The unpublished manuscript “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,” now housed in the British Library, is a little less than 450 years old. George North wrote the treatise in 1576, signing, dedicating, and presenting it to Roger, 2nd Lord North while living at the nobleman's Cambridgeshire manor, Kirtling Hall. It generated no known copies or contemporaneous allusions to it. Until now, no Shakespeare scholar has studied the manuscript, and it has probably remained little read. Yet, as our analysis has revealed, “Discourse” is not merely the only uniquely existent, evidently uncopied document to have had a substantial impact on the canon; it is one of the most influential Shakespearean source texts in any form. In one year's work on the manuscript, we have traced more than twenty Shakespearean monologues and passages back to North's essay. These include Gloucester's opening soliloquy about his deformed appearance and villainous determination (Richard III 1.1.14–30), Canterbury's discussion of aristocratic order in the societies of bees (Henry V 1.2.183–212), Macbeth's comparison of various breeds of dogs to different classes of men (Macbeth 3.1.93–102), the citizens’ uprising in Coriolanus (Act 2), and essentially all the events surrounding Jack Cade's fatal fight with Alexander Iden in his garden (2 Henry VI 4.10). While scholars had long believed that Shakespeare had invented the circumstances of Cade's final hours, a reading of Jack Cade's poetic soliloquy in “Discourse” confirms we have now found the source. Similarly, George North's discussion and quoting of a Merlin prophecy also clears up long-standing confusions over the origin and purpose of the Fool's Merlin prophecy in King Lear (3.2.79– 95). In terms of the number of plays, scenes, and passages affected, the scope of the manuscript's influence likely exceeds all other known Shakespearean sources, excepting only the Chronicles of Hall and Holinshed and Thomas North's Plutarch's Lives.

Considering the unusual nature of this discovery, we have taken painstaking steps to assure the uniqueness of the links between “Discourse” and various Shakespearean plays. This includes the use of plagiarism software and rigorous searches of the Early English Books Online–TCP Partnership database (EEBO) to exclude the possibility of other source texts for the shared content and parallel passages.

One of the more exciting results to issue from our mining of George North's “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels” is that the manuscript reveals the origin of the much-debated circumstances surrounding the final hours of Jack Cade, the rebel who, in 1450, claimed Edmund Mortimer as ancestor and asserted his right to the crown. In Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, Cade leads a vigorous citizens’ revolt only to die at the hand of Alexander Iden. The Chronicles of Hall and Holinshed were clearly Shakespeare's primary source for the English histories, but there are details concerning Cade's death that do not appear in either – or, for that matter, in Caxton, Fabyan, Christopherson, Baldwin, Foxe, Stow, or Grafton. These include Cade's repentant monologue detailing his suffering as well as peculiar features describing his final hours: the weather is very hot, he is hiding fearfully until starvation compels him to trespass into Iden's garden, his limbs are emaciated, he eats grass to sustain himself, and he dies because he is too famished to fight effectively. Iden intends to drag Cade's body along the streets by the heels and leave his corpse to be eaten by crows. No other account of Cade's final hours includes any of these circumstances; indeed, scholars credit Shakespeare with having invented them. But the manuscript reveals that Shakespeare had a source.

Although nearly all of North's “Discourse” is in prose, the treatise contains poems on the three notorious rebels: Jack Cade, Owen Glendower, and the Black Smith. North fashioned each poem as a memoir-confession by the rebel's remorseful ghost, clearly drawing inspiration from William Baldwin's Mirror for Magistrates (1575), which contains similarly styled poetic monologues by these and other historical figures. North occasionally borrowed stanzas from Mirror for Magistrates, but, importantly, he did a fair amount of rewriting and added details that, some years later, ended up in Shakespeare's plays.

The regretful monologues in “Discourse” are best described as end-of-life laments, and, importantly, North intertwined them, introducing all three in the same paragraph. Baldwin's work, in contrast, deals with a variety of historical events involving the fall of princes and includes material on Richard II, Lord Clifford, Henry VI, and Edward IV. Thus, in Mirror for Magistrates, the poems on Glendower, Cade, and the Black Smith appear in three widely separated chapters, beginning on folios 19, 43v, and 144, respectively.

I WANT TO SUGGEST a way of appreciating the achievement of J. M. Coetzee's book, Elizabeth Costello, and its eight “lessons.” Given the nature of these lessons, this will make inevitable an attempt to raise the question of understanding the work in terms of what I shall call “philosophical fiction.” In this, I take myself to be following the lead given us by the book itself, in which philosophy obviously plays a large role. The idea will not be to show that fiction is philosophy. Of course, it is not. The book is literary fiction, even if a unique genre; not quite a short story collection, and certainly not a mere device for ventriloquizing philosophical claims. But the idea that fiction can be philosophical requires a defense of the claim, first, that fiction can be a distinctive form of thought, even a form of knowledge; and second, that such knowledge is relevant to, has a bearing on, the sort of knowledge philosophy, or at least some version of philosophy, tries to achieve. The bearing of fiction on philosophy is not that fiction is a form of philosophy. It has this bearing precisely because it is not. It has this bearing even, and especially, when what fiction achieves throws into some doubt the prospects for philosophy to achieve what it is trying to achieve. The immediately problematic or paradoxical nature of this thought can be put by saying: if the idea is that fiction is “philosophy by other means,” then the emphasis must first of all be on the phrase: “other means.” And that already threatens the claim that it can be philosophical. (How “other” can such means be, and still be means to philosophy?)

As a strictly theoretical question this leads us immediately to the notion of the form of literary fiction. Knowledge is knowledge by being of some generality, and generality is formal. It extends to many instances. This problem is dual. It concerns the distinctive form of all literary thought, as contrasted, say, with forms like mathematical or religious thought. And it concerns the specific content of any fictional insight. If a drama can be philosophical, then, say, the play, Othello, cannot be about, be a way of understanding, Othello's jealousy without also being about, showing us something about, jealousy in general.

IN HIS 2014 NOVEL 10:04, the American author Ben Lerner recounts a year in the life of a character who seems to resemble his creator: young, successful, Brooklyn-hip, and also named Ben. A similar protagonist narrates Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, a book that instigated the bidding war for 10:04, the writing of which being the primary plot of the latter work. If all this sounds rather self-referential, that is because it is. Leaving the Atocha Station is about a young American poet on a fellowship abroad, trying to become who he is. 10:04 is about the writing of a novel that is 10:04. Both are about nothing other than Ben Lerner.

This is not the first time a writer has fictionalized his own life, of course. J. M. Coetzee's whole career can be viewed as “a huge existential enterprise, grounded in fictionalized autobiography,” as David Attwell has argued recently. And Coetzee is part of a longstanding tradition. From its inception, the novel, as a literary form, has blurred the line between fact and fiction, with authorship itself being the easiest, or most readily available thing to obscure and make mysterious—Cervantes, Defoe, and Richardson prove as much. And Borges, in “Borges and I”—a text that influenced Coetzee's Nobel Prize Lecture, “He and His Man”— reminded us of this lesson in his inimitable way.

What are we to make, though, of Lerner's fictionalization not just of himself, but also of other famous self-fictionalizers? A scene in 10:04 describes a dinner thrown for the participants of a panel discussion sponsored by Columbia University's School of the Arts. It is a set piece reminiscent of the post-lecture dinner described in Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (and later, in Elizabeth Costello), and the fact that it seems to skewer a character all too similar to Coetzee, as Christian Lorentzen and others have noted, only heightens the hall-of-mirrors effect.

Introductory Remarks

EVER SINCE BÁRBAROS acquired its ethnocentric meaning in the fifth century BC, this Greek noun and adjective and its derivatives in Latin and in the modern European languages have functioned as an “asymmetric counter-concept” (asymmetrischer Gegenbegriff), to quote the historian Reinhart Koselleck. Discriminating against the ethnic others to whom the concept is applied, it functions to deny the reciprocity of mutual recognition. It involves, as Edward Said has put it, a hierarchical spatial divide between a metropolitan center and remote territories to be controlled or even colonized by the center. Thus the concept generates a dynamic of forcing the indigenous inhabitants of those territories to mimic the center's view of them as subhuman beings whose domination and even annihilation may seem legitimate. This violent dynamic inherent in the concept must undermine and ultimately reverse the positions held by the asymmetric counter-concept and its opposite, as Claude Lévi-Strauss has pointed out very pertinently in his 1952 UNESCO memorandum entitled Race et Histoire: “Le barbare, c'est d'abord l'homme qui croit à la barbarie” (The barbarian is first of all the very person who believes in barbarism).

Despite this dynamic of reversal, the space-related, exclusionary function of the concept has prevailed for about two and a half thousand years. It has resisted the Enlightenment's attempt to temporalize the concept (an attempt quoted in Coetzee's novel, as we will see). This stunning resistance and resilience bears witness to the important role that the use of the word barbarian as an asymmetric counter-concept has played and continues to play in European and Western cultural history and identity formation. We may even surmise that it is a founding concept, or rather a founding counter-concept, of European and Western identity. Yet there is much reluctance to acknowledge it as such. This is evidenced by the fact that there is still no comprehensive history of the concept ranging from classical antiquity to the present.

One of the scholarly reasons for this dearth of research no doubt is that the concept of the barbarian defies the traditional methodology of conceptual history. The latter focuses almost exclusively on non-fictional and non-poetic texts, and while admitting that there are no concepts without words, it considers that concepts can to a large extent be abstracted from the words representing them, since these words are variable over time and (linguistic) space.

Because of their intelligence, their relationship with Man and their iconic appeal, horses could not be treated in the same way as other domesticated animals.1 For a member of the landed elite who wished to establish or expand a stud the unique status of horses held out the prospect of a good return on his investment, that is, if he produced a well-proportioned horse; in a sought-after breed with an excellent pedigree; of the right size, pace and colour; and fit for purpose, whether for hunting, pulling a coach or merely enhancing the image of the rider mounted on his back. It was therefore a risky business, one that could not be undertaken lightly, because failure to produce exactly the right product for a highly discerning market courted disaster. As Sir John Reresby wrote of his grandfather Sir George, who owned the Thrybergh estate (Yorkshire: West Riding) in the early seventeenth century:

The absence of sales ledgers precludes any analysis of the profitability or otherwise of Cavendish's stud, but the disbursement books show that he was expanding his stud at the time, and he was not a man who was careless with his money.

Mares and Stallions

The Cavendish brothers, Henry, William and Charles, kept fine horses, an interest that they had inherited from their father. In 1597, for instance, Henry offered Sir Robert Cecil, the queen's chief minister, 100 French crowns or the choice of a horse of equal value for a six- or seven-year-old colt then in his own stable. In August of that year, William paid a modus of 10d. to the vicar of Pentrich for ten foals produced in the stud over the previous five years, a mean of two per annum. In 1611 the mares delivered eleven foals, while in March 1623 Martin Hole had to buy fourteen halters to lead the young foals. To achieve this growth, Cavendish acquired additional brood mares, mainly in a flurry of activity between 1597 and 1603.

Family

William Cavendish was born on 27 December 1551, the second son of Sir William Cavendish and his third wife, Elizabeth Barley (née Hardwick), generally known as Bess of Hardwick. Of Bess's children by William, her second husband, five survived into adulthood: an elder brother and sister, Henry and Frances; a younger brother, Charles; and two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Mary. Bess married as her fourth husband George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, late in 1567, and on 9 February following, her son and daughter Henry and Mary wed the earl's daughter Grace and his son and heir, Gilbert, respectively. Henry, who lived at Tutbury Abbey, had no legitimate children, although he fathered ‘a host of bastards’. Charles married Margaret, the daughter of Sir Thomas Kitson of Hengrave (Suffolk), in 1581, but the match hardly lasted a year because she died in childbirth in July 1582. He married as his second wife Catherine Ogle, daughter and co-heiress of Cuthbert, 7th Baron Ogle, in 1592. Until 1607 Charles lived at Stoke, four miles from Chatsworth, but in that year he bought Welbeck Abbey from his brother-in-law, Gilbert, and moved in. He acquired Bolsover from Gilbert a year later.4 His elder son, William, who eventually became Duke of Newcastle, was one of the foremost horsemen in Europe. Frances, Bess's eldest child, married Sir Henry Pierrepont of Holme Pierrepont (Nottinghamshire), while Elizabeth's union with Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, gave their daughter Arbella a claim to the throne. William married as his first wife Anne, daughter and co-heiress of Henry Keighley of Keighley (Yorkshire: West Riding), in March 1580, and of the couple's six children, two survived into adulthood. William, the 2nd earl, was born around 1590 and later married Christiana, the daughter of Edward Bruce, Lord Kinloss and Master of the Rolls, while Frances, born in 1593 or 1594, married William, the son of Sir Henry Maynard, Lord Burghley's secretary. Anne died in childbirth in February 1598, leaving William a widower until his marriage to Elizabeth Wortley (née Boughton), the widow of Sir Richard Wortley of Wortley Hall (Yorkshire: West Riding), on 2 July 1604. Their son John was born in spring 1607 but died in January 1618.

To manage their large, unwieldy estates peers employed numerous officials organised in a hierarchical fashion, as exemplified in the estate accounts of the Earls of Northumberland or those of Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland. Bailiffs supervised economic activity in the primary unit of administration and accounted to receivers who were responsible for discrete blocks of territory, perhaps in a county. The latter, in turn, reported to a receiver-general who had financial oversight of the entire estate. Not uncommonly, officers maintained separate accounts for the estate and the household, respectively under the control of receivers and the steward of the household. The Master of the Horse or his equivalent often drew up distinct stable accounts, either in specific documents or filed en bloc in more general accounts. The structure was therefore capable of adaptation. For instance, within this broad framework, Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, operated a flexible system, in which ‘responsibility was personal to the officer accounting rather than attached to the office or offices which he held’.

In spite of the incentive to improve their knowledge of their financial situation, landowners were slow to modernise their accounting procedure. On the estates of the Earls of Northumberland, the medieval charge/discharge system persisted and only really gave way to double-entry book-keeping after the Restoration. Stone argues that landlords were reluctant to change because they prioritised the prevention of fraud over a more accurate calculation of profit and loss. William Cavendish and his mother usually kept separate receipt and disbursement books, many of the former having been lost over time. As Riden and Fowkes indicate, Bess and her son adopted slightly different systems from the one just discussed. Bess did appoint a receiver-general but he, rather than intermediate receivers, obtained the accounts and surpluses of the bailiffs of individual manors. In the 1590s her receiver, Mr William Reason, gave the balance to Mr Timothy Pusey, her steward and main man of business. William Cavendish, who recognised Pusey's legal and administrative abilities, retained his services but divided the receivership into two, one receiver being based at Hardwick and the other at London. Although independent of each other, the gross imbalance between expenditure and income meant that the Hardwick receiver regularly remitted surplus funds to his counterpart in London. His receivers might also deal with the bailiffs but the latter often liaised with other officials.

J. M. COETZEE's The Childhood of Jesus, which many literary critics have seen as an allegorical, even an inscrutable novel, takes up three dimensions of otherness. First, and most obviously, it addresses the question of cultural otherness resulting from the experience of migration and from arrival in a new land. Secondly, it explores the cognitive otherness inherent in the relationship between children and adults: children may have to catch up with adults and adapt to the prevailing order, but they also have a right to their own world view. But with its depiction of intercultural and pedagogical conflicts, the plot of the novel also focuses on a third kind of otherness: the otherness of writing, its names, concepts, and fictions. This aesthetic otherness, which can only be experienced in the mode of reading, will be at the center of my discussion here; it provides the basis for the covert main character of The Childhood of Jesus.

Writing is a world of signs with a mysterious connection to spoken language. This is the field of operation of a cultural technology that makes both the otherness between languages and the otherness between adults and children into dramatic sources of difference. As can be seen in the Latin concept of infans, which stigmatized the child as a “non-speaking” creature, the decisive criterion for the otherness of childhood was once the issue of speaking, but now it is the ability to read. In the modern era, social and cultural practices of exclusion are increasingly based on the subjective distinction between the ability and the inability to read, as well as the distinction between readability and unreadability in the world of objects. Almost all processes of social communication and economic production are fundamentally regulated by operations of reading. At the same time, reading skills generate further varieties and forms of virtual reference to “the world” which must themselves be cognitively and culturally processed. Reading can lead readers to bizarre misunderstandings and unjustified acts. Works of history, and above all works of literature, are full of examples of failed or mistaken reading: the travel plans of Columbus were based on an incorrect map of the world, and it took centuries for the legends and the facts of geography to be definitively separated. Madame Bovary reads the wrong books—all-too-romantic love stories she vainly hopes to rediscover in reality.

This book is not the one I had in my mind when I set out to write a book on William Cavendish, 1st Earl of Devonshire, and his horses. At the time, I intended it to serve as a case study of the relationship between an aristocrat and his horses, one that would be narrowly focused on equine pursuits. Of course, the proposal emphasised the centrality of horses to Cavendish and his peers, but, blinkered, I did not fully consider the wider implications inherent in that statement. So if initially I did not see it coming, once I started to write I found myself getting involved in a range of subjects that seemed relevant to my central theme of a man and his horses. Chapters on provincial and metropolitan visits expanded to incorporate information on the social, political, legal and administrative activities of Cavendish and his peers to the extent that they had to become chapters in their own right. In its final incarnation the book even has a chapter on entertainment and pastimes, admittedly some of which have a definite equine feel about them and would have surfaced in the narrowly conceived book anyway.

As the book mutated, the title had to change to keep pace with the shifting ground it was covering. In this respect the title, which was suggested by one of the referees, namely, Horses and the Aristocratic Lifestyle, accurately reflects the construction of the book. It contains ten chapters, neatly divided in the middle, with the first half dealing with equine themes and the second one covering lifestyle subjects. But this is not a forced coupling but rather a symbiotic one with cross-currents flowing freely between the two halves. Just as I found it impossible to write a book on an aristocrat and his horses without discussing his lifestyle, it would be equally impossible to write a book on the aristocratic lifestyle without highlighting the centrality of horses to it. This is particularly true of the period covered by the book, which focuses on the turn of the sixteenth century (1597– 1623), the years covered by the exant accounts. It encompassed developments in agriculture, industry and trade; improvements in internal communication; the growth of a social season, especially in London; and the benefits of peace brought about by the ending of the threat from Spain and the effect of dynastic union with Scotland, even if Ireland remained an open wound. The role of horses was crucial to all these developments.