Cleopatra, longing for Antony and impatient at his prolonged absence in Rome, imagines for a moment that that it is better to be Antony's horse than to be Queen of Egypt: "O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!" (1.5.21).

For the play's editors, Cleopatra's exclamation has seemed little more than a conventional bawdy, linking riding to intercourse and containing a pun on horse/whores. But I will argue that much more than conventional Jacobean bawdry is going on here. I read this utterance as interrogating the dignity of man from a point of view importantly identified as animal and participating in an historical epistemology of the passions.

It is important to our historical understanding of the passions that that they belonged to that part of the natural order jointly occupied by human beings and animals. As the Jesuit Thomas Wright pointed out, "Those actions . . . which are common with us and beasts we call Passions and Affections, or perturbations of the mind." The passions were a part of the bodily habitus, classified along with material phenomena, like food and air, states like fullness and emptiness, and habits like rest and exercise. In such a schema--the schema of Galenic humoralism--the emotions, rather than being regarded as separable from bodily being and knowing, helped to constitute them.

In Antony and Cleopatra, one function of the play's diacritics is to call the question of the passions' role in humanistic determination of human being/nature. From this point of view, Cleopatra's identification with Antony's horse depends on the physiological self-sameness of human and animal emotions, a theory found in taxonomies of the passions from Aristotle forward. Animals played a key role structurally in the production of knowledge about the passions because passions were at their purest, most intense, and most visible in those beings lacking the constraint of reason.

In the play's complex celebration of the passions, the passions become forces of indeterminacy which challenge not only Rome's geopolitical order but its intellectual order as well-- imperilling its most fundamental binaries of difference in gender and species. Cleopatra's hailing of the horse as fellow subject of desire for Antony adds to the intellectual and ethical burden which the play's diacritics places on Antony as paradigmatic man because he is the biographical subject in whom Rome's massive cultural investment in human dignity comes to question. It is Rome's investment in the binary opposition of man to beast which gives thematic importance to Cleopatra's hailing of Antony's horse. She becomes in this hailing a figure for Circe, but one who, rather than enacting a shameful transformation of species, finds in the psychological fellowship of desire and the means of its enactment a reason for denying the essential differences between human and animal, and finds in that denial a principle of opposition to Rome. Cleopatra allows us to glimpse the possibility of an humanistic interrogation of the dignity of "man" and the species barrier in terms not entirely foreign to our own cyborgian speculations.