ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief critical history of Shakespeare’s Richard II moving from mid-twentieth-century new critical analyses to contemporary ecocritical and animal sensitive ones. It traces differences, but also links, between presentist ecocritical and historicist animal studies readings, and offers a new interpretation of the play through a focus on its horses. This interpretation, informed by the emergence of skeptical ideas in the late sixteenth century, suggests an alternative possibility at the end of the play to that offered by recent critical analyses that figure this moment in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy as marking a shift in conceptions of subjectivity and of the natural world.
