ABSTRACT
In exploring issues of training, I propose in this chapter that human and nonhuman animals in the Shakespearean period are perceived as existing on a continuum. In this view, humans and animals are simultaneously seen as having shared and separated forms of being. Prompted by an analysis of the confrontation between the rebel Jack Cade and the lawyer, Lord Saye in 2 Henry VI, IV.vii.79–107, in which subtle exchanges between the natural and the unnatural, the physical and the verbal, or between “a culture of presence” and “a culture of representation” (Gumbrecht 2004) pivot on a reference to “bridl[ing]”, I consider ideas of human and animal training and education, examining areas of difference and contiguity. My analysis of human–animal relationships, viewed through this frame, will be developed through a juxtaposition of a series of Shakespeare’s plays with thought taken from the treatises and manuals on education; domestic conduct; courtliness; dancing; swordsmanship; archery; and animal training, husbandry, or management that abound in the period. From The Taming of the Shrew with its systematic exploration of gender roles through the terms of horse management and falconry manuals, through Macbeth, a play all about a natural order, its limits and its breaching, epitomized in the famous image of cannibalistic horses, this chapter will then consider the suffusion of a broader range of Shakespearean texts and Elizabethan theater practices with ideas about all that is between humans and animals (especially performance-related animals such as horses, dogs, and bears) that emerge from notions of training, both of the human and by the human of the animal.
