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As many scholars have pointed out, sixteenth-century England was a horse-owning, horse-riding culture, a place where the language of horses and horsemanship was pervasive. Given such an environment, it is not surprising that the image of the horse was often deployed in metaphorical, proverbial, allegorical or otherwise symbolic ways. This essay, however, sets the metaphors aside, following instead what nineteenth-century historian Harriet Ritvo has called the “unacknowledged metonymy” of animal discourse, a process by which discussions of real animals become the ground for “opinions and worries imported from the human cultural arena.” In early modern England, one significant anxiety was about the relationship between the English people and their regional environment. The natural environment was frequently perceived as determining both the constitution and the temperament of earthly creatures: this is the Galenic doctrine of geohumoralism. Even the human soul was, for some writers, influenced by its natural environment. These attitudes necessarily shaped emerging concepts of national and regional identity. “English-ness,” for example, was often depicted as the result of an uneasy interplay between regional climate, including things such as “air” and “ground,” and more abstract notions of race or breed. Nowhere are these concerns more effectively demonstrated than in the many texts devoted to horses, horsemanship, and horse breeding. In particular, early modern writers’ attempts both to investigate and to defend the nature of the “English” horse are evidence of a controversy that contributes to the construction of nationality itself. A nation of excellent horses is also perhaps a nation of excellent men. And England in the late sixteenth century seemed to find grounds for doubt about both horses and men. The debate over the value of the English horse was thus part of a larger concern with the relationship between constant climatic influence and attempts to improve a “breed.” The most famous literary representation of this concern is surely Shakespeare's Henry V. Nationality and national identity have always been acknowledged as one of the main subjects of the play. Some have even argued, as David Cairns and Shaun Richards do, that it “dramatizes ... the originating moment of nationhood.” It is also, however, a play pervaded by the language of race and breed expressed in terms of horses. I argue that in this play and others, Shakespeare is echoing a larger cultural pattern centering on the body of the horse. It is a pattern in which the Galenic determinism of climate, region, race, and breed confronted a nascent nationalism based on governance and disciplined management.
Kritika Kultura, 2010
Postcolonial Text, 2009
The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 2004
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