What would Shakespeare drive?

Imagine a Hollywood film about the Iraq War in which a scene at a clandestine Al-Qaeda compound featuring a cabal of insurgents abruptly cuts to a truck-stop off the New Jersey Turnpike. A group of disgruntled truckers huddle around their rigs cursing the price of gas. An uncannily similar coup de thèâtre occurs in an overlooked episode in 1 Henry IV. From the rebel camp where Hotspur has hatched his treasonous revolt, the action shifts to a roadside inn outside London, where we eavesdrop on a conversation between two carriers.

Second Carrier: Peas and beans are as dank here as a dog, and that is the next way to give poor jades the bots. This house is turned upside down since Robin Ostler died.

First Carrier: Poor fellow never joyed since the price of oats rose; it was the death of him.

This curious exchange is more than just a tour de force display of Shakespeare’s mastery of working class argot. As a key ingredient in fodder, oats were in effect the petrol of the early modern world, and a horse’s daily ration of a peck per day was roughly equivalent to nine litres. As demand for travel grew, an increasing proportion of the nations’ arable land had to be diverted for oats cultivation. Oats grow well in dank soil, and were thus the major crop in places such as the Peak District, the Staffordshire moorlands, the Yorkshire dales, parts of Wales, West Morland, Northumberland, and Scotland—the very counties in revolt in Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays. Meagre harvests of this crop would breed unrest in the north, whilst a northern rebellion would inevitably catapult the price of oats skyward.

The affordability of oats was also subject to vicissitudes of the British climate. During the “Little Ice Age,” Britain experienced three dismal harvests in the mid-1590s. As a consequence, the already exorbitant price of oats doubled in 1596, skyrocketing to a rate eleven times what it had fetched at the start of the century, a staggering eighty-two per cent above the norm. In fact in 1596 it hit the highest price ever recorded for oats in England in a two hundred year span between 1450 and 1649. Peas and beans—two other fodder ingredients mentioned by Shakespeare’s carriers—also soared to unprecedented levels at this time. 1 Henry IV was written in late 1596 or early 1597, in the midst of what might be considered the greatest fuel crisis in early modern English history.

Viewed under these conditions, the equestrian imagery in 1 Henry IV takes on a new significance, as does the fact that two of the main characters misuse horses. In the two plus hours’ “traffic” of the play, the aptly named Hotspur travels from the Scottish border to Windsor to Northumberland to Wales: a journey of over a thousand miles. At Shrewsbury, he commits the tactical error of engaging in battle with “journey-bated horses” (4.3.28). His rebellion fails because he is oblivious to the physical suffering he causes and the energy he consumes by over-exerting his horses.

Desidia (Sloth), 1557 by Pieter Bruegel. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the art of equestrian manège embodied by Hotspur was already becoming an anachronism, as the nobility gradually transformed itself from a warrior class into a leisure class. Throughout the early modern period the horse underwent a corresponding transformation from a weapon of war to a means of personal transport. The character in 1 Henry IV who most obviously reflects this transformation is Falstaff. During the Gad’s Hill robbery, Poins plays a practical joke on the fat knight the importance of which has not been given the attention it deserves: he steals his horse. The “uncolted” Falstaff seems to parody Richard III’s outburst in a line that should be equally notorious: “Give me my horse, you rogues, give me my horse, and be hanged!” (2.2.29-30). Accustomed to riding everywhere, Falstaff underscores his distress at having to walk by punningly protesting that the robbery was “so forward and afoot too” (2.2.46-47). The play also comments on how Falstaff’s massive girth increases the burden of his mount. Among the colourful insults hurled at Falstaff “horse-back-breaker” (2.5.246) serves as a retrospective justification of Poin’s gag. Whereas the travellers he robs decide to walk to “ease” their horses’ legs (2.2.79), Falstaff thinks only of his own discomfort: “I’ll not bear my flesh so far afoot again for all the coin in thy father’s exchequer” (2.3.35-36). The verb “bear” here is highly suggestive. It bespeaks Falstaff’s centaurian consciousness of his own body as both vehicle and rider. In a culture where vehicular travel has become the norm, walking comes to be perceived as onerous. Falstaff, the play insinuates, has not grown fat on sack alone. His “uncolting” is not simply a ploy to avoid bringing horses on stage or a comment on the obsolescence of chivalry. It is a theatre of punishment directed at environmentally irresponsible behaviour that was aggravating an Elizabethan energy crisis.

In Sonnet 44 Shakespeare voices a wistful fantasy that humans possessed the power of teleportation––a capacity to leap through space instantaneously with no other fuel than thought. The inability of our body to do this is a source of melancholy for Shakespeare as it is for the environmentally conscious today. The remorse the spur-clad Shakespeare expresses in Sonnet 50 for causing his horse to groan may not be exactly similar to that which prompts academics to purchase carbon offsets for travelling to professional conferences, but his works reminds us–with its homophonic pun on travail–that travel was not and should not be easy. In an era when transportation took place on the back of sentient creatures–what if our cars moaned in pain each time we stepped on the accelerator?–and was fuelled by the sweat of animals and local farmers who grew their food, the energy required to generate such horse-power could not be hidden under the hood. Although in the symbolic calculus of the Henriad, medieval chivalry dies with Hotspur, we are, nonetheless, committing the same mistake in the post-chivalric era of the automobile. We are all Hotspur now.

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