. To Petruchio, Katharina becomes “My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything” (Taming of the Shrew 3.2.232). Puck promises the sleeping Lysander that “Jack shall have Jill; /…/ The man shall have his mare again” (Midsummer Night's Dream 3.2.461–63). Hotspur assures his wife that “when I am a’ horseback, I will swear / I love thee infinitely” (1 Henry IV 2.3.101–2). Cleopatra wishes she could be a horse so as “to bear the weight of Antony” (1.5.21). Antigonus responds to the possibility of an unchaste Hermione by exclaiming, “I’ll keep my stables where / I lodge my wife” (The Winter's Tale 3.1.134–35). Such moments may derive in part from the obvious sexual suggestiveness of the horse-and-rider configuration, in part from the shared dynamics of dominance and submission that traverse both gender and species relations, in part from the traditional status of both women and horses as property within the legal patrimonium of a Roman paterfamilias.6 However, beyond all these considerations, the conflation of women with horses provides Shakespeare with a powerful antichivalric image, an antidote to the heroic dyad of Rinaldo and Baiardo, hero and steed. This is why Orleance invokes it to counter the Dolphin's grandiose claims for the preeminence of his horse. This is arguably also why Shakespeare contrasts the pretentious nonsense of Henry V's horsey Frenchmen with a hardscrabble vision of the English cavalry at Agincourt:
The [English] horsemen sit like fixed candlesticks,
With torch-staves in their hand; and their poor jades
Lob down their heads, dropping the hides and hips,
The gum down-roping from their pale-dead eyes,
And in their pale dull mouths the [gimmal’d] bit
Lies foul with chaw’d-grass, still and motionless.
(4.2.45–50)
In this context, Henry's victory marks not only the triumph of England over France and yeomanly virtues over aristocratic preciosity; it also entails the conquest of one literary idiom by another and a transition between the models of nature these literary idioms presuppose. The possibility of Baiardo—to put it more broadly, the possibility of animal character and perhaps even that of a sentient nature in general—emerges as one casualty of this transition.
In the Dolphin's case, anti-Gallic prejudice combines with a selective sort of antiaristocratic contempt to produce a mockery of the chivalric tradition. However, when not inflected by nationalism and racial prejudice, Shakespeare's equestrian depictions of aristocratic privilege can take widely varied forms, ranging in quality from regal triumphalism to tragic ambivalence. Even Richard II, perhaps the most famously flawed royal horseman in the Shakespeare canon, emerges from his play less as an effete ninny than as an object of pathos and a source of national guilt. This differences in tone derives in large part from Richard's intensely voiced sense of sympathetic connection to his kingdom, a connection he figures repeatedly as a kind of communion with the fabric of nature. His “senseless conjuration” (3.2.23) at Barkloughly Castle provides a classic, if typically extreme, example:
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’