10/27

Sometime before March of 1628, Ben Jonson wrote an epigram complimenting the soon-to-be Earl of Newcastle, William Cavendish, on his horsemanship. (Footnote: one MS mentions his Viscount-ness. Clarify date.) Jonson's praise seems to have been well-targeted: later, in Antwerp during the Interregnum, Cavendish would write a book on horse training, and at the Restoration he returned as the king's horse master. [And, during the closing years of Jonson's life, Cavendish proved one of his most important patrons (sponsoring what?)]

Bringing the highest literary models to bear on his quest for patronage, Jonson compares the mounted lord to Perseus on Pegasus, to Castor on Cyllarus, and to Sir Bevis on Arundel, ultimately pronouncing:
-Nay, so your seat his beauties did endorse,
-As I began to wish myself a horse...
This is an odd sort of wish, and one that Jonson quickly spins into a clever appeal for patronage. His wish is "absolved," he says, because Cavendish's horses eat better than the Muses. He then gives the screw a further turn:
-[I] cried, away with the Caesarian bread,
-At these immortal mangers Virgil fed.
Calling to mind Virgil's alleged stint in Augustus's stables, Jonson proposes that Cavendish's patronage could replace royal patronage--not undesirable, given the financial troubles of the monarchy. Moreover, he suggests, Virgil--feeding at the manger rather than on the bread granted him by Augustus--originates a pedigree of poet-horses that culminates in him.

I will return to these issues of patronage and lineage later in the paper. For now, I want to turn to the odd couplet in which Jonson, seeing his patron ride, wishes himself the horse. We have an account, luckily, of what Cavendish looked like on horseback, from a sympathetic observer: Cavendish himself. In the opening pages of the English version of his book on horsemanship, he writes:

-"I Rid first a Spanish-Horse, called Le Superbe, of a Light-Bay, a beautiful Horse; and though Hard to be Rid, yet when he was Hitt Right, he was the Readiest Horse in the World: He went in Corvets forward, backward, sidewayes, on both Hands; made the Cross perfectly upon his Voltoes; and did Change upon his Voltoes so Just, without breaking Time, that no Musitian could keep Time better; and went Terra a Terra Perfectly."

This connection between the forms of horse-riding and those of music or verse is a Renaissance commonplace. Jonson could not have read Cavendish's passage, written many years after his death, but both he and Cavendish would be familiar with the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, by Philip Sidney--whose name, of course, means horse-lover. There, Pamela describes Mucedorus's horsemanship in similar terms: "[W]ith a kind rather of quick gesture than show of violence, you might see him come towards me beating the ground in so due time as no dancer can observe better measure....[H]e ever going so just with the horse, either forth-right or turning, that it seemed as he borrowed the horse's body so he lent the horse his mind" (CPA 2.5.247-248). The entire passage is too long to quote, but it relates horsemanship on the one hand to a graceful performativity, akin to music or dance, and on the other to a successful Platonism that is itself a sign of Mucedorus's nobility. Readers know that Mucedorus's mind does not in fact control his body as well as the man controls the horse.

Jonson may have borrowed the image of the "centaur" for the union of man and horse from this passage, though the topos is common. The epigram bears the traces of another Sidneyean source, as well. Sidney famously opens his Defence of Poetry by describing the orations of his riding master, John Pietro Pugliano. His praise of horsemanship is so convincing that "if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse." In Sidney's exordium,