'Forgiveness Horse': The Barbaric World of Richard II (original) (raw)
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'Man and birds are fain of climbing high': Animals in 2 Henry VI
Ideas, 2019
Shakespeare's plays make extensive use of nonhuman animal imagery and references to the natural world in order to exemplify, explain or qualify human behaviour, as well as social and political issues. 2 Henry VI, the second play of Shakespeare's first tetralogy, is of course no exception. Nonetheless, the history plays have quite logically been the object of more social and political analyses and seem to have been mostly ignored by animal studies and ecocritics. The present article focuses on nonhuman animal imagery in the second part of Henry VI, and the consequent representation of animals in the play, to explore Shakespeare's treatment of the relationship between human and nonhuman animals in the early modern period. Drawing on Greg Garrard's typology of animal representation, the paper first demonstrates how Shakespeare, following standard practices at the time, deploys animal metaphors and comparisons that are nonetheless based on prior anthropomorphic projections of human qualities onto animals. As a second step, the study identifies in the play a set of images related to animal control in order to argue that these alternately subvert and contain the anthropocentrism of the period, further blurring the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals. In an attempt to build on Simon Estok’s activist reading of the play, this article understands this blurring of boundaries as an embedded critique of animal consumption and control, albeit cautious and ambiguous.
A Revisionary Reading of William Shakespeare
Zoocriticism is one of the fastest growing subfields within ecocritical literary studies. It is concerned with how the relationship between human beings and animals gets reflected in literature. However, it should be noted that zoocriticism is more than simply the study of animals represented in literary works. It has distinguished itself by the ethical stand it takes and its commitment to the animal community as a significant thing rather than merely as a thematic study. Zoocritics try, by a revisionary reading, to bring in to light the writer's biocentric world view reflected in his/her work so that the readers can be aware of the evil consequences of destroying the wild and the savage. My endeavour in this paper is to re-read William Shakespeare's representation of animals in one of his most popular pastoral comedies, As You Like It through the lens of zoocriticism. Shakespeare did not write in response to our present-day environmental crisis. The explicitly activist position of Silko, Abbey or Thoreau is not, therefore, found in his plays. Nevertheless, as Simon Estok reminds us in An Introduction to Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: The Special Cluster , it is not easy to avoid in Shakespeare the feelings of what Scott Slovic calls 'ecodespair.' In As You Like It , Shakespeare has advocated the ecocentric philosophy of life instead of the reigning philosophies of Western Civilization which were deeply anthropocentric; that is, human beings were viewed as opposed to and superior to 1 non-human animals and free to exploit them to meet their own needs. The ecocentric values of collective ethical responsibility and the claims of the animal community beyond ourselves receive expression in this play.
Altering a Race of Jades: Horse Breeding and Geohumoralism in Shakespeare
As many scholars have pointed out, sixteenth-century England was a horse-owning, horse-riding culture, a place where the language of horses and horsemanship was pervasive. Given such an environment, it is not surprising that the image of the horse was often deployed in metaphorical, proverbial, allegorical or otherwise symbolic ways. This essay, however, sets the metaphors aside, following instead what nineteenth-century historian Harriet Ritvo has called the “unacknowledged metonymy” of animal discourse, a process by which discussions of real animals become the ground for “opinions and worries imported from the human cultural arena.” In early modern England, one significant anxiety was about the relationship between the English people and their regional environment. The natural environment was frequently perceived as determining both the constitution and the temperament of earthly creatures: this is the Galenic doctrine of geohumoralism. Even the human soul was, for some writers, influenced by its natural environment. These attitudes necessarily shaped emerging concepts of national and regional identity. “English-ness,” for example, was often depicted as the result of an uneasy interplay between regional climate, including things such as “air” and “ground,” and more abstract notions of race or breed. Nowhere are these concerns more effectively demonstrated than in the many texts devoted to horses, horsemanship, and horse breeding. In particular, early modern writers’ attempts both to investigate and to defend the nature of the “English” horse are evidence of a controversy that contributes to the construction of nationality itself. A nation of excellent horses is also perhaps a nation of excellent men. And England in the late sixteenth century seemed to find grounds for doubt about both horses and men. The debate over the value of the English horse was thus part of a larger concern with the relationship between constant climatic influence and attempts to improve a “breed.” The most famous literary representation of this concern is surely Shakespeare's Henry V. Nationality and national identity have always been acknowledged as one of the main subjects of the play. Some have even argued, as David Cairns and Shaun Richards do, that it “dramatizes ... the originating moment of nationhood.” It is also, however, a play pervaded by the language of race and breed expressed in terms of horses. I argue that in this play and others, Shakespeare is echoing a larger cultural pattern centering on the body of the horse. It is a pattern in which the Galenic determinism of climate, region, race, and breed confronted a nascent nationalism based on governance and disciplined management.
A Horse of a Different Colour: A Shakespearean Subversion
Shakespeare is not usually thought of as a subversive writer, and other than the well-documented performance of Richard II relative to the Essex Rebellion and the curious Oldcastle controversy, Shakespeare seems to have avoided conflicts with the authorities. This essay, however, presents an extremely subversive thread—subtly encoded throughout scene 3.7 in Henry V, where the target of the subversion is Queen Elizabeth and her court, an incredibly indiscreet focus for his satire. The subversive storyline is so reasonable and persistent that it should be realized as intentionally crafted to get past censorious eyes and is only discovered by a close reading and suitable interrogation of the text—where we are prompted to do so by the pointed clues in the text. After piecing out the subversive thread in the scene, I present two plausible triggers, possible Catholic sympathies, and the Oldcastle controversy, that might have motivated Shakespeare to elevate his poetic powers and wit to craft such a subtle, yet dangerous, subversion into the scene. Taken in whole, an appreciation of the subversive nature of this scene should prompt further scholarly attention to the ironic perspective of the play, which was first promoted for the play 100 years ago.
Critical Survey, 2023
This article explores how Shakespeare combines dreams and animal symbolism to illuminate the underlying motivations and character traits of his protagonists. Two case studies are presented: * Richard III and the Boar: The analysis examines Stanley's dream of a boar in Richard III, demonstrating how Shakespeare utilises the boar's rich cultural symbolism, which he aligns with Tudor propaganda, to construct a compelling image of the tyrannical Richard. * Antony and Cleopatra and the Dolphin: The article investigates Cleopatra's dream of Antony as a dolphin in Antony and Cleopatra. This dream image, it argues, encapsulates Antony's mercurial and unpredictable nature, while simultaneously highlighting the tragic disconnect between Cleopatra's idealized perception of him and the demands of political and social reality. Keywords: Shakespeare, dreams, animals, animal symbolism, character analysis, Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra, Antony, Tudor history, cultural symbolism, dream studies, animal studies.
Play, Death, and History in Shakespeare's _Richard II_
This essay examines existential processes that the shape attitudes toward history and change. Lynn White Jr. calls the Renaissance "the most psychically disturbed era in European history." He holds that the era's abnormal anxiety "rose from an ever increasing velocity of cultural change compounded by a series of fearful disasters," and that "this spiritual trauma was healed by the emergence, in the minds of ordinary people^ of an .absolutely novel and relaxed attitude toward change."10 As I see it, popular fascination with Shakespeare's histories was. in part a response to this traumatic stress. It was an attempt to integrate terrifying psychic materials into a coherent cultural narrative. The dramatist and his audience were groping toward the healthier "relaxed attitude toward change" that White discerns in the century that followed.