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 ethics of feudalism. When Richard finally absolves the horse of blame, he does so by depriving all horses, everywhere, of the capacity for personhood in this sense:
Forgiveness, horse! Why do I rail on thee,
Since thou, created to be aw’d by man,
Wast born to bear? I was not made a horse,
And yet I bear a burthen like an ass,
Spurr’d, gall’d, and tir’d by jauncing Bullingbrook.
(5.5.90–94)
Richard emerges from his play as one of Shakespeare's incredible shrinking men—a figure, like Antony, whose identity melts away inexorably over the course of five acts. If, at the end, this progressive loss of royal character is tied to the loss of animal character as well, it is because both of these exist in a world that has been revealed as a figment of Richard's imagination, a world governed by a divinely instituted system of degree and sustained by a universal harmony in the fabric of nonhuman nature.
Richard II derives its conflicted, mournful tone from this fact: not simply an enactment of the death of a great man or even of the untimely end of a monarchy and a dynasty, the play performs the loss of an entire world and the language that conjured it into being. It is interesting that Shakespeare are returns to this world at the end of his career, in his collaborative work with John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1613). Less openly political than Richard II, this late play situates itself more directly in the tradition of chivalric romance, drawing as it does on Chaucer's Knight's Tale for its main story line. The attribution of authorship in specific scenes remains uncertain, and to this extent it also remains tricky to fix upon specific passages as representative of one author's habits of thought or literary development. However, a broad if tentative scholarly consensus on the authorship question has developed, with general opinion crediting Shakespeare with most of acts 1 and 5, and Fletcher with most of acts 2–4.8 While this broad hypothesis remains unconfirmed, it also seems reasonable to assume that the collaborating playwrights engaged in some fairly close coordination of plot lines and thematic issues. With these considerations in mind, we may read the play as a kind of farewell to romance that, especially in its final act, repudiates the practices of equine characterization typical of the romance tradition.
This repudiation occurs concurrently within the play's heroic main plot—which recounts the tragic sexual rivalry of the knights Palamon and Arcite—and in its comic subplot—which centers on the Athenian Jailer's Daughter's unrequited passion for her prisoner, Palamon, who enters her care after being taken captive in battle by Duke Theseus. In both plots the play reenacts chivalric conventions but in a queasy, discomforting, and in some cases openly parodic way, perhaps thus augmenting the gentler ironic distance imposed on the same subject matter by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The play's main plot centers at first on heroic friendship, the sort of loyalty foregrounded in much chivalric literature as, for instance, in cantos 18 and 19 of the Furioso. There the pagan warrior Medoro risks his life to retrieve the body of his slain lord Dardinello from a heavily guarded battlefield held by Charlemagne's army and is accompanied in the effort by his comrade Cloridano, who sacrifices his life to help Medoro escape with Dardinello's corpse. At the outset of Shakespeare and Fletcher's play, Palamon and Arcite depict their friendship in similarly extravagant terms: “dearer in love than blood” (1.2.1), the cousins claim that in war, “the blood we venture / Should be as for our health” (1.2.109–10); taken captive together, they imagine themselves as “one another's wife, ever begetting / New births of love” (2.2.80–81). Likewise, the play's comic subplot opens with a sudden infatuation that is similarly reminiscent of romance. Just as, in the Furioso, Angelica stumbles upon the wounded Medoro after his rescue of Dardinello's body and falls instantly in love with him, so the Jailer's Daughter exclaims of Palamon, “I love him beyond love and beyond reason, / Or wit, or safety” (2.6.11–12). However, in both plots of the play, the conventional romance pose malfunctions. Within a hundred lines of being “one another's wife,” Palamon and Arcite have repudiated their friendship in the name of sexual rivalry: as Palamon declares, “Thou art a traitor, Arcite…/…Friendship, blood, / And all the ties between us, I disclaim” (2.2.171–73). Likewise, the Jailer's Daughter experiences a passion far less noble and enduring than its chivalric counterparts. Overlooked by an Emilia-besotted Palamon, she lapses into madness, but even this stance of heroic ardor dissolves in turn into self-parody when she is persuaded to accept an impersonator in Palamon's place.
As for Palamon and Arcite's courtship of Emilia, this too proceeds with the conventional trappings of chivalry, only to repudiate these, as it were, after the fact. Horses inevitably figure as part of the business. When first introduced to Emilia, for instance, Arcite declares, “I dare not praise / My feat in horsemanship, yet they that knew me / Would say it was my best piece” (2.5.12–14). Pirithous responds by promising, “because you say / You are a horseman, I must needs intreat you / This afternoon to ride” (2.3.45–46). As Arcite gains marks of favor from Emilia, his good fortune develops in equine terms:
She takes strong note of me,
Hath made me near her; and this beauteous morn
(The prim'st of all the year) presents me with
A brace of horses; two such steeds might well
Be by a pair of kings back’d, in a field
That their crowns’ titles tried.
(3.1.17–22)
Although Palamon and Arcite agree, prior to their first combat for Emilia, that they will “use no horses” (3.6.59), this decision is clearly made for practical theatrical purposes, so that the fight may be presented onstage, and Arcite at once recalls a previous battle in which Palamon “charg’d / Upon the left wing of the enemy, / I spurr’d hard to come up, and under me / I had a right good horse” (3.6.74–77). Likewise after their final duel, when Arcite has won and Palamon has lost, Theseus praises the latter in terms of his horsemanship: “He [Arcite] speaks now of as brave a knight as e’er / Did spur a noble steed” (5.3.115–16). The markers of sexual favor, heroism, and literary genre converge repeatedly on this form of cross-species troping.
That being the case, it comes as a particular irony that Arcite should meet his end in a riding accident—indeed, an accident that involves one of the horses Emilia presented to him as a mark of her favor. The passage describing this misfortune, a speech generally assigned to Shakespeare's authorship, comprises the play's greatest