Animal Characters. Bruce Thomas Boehrer

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      And of kind manage; pig-like he whines

      At the sharp rowel, which he frets at rather

      Than any jot obeys; seeks all foul means

      Of boist’rous and rough jad’ry to disseat

      His lord that kept it bravely. When nought serv’d,

      When neither curb would crack, girth break, nor diff‘ring plunges

      Disroot his rider whence he grew, but that

      He kept him ‘tween his legs, on his hind hoofs

      […] on end he stands,

      That Arcite's legs, being higher than his head,

      Seem’d with strange art to hang. His victor's wreath

      Even then fell off his head; and presently

      Backward the jade comes o’er, and his full poise

      Becomes the rider's load. Yet is he living,

      Yet such a vessel ‘tis that floats but for

      The surge that next approaches.

      (5.4.49-84)

      As a virtuoso rhetorical performance, this speech proves almost impossible to abbreviate; its intricate syntax, like the tortuous action it describes, defies efforts at restraint or productive curtailment. At heart it rehearses a mundus inversus motif, a scene of catastrophic reversal that occurs not only on the level of plot—as Arcite's fortunes alter in a heartbeat—but on the level of personal status as well. Indeed, the horse's wild cavortings provide a spatial counterpart to the implied logic of degree that saturates the speech. Prancing on his hind legs so that Arcite's head hangs upside-down and his victor's wreath falls to the earth, the mount embodies a similar inversion. First introduced in act 3 as one of “A brace of horses [which] might well / Be by a pair of kings back’d” (3.1.20–21), the horse here “whines” in “pig-like” manner as he disobeys his master, his regression down the great chain of being providing both an occasion and a parallel for Arcite's similar dislocation. The whole set of reversals is introduced as an issue of character: the horse's black coat supposedly advertises his unreliability, so that “many will not buy / His goodness with this note” (5.4.52–53). And the character problem extends to Arcite as well insofar as the “brace of horses” Emilia has given him recalls the paired steeds of Plato's Phaedrus: allowing his passion for Emilia to ruin his friendship with Palamon, Arcite has arguably surrendered his reason to appetite, and thus he rightly meets his end in an accident involving an unruly horse—apparently the bad one of a pair.