There are seven uses of the word ‘elephant’ in Shakespeare’s works, but – alas – no appearances from the animal. They occur in Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida and Julius Caesar. When Sebastian, one half of the twins at the centre of the intrigue of Twelfth Night, arrives in Illyria, his companion, Antonio, lends him money and tells him to lodge at the Elephant Inn. Of course, things don’t go to plan, and Antonio mistakes Sebastian’s twin sister, Viola (disguised as the page Cesario), for his friend, leaving the hero to ask:

Where’s Antonio, then?
I could not find him at the Elephant [...]

Quite why Illyria should name an inn after an exotic animal is anyone’s guess, although one should note that this occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works: the inn at the centre of The Comedy of Errors is called, for example, ‘The Tiger’. Efforts to find a modern day equivalent of the elephant inn, in Montenegro, Albania or Croatia, reveal only that there exists only one mix of hospitality and African beast in the region Shakespeare called “Illyria”: the Electric Elephant Festival, in Croatia.

Leaving the comedies behind, our word hunt brings us to a set of plays placed that all take place in the classical period. Elephants were, of course, most famously used at this time by Hannibal in his attack on Rome during the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome, but Decius (one of the conspirators against Caesar) points out that even these creatures could be beaten with “holes” in the ground. The comment comes in a speech comparing elephants to the proud and powerful Roman leader, a patter nof thought also found in Troilus and Cressida, where the Greek heroes, Achilles and Ajax, are likened to the beast: Achilles to the creature that “hath joints but none for courtesy” and Ajax to an animal that is “slow” and powerful.

One might conclude then, that all Shakespeare’s references to the elephant have little overlap with modern conceptions of the beast, influenced by tales of Indian exoticism, like Rudyard Kipling’s, or by such sympathetic portrayals as Disney’s Dumbo. Instead of this later view, elephants are taken as representative of great power, but inflexible and stupid. With this in mind, perhaps one should note the potential for a diplomatic gaff when Suleiman the elephant was presented to Archduke Maximilian II (later the Holy Roman Emperor) by King John III of Portugal in 1542. That, though, is a story for another time.