‘Many A Civil Monster’: Shakespeare’s Idea of the Centaur

Summary

Critics have long noted Shakespeare’s debt to Sidney’s Arcadia, particularly for King Lear. One passage in the Arcadia that critics have overlooked not only bears marked similarity to several of Shakespeare’s plays but also encapsulates an idea that fascinated Shakespeare throughout his entire career: the centaur. During a jousting exercise, the character of Musidorus, a prince of Thessalia in the guise of a shepherd, is urged by Pamela to ‘do something upon his horse’. While on his steed, prancing upon the ground in a rhythmic dance, ‘he (as if Centaurlike he had bene one peece with the horse) was no more moved, then one is with the going of his own legges: and in effect so did he command him, as his down limmes . . . that it seemed as he borrowed the horse’s body, so he lent the horse his minde’. This union of horse and man resembles, for example, that in Hamlet: Claudius describes ‘a gentleman of Normandy’ whose horsemanship seemed like ‘witchcraft’; such was the man’s skill that ‘[h]e grew into his seat, / And to such wondrous doing brought his horse / As had he been incorpsed and demi-natured / With the brave beast’ (4.7.68–74).