Footnotes
The Legend of Dido


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Priamus: For a later literary manifestation of Aeneas' speech to Dido concerning Troy and Priamus, see Shakespeare's Hamlet in which Hamlet greets the players prior to their performance of Hamlet's The Mousetrap. (Act II, Scene II, ln 445-448):
One speech in't I chiefly lov'd, twas Aeneas' [tale] to Dido, and thereabout of it especially when he speaks of Priam's slaughter. (The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1974. p. 1157.)
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hors: The medieval association of the horse with unbridled passion was a strong verbal and visual icon. V.A. Kolve (Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford UP, 1984.) cites the "Porphyrian tradition in which the horse stands for all that is not rational or spiritual in man's nature" (239). St. Gregory used the imagery of the horse to convey the metaphor of controlling the flesh: "Indeed the horse is the body of any soul, which it knows how to restrain from illicit action with the bridle of continence and to release in the exercise of good works with the spur of chastity" (as qtd by Kolve 241). Analogs of the representation of horses as metaphoric flesh exist in numerous texts and manuscripts. In one fifteenth-century illumination,
Prudence (shown as a man) "holds a horse by its bridle to indicate that prudence likewise requires control over one's carnal nature" (Kolve 243). The image of Dido and Eneas on horseback immediately call these associations to mind, especially the "stertlynge," unrestrained, movements of Eneas's horse.

For another horse analog, the Prioress in the Canterbury Tales also rides a palfrey, considered the suitable mount for noblewomen.
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