The Prince and the Hobby-Horse: Shakespeare and the Ambivalence of Early Modern Popular Culture

The Shakespearean hobby-horse, mentioned emphatically in Hamlet, brings into focus a number of problems related to early modern popular culture. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the word was characterised by semantic ambivalence, with simultaneously valid meanings of a breed of horse, a morris character, a foolish person, and a wanton woman. The overlapping of these meanings in different cultural discourses of the age (playtexts, emblem books, popular verse, pictures) exemplifies the interaction of different productions of early modern popular culture, from social humiliating practices to festivals and public playhouses. This attests to a complex circulation of cultural memory regarding symbols of popular culture, paradoxically both ‘forgotten’ and ‘remembered’ as a basically oral-ritual culture was transformed into written forms. In this context, the Hamletian passage gains new overtones, while the different versions of the playtext (Q1 & 2: 1603, 1604, F: 1623) also offer insights into the changing attitudes regarding popular culture, as it became gradually commercialised and politicised in the following decades. Finally, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair solidify a critical and sceptical attitude, which seems to have signalled the end of ‘Merry Old England’ on-stage and off-stage as well

Hybrid Creatures in Context: Centaurs, Hobby-horses and Sexualised Women (Hamlet, King Lear, The Two Noble Kinsmen)

Shakespearean centaurs and centaur-like images have received scholarly attention with relation to Ovid as well as to early modern philosophy, regarding the human-animal divide. This paper argues for a nuanced re-reading of relevant textual cruces in Hamlet, King Lear and The Two Noble Kinsmen in the light of a specific fusion of popular and elite cultures in the man-horse hybrid, as represented by the (male/female) centaur and the early modern hobby-horse, emphasizing the stigmatisation (the “monstrosity”) of bestial passion and illicit sexuality, signified by the hybrid creature and its animal part. English emblem books and Edward Topsell’s 1607 volume on “four-footed beasts” present a complex background to the re-visitation of these well-known passages, and illuminate how Shakespeare used elements of both popular and elite cultures to suit his dramaturgical ends and to address different strata of the audience. The paper offers an overview of the complex iconographical and conceptual semantics of centaur-like creatures, as they existed in Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ imagination, suggesting a tentative summary of the cultural memory of the centaur in early modern England.La représentation de centaures et de figures assimilées dans l’œuvre de Shakespeare est souvent étudiée en lien avec Ovide et la philosophie de la Renaissance, dans une analyse de la différence entre l’humain et l’animal. Cet article propose une relecture nuancée des passages pertinents dans Hamlet, Le Roi Lear et Les Deux Nobles Cousins à la lumière d’une figure hybride, produit d’une fusion des cultures élitistes et populaires : l’homme-cheval, représenté par le centaure (mâle ou femelle) et l’homme à tête de cheval, frappé par la stigmatisation (la « monstruosité ») de la passion bestiale et de la sexualité illicite incarnée par son hybridité et son animalité. Les livres d’emblèmes anglais et l’ouvrage d’Edward Topsell consacré aux « bêtes à quatre pieds » (1607) permettent de remettre en contexte ces passages bien connus, afin d’analyser l’utilisation par Shakespeare d’éléments tirés des cultures élitistes et populaires, adaptés par le dramaturge à ses objectifs et aux différents types de publics visés. Cet article étudie la sémantique conceptuelle et iconographique complexe des créatures assimilées au centaure, telles qu’elles existaient dans l’imagination des contemporains de Shakespeare, proposant ainsi un panorama de la mémoire culturelle du centaure dans l’Angleterre de la première modernité

Film & Culture

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