Exit Pursued by Horace: Bears, Shakespeare, and the Classical Tradition

Abstract

This article puts the bear back in Horace, demonstrating the role bears have played from antiquity through the Renaissance as the great disruptor of the classical literary artefact, simplex et unum. The first section of the article treats bear’s place in ancient poetics. The second section exposes its role in Horace’s corpus, demonstrating how it instantiates both historical interpretive conflicts over one of Aristotle’s definition of the poet’s vocation and a wide range of Roman cultural and literary developments in the late first-century bce. The third and final section finds Horace’s bear stalking Renaissance artes poeticae and starring as the unstable genre-crossing centre of Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’ (1611). This article shows that Shakespeare’s bear has as much to do with the history of poetics (and the War of the Poets) as with the material history of stagecraft, which has often been the intriguing focus of scholarship on the bear. In addition to heightening our sense of the monstrous qualities of Augustan literature, and to troubling our notions about the classicism of classical literature, this article clarifies how classical poetics could function, in its own time and thereafter, as both analytic field and a literary genre sui generis.