Ursine Poetics in Horace and the Classical Tradition

Kachuck, Aaron [UCL]

See a later published version: “Exit Pursued by Horace: A Classical Archaeology of Shakespeare’s Bear”, accepted in Artes Poeticae: Formations and Transformations 1500–1650, Special Issue of Classical Receptions Journal (11 June, 2021), pp. 86–106. Though both Nicolas Boileau’s L’art poétique (1674) and Marco Girolamo Vida’s De arte poetica (1527) adapt Horace’s Ars Poetica (c. 10’s BCE), both eschew the mad-cap poet turned bear turned leech with which Horace’s poem, its third wall broken, ends. Their classicizing artes poeticae end in polite aspiration, Horace’s in chaos. Modern classical scholarship has often shared Boileau and Vida’s neo-classical reticence; Bernard Kytzler, for example, can call the Ars Poetica “not a versified manual but a humane conversation with friends on a common theme”, but what “humane conversation” ever ended with this poem’s shockingly violent conclusion? The paper that I am offering today represents part of a larger article that puts the bear back in Horace by demonstrating the role bears have played as the traditional disruptors of the classical literary artifact. The article’s third and final section, which I will be sharing with you, turns to the bear’s fate in Renaissance artes poeticae, and its role as unstable genre-crossing center of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611). Shakespeare’s bear is an addition to the play’s primary source (Robert Green’s 1588 novella, Pandosto), thus making it of particular symbolic interest, and yet, although it has been analyzed by way of folk-lore, theology, ethics, law, ecology, and theatre, too monolithic a view of classical and renaissance poetics has kept the bear’s poetological sources consistently out of view. This article thus represents an interesting case-study for my larger project on All Augustus’ Animals: A Symbolic Bestiary of the Classical Tradition, which examines animals as vehicles for political and poetic power from the age of Augustus on.