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

Abstract

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.