Morocco
Marocco (* in the 16th century; † around 1606 ) was a trained horse. He was the only horse to ever climb the tower of Old St Paul's Cathedral in London .
prehistory
Marocco's coach William Banks (the name also appears in the forms Bankes, Bancks, Banckes etc .; the first name Richard is also sometimes mentioned) was probably born in Staffordshire in the 1560s and probably initially worked for the Earl of Essex . In the summer of 1591 he showed up in Shrewsbury on a white horse and performed some tricks. This first horse that Banks presented seemed to be able to count money and recognize people by the color of their clothes.
Marocco's life
In the 1580s, Banks had a foal that he trained from an early age . In 1592 or 1593 he sold his property in Staffordshire, had the horse, which was named Marocco after a saddle shape customary at the time, shod with silver irons and moved with him to London. The demonstrations there were probably financially successful right away. Marocco could dance on two and four legs, pretend to be dead, take certain people out of the audience on command and lead them onto the stage, and give the appearance of being able to count money. A popular trick, later imitated by numerous animal dressers, was to make the animal bow submissively to the Queen of England, but to provoke an angry reaction when the name of the King of Spain was mentioned. A poem by John Donne shows that this alleged aversion to the Spanish monarch was also shared by monkeys and elephants. There Morocco is referred to as a "wise politique horse" . William Shakespeare apparently went into Lost Love Labor on Marocco's alleged ability to indicate the value of coins . He called the animal the "dancing horse" , which became a common name for Morocco. Shakespeare's mention of the dancing horse was used by literary scholars to date the play.
Banks made a lot of money with Marocco. He moved into the Bell Savage Inn on Ludgate Hill ; the demonstrations took place in a purpose-built building on Gracious Street (now Gracechurch Street). A musician entertained the audience between the individual performances of the horse and accompanied the performances. Around the mid-1590s, Banks was still showing some more burlesque tricks. For example, he made the horse drink a large amount of water so that Marocco could urinate on command. John Bastard , a contemporary poet, summed up his amusement in the words:
"Bankes has a horse of wondrous quality,
For he can fight, and pisse, and daunce, and lie,
And find your purse, and tell what coyne ye have ..."
"Banks has a horse with amazing ability
because it can fight, piss, dance and lie down
and find your wallet and say what coins you have ..."
However, this trick was probably not well received by the entire audience and was not demonstrated later. At least with men, on the other hand, the “virgin rehearsal” was popular: on command, Marocco brought chaste virgins and their opposite from the audience onto the stage. Banks is said to have ordered his horse to drag the craziest man in the area onto the stage and Marocco is said to have performed the popular clown Richard Tarlton, who is friends with Banks . The truthfulness of this story is questionable, however, since, as far as this can be reconstructed, Tarlton († 1588) died before Marocco appeared in public. Of course, it cannot be completely ruled out that Marocco was older than generally assumed or that he was identical to the white horse that Banks had previously shown - there is, however, evidence that Marocco was not a gray , but a bay .
In any case, Morocco had an excellent reputation and was also praised in literary texts. A poem of praise entitled Ballad Shewing the Strange Qualities of a Young Nagg called Morocco appeared in the fall of 1595 but has not survived. A little later, Maroccus became Extaticus; or, Bankes Bay Horse in a Trance in London. It was said to have been written by Iohn Dando and Harrie Runt, but was more likely written by ghostwriters from Oxford and was written in the form of a dialogue between Mr. Banks and his horse.
The idea that Morocco could communicate with Banks was widespread - as was the idea that witchcraft was involved in the demonstrations. Between 1595 and 1597, Banks toured several English cities with Morocco, and it happened time and again that people in the audience were shocked and afflicted with anxiety because they believed in the presence of higher and darker powers. Patrick Henderson reported on the tour to Scotland in his History of Scotland .
In the late 1590s, William Banks returned to London with Marocco and found that competition from trained animals had increased sharply. So now there was a trained elephant and a dancing camel in London. Banks had to come up with a spectacular new trick with Marocco to keep up, and he succeeded: Marocco would be the first and only horse to climb the tower of Old St Paul's Cathedral. This church looked different in Marocco's time than it does today: It was badly damaged by a lightning strike in 1561 and did not yet have the dome that was added later, but instead a tower with more than 1,000 steps leading up to it. In February 1601, Marocco actually managed to use the stairwell of this tower to get to the roof, where an acrobatic performance took place, and then to go back down the same way. This unusual achievement was recognized by Thomas Dekker in his work Guls Hornebooke .
In March 1601, Banks traveled to mainland Europe with Marocco and settled in the Lion d'Argent on Rue Saint Jacques in Paris . The horse appeared in France under the name "Monsieur Moraco" and had the same great success there as in England. Banks and Marocco were recognized in an extensive footnote to a French edition of Apuleius by Jean de Montlyard . The previous tricks have been expanded to include some details. Banks made the audience believe that Morocco could even count money blindfolded and knew the current rate for the golden Écus . The success was almost too great, however: Banks was eventually arrested for being accused of wizardry and had to explain that Marocco's actions were entirely due to careful training and that the horse received his instructions in the form of tiny, barely perceptible signs. He also claimed that he could train any other horse in the same way within a single year.
In 1601 and 1602, Banks and Morocco traveled to other cities in France. In Orléans they were again suspected of being in league with dark powers. Banks and his horse were arrested again, this time at the instigation of monks and priests, and should be punished with death by burning. However, he managed to get a farewell performance through. In the course of this demonstration, Marocco approached a priest who wore a large crucifix around his neck, knelt in front of him and "kissed" the cross - which seemed to prove that neither the horse nor the owner was in league with the devil could, and the charges were overturned. Bishop Morton later processed this episode in the life of the horse in A Direct Answer to the Scandalous Exceptions of Theophilus Higgons . In an epigram from 1616, Ben Jonson really let Banks and his horse suffer death in the flames - but in fact Marocco traveled on with his owner through Europe after the incident in Orléans. He probably performed in Lisbon , Rome and Frankfurt am Main, among others . The last mention of an appearance that can be reliably dated comes from April 1605. At that time, Marocco could be seen at the court of Prince Heinrich Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel . The horse is said to have been 16 years old at the time; its owner was strangely referred to as "Reichardt Banckes". Marocco probably died soon after that last attested appearance.
After Marocco's death
Banks probably returned to England after Marocco's death. Although he once claimed that he could lead any horse to the same level of success as Marocco, he apparently never succeeded again. In any case, he no longer appeared in public, but hired himself out as a horse trainer for high-ranking personalities. In 1632 he opened a pub in London at the age of 70, with royal patronage. The establishment must have been successful. In 1637, some of Banks' friends wrote a satire on the exotic dishes he served. In 1639 he was mentioned in Shirley's Ball for the last time during his lifetime. But even after her death, both Banks and Marocco remained known apparitions. In his Pleasant Notes to Don Quixot of 1654 Edmund Gayton lets Marocco speak to Rosinante, and in 1626 he appeared in a pamphlet as "le joly Monsieur Maroc", who sits in hell instead of Dante's Virgil and entertains visitors there.
Banks' tricks
After Banks discovered that he could not raise a second Morocco, he revealed to the horse expert Gervase Markham how he had trained Morocco. He dedicated a chapter to him in his 1607 book Cavelarice . Banks had always fed and tended the foal himself from an early age and had spent a lot of time with him. Every success had been rewarded with food, failure resulted in food deprivation for Morocco. In order to teach the animal to “count”, for example, Banks taught it first to stamp on it with a hoof, then to regulate the number of its kicks at the signal of a small stick. Later, Marocco no longer needed signs that were transmitted with the stick, but responded to Banks' facial expressions. The trick worked similarly with the selection of the people in the audience who should bring Marocco onto the stage or to whom he should deliver something. At first he received the instruction by pointing with a stick, later by the command “Be wise!”, Which indicated to him that he was approaching the wrong person, or the exclamation “So, boy!”, Which showed him that he was was on the right path, and could ultimately be directed in the right direction even in these cases just by observing his master.
In addition to Markham, Samuel Rid , author of Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine (1612), was also privy to these tricks. During a demonstration by Banks, he had observed that Marocco stopped stomping when his master gave a slight shrug of his shoulders to signal this, and found that Marocco was absolutely dependent on these signals: “[…] nothing can be done, but his master must first know, and then his master knowing, the horse is ruled by him by signs. "
Marocco's successor
In William Banks' day, animals were treated roughly in his society. However, his dressage act made school. Many trained animals could already be seen in London during Morocco's lifetime. A similarly gifted horse like Marocco was Billy, a star in Astley's Circus in London in the late 18th century, who performed similar dance and counting numbers as his predecessor and was also trained to implement inconspicuous cues from his trainers so that he could do it on his own terms seemed to act. When the circus ran into financial difficulties, Billy was sold as a carriage horse and was later rediscovered by chance. Since he reacted immediately to a snap of his finger from the circus member, who found him, despite years of interruption in his training, he was bought back and performed in the circus well into old age. Billy died at the age of 42. A big drum was made out of his skin, with which special sensations were accompanied in the circus.
Acrobatic and balance tricks with horses became particularly popular towards the end of the 19th century; Doc Carver , one of Buffalo Bill's snipers , even demonstrated horses that jumped from a diving tower into a water basin, others let ponies walk on stilts and perform similar tricks.
The tradition of reacting to tiny signs was continued by horses like the clever Hans , who first trained by Wilhelm von Osten and later Karl Krall , as well as the other horses that Karl Krall kept in Elberfeld, in particular Muhamed and Zarif. Both Ost and Krall seem to have been convinced of the thinking abilities of their animals, whereas Oskar Pfungst and others also assumed here that the animals reacted to minimal, involuntary physical signs of their trainers instead of actually calculating and spelling. Lady Wonder, a mare who made a name for herself in the USA in the 1920s, may also have worked in this way. But none of these animals, Jan Bondeson believes , ever achieved the variety of skills and tricks that Marocco was able to acquire.
See also
- Lady Wonder , trained American horse
literature
- Jan Bondeson : Animal Freaks. The Strange History of Amazing Animals. Tempus Publishing, Stroud 2008, ISBN 978-0-7524-4595-3 , pp. 13-28.
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.online-literature.com/donne/416/
- ↑ http://manybooks.net/titles/shakespeetext982ws1210.html
- ↑ Russell A. Fraser, The Dancing Horse of 'Love's Labor's Lost' , Shakespeare Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 1, January 1954, pp. 98 f.
- ↑ http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=chadwyck_ep/uvaGenText/tei/chep_1.1451.xml;chunk.id=d106;toc.depth=1;toc.id=d89;brand = default # 1
- ↑ Jan Bondeson: The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History in the Google book search
- ↑ Ep. 133.156-159, cf. Ben Jonson and Helen Ostovich, Every Man Out of His Humor , Palgrave 2001, ISBN 978-0719015588 , p. 197, note to line 373
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated November 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ The horse cannot solve a problem unless its master knows 'the solution' beforehand; if his master knows the solution, he will guide the horse with signs.
