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Marius Kwint
Britain. The circus packaged up the vestiges of carnival in within an orderly
commercial space, and added feats of human discipline and demonstrations of how
animals should be cared for and cultivated. By these means it helped to rescue
certain popular traditions from a world that had begun to look unacceptably rough,
disorderly, and cruel to many opinion-formers. This remained the rationale of the
circus, even though its precepts were deeply archetypal, and even arcane. How
the circus negotiated these tensions provides much of the substance of the
following account.
As far as we know, the robust figure of Philip Astley rarely intellectualized his art,
except in his early “Prologue on the Death of the Horse” of June 1768. His steed
would play dead in the ring while Astley announced that this was to show, “how
brutes by heaven were design’d / To be in full subjection to mankind.” Then,
referring to a famous general in the recent Seven Years War with the French, Astley
bellowed: “Rise, young Bill, & be a little Handy / To serve that warlike Hero, [the
Marquis of] Granby.” 11 Whereupon the horse would of course briskly stand up.
Circuses went on frequently to stage the death of the horse in order to elicit astonishment
at the ability of riding masters to train their animals. Equestrian performers
had, after all, founded the circus, and remained its hub. So the relationship between
human and horse is likely to be the first key to the logic of the genre.
It is widely accepted that the natural world is fundamental to human identity by
allowing awareness of ourselves as a species. Animals in the human environment
provide instruments for categorical thought: they are, in the words of Lévi-Strauss,
“things to think with.” 12 Onto them we project our visions of human difference
and moral character, and hence our emotions. It is nonetheless surprising that an
influential genre of mass urban entertainment should be sustained by an equestrian
cult that lacked the appeal of competition or gambling. Some circus historians have
suggested that the ubiquity of the horse in pre-automotive society had the effect
of heightening the audience’s astonishment at what the riding masters could do. 13
This may have been true, but was hardly a new factor by the time that the modern
circus was founded in the 1760s. Other circumstances must have helped to make
the dramatic potential of the horse so apparent.
In his splendid book Realizations, the cultural historian Martin Meisel attributes
the circus firmly to an emerging Gothic and Romantic sensibility that captured the
imaginations of elite intellectuals and popular pleasure-seekers alike. 14 Meisel
takes Astley’s famous hippodrama Mazeppa; Or, The Wild Horse of Tartary (first
performed there in 1833) as an example. The play was based upon Lord Byron’s
poem of the same title, in which a low-born Polish youth who dares to love the
daughter of the king is lashed naked to the back of a “fiery untamed steed” and
sent galloping off across the Steppe. He survives to raise an army, avenge his
punishment and win both the kingdom and his love. Meisel, noting the prevalence
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