SOURCE: Kendle, Burton. “The Elusive Horses in The Sea Gull.” Modern Drama 13 (May 1970): 63-6.

In the following essay, Kendle analyzes Chekhov's use of references to horses in The Seagull.

An elaborate refrain emerges from the apparently random requests for horses in The Sea Gull. As they try, usually unsuccessfully, to secure the horses that promise escape from the boredom and spiritual imprisonment of Sorin's estate, Chekhov's characters deepen the resonance of this refrain. The motif of unavailable horses is introduced humorously as merely another example of the steward Shamreyeff's blundering tyranny over his social superiors, a theme familiar in Chekhov's early plays and still effective in the butler's comic, yet touching, despotism over the weak-witted Protheros in Mary McCarthy's The Group. Though a half-foolish, half-pathetic figure in his nostalgia for the theater of his youth, Shamreyeff rules his domain absolutely. Indeed his absolutism seems partly an attempt to...