[In the essay below, Hattaway claims that the text of 2 Henry VI favors class rebellion rather than the order of the establishment.]

I

REVOLUTION

As we all know, history is made by the questions we ask—or more by those we don’t ask. Our conclusions derive as much from the ideological assumptions that we bring to a problem as from the ‘facts of the case’. This is demonstrated by examining a little noticed line in a well known play, Hamlet. When the prince is handling the first skull thrown up from Ophelia's grave he comments: This might be my Lord Such-a-one … now my Lady Worm's, chopless, and knocked about with a sexton's spade. Here's fine revolution, and we had the trick to see’t (V.1.70-6). Ideology, it emerges, informs even the most ‘neutral’ of scholarly activities, the editor's investigation of lexical history. The most recent editor, Philip Edwards,¹ does not gloss ‘revolution’; Harold Jenkins offers “as of the wheel of Fortune or the whirligig of time”.² Now it is true that the word ‘revolution’ derives from the observation of celestial rotation, but its immediate and particular context, embedded in imagery that reminds us that man himself as well as death can be a great leveller, makes us aware that the modern meaning, the overthrow of an order or régime by those previously subject to it (OED, 7), may be appropriate here. (Significantly, perhaps, the first recorded use in OED of the word with this meaning dates from 1600, about a year before Hamlet was written.)

That is one point of reference. Ideology affects theatre too. In the 1982 BBC television version of 2 Henry VI, Dick the Butcher who demolishes the pretensions to authority of Jack Cade, was placed immediately before the camera, his opinions thereby foregrounded and valorised. Jack Cade became thereby a comic figure. It will be the point of this paper that what Cade proclaims constitutes a cause, and a cause that emerges from class oppression.

II

THEATRE AND DRAMA

I would like to move from this to what I take to be a notable if crude contradiction. It is—or it was until recently—orthodoxy among English scholars to claim that English Renaissance drama was supportive of order. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it was held, endorsed ‘the Elizabethan world picture’, and in particular, Shakespeare's history plays endorsed the Tudor myth which presented a scheme fundamentally religious, by which events evolve under a law of justice and under the ruling of God's providence, and of which Elizabeth's England was the acknowledged outcome.³ There are obvious objections to this claim: first, it suppresses the debates that surged through the kingdom as consequences of both Renaissance and Reformation—theatres were used for propaganda purposes by those exercising authority and those opposed to that authority alike.⁴ We have simply to remind ourselves that a performance of Richard II was arranged by supporters of the Earl of Essex the day before his rebellion. That was because Richard II demonstrates that a king might be removed from the throne without incurring immediate divine wrath. Second, it ignores the fact, long known to theatre historians, that the theatres were associated with frays and seditious riots. The status of theatre was ambiguous: it attracted the patronage of courtiers but was a plague to the city, marginal to formally constituted social orders.⁵

If, in order to explain a political play, we invoke a metaphysical ‘order’, we have to be careful, as we translate it to the social sphere, to ask ourselves ‘Whose order?’ If we go to moralists contemporary with the dramatists, should we look to theologians like Richard Hooker, committed to looking for correspondence between the heavenly order and terrestrial practice, or to historians like William Harrison who interrupted his survey of the laws of England with a sceptical observation that might have astounded a previous generation of critics: For what hath the meditation of the law of God to do with any precise knowledge of the law of man, sith they are several trades and incident to divers persons?⁶ And inevitably we wonder what kinds of audience attended those plays, particularly those political plays with which I am here concerned. Was popular theatre in the time of Shakespeare a national theatre, appealing to all ranks of society, or was it, as has been recently argued, a theatre for the privileged?⁷ Even if we could be certain of the social composition of one theatre, can we assume a correlation between rank and sophistication or even rank and political allegiance? (The Queen herself was delighted to be entertained by Tarlton, one of the greatest proletarian artists of his age.⁸) And finally belief, assent, depend upon the mode of representation. Theatre was associated with holiday, drama is imprinted with the patterns of carnival: the assertions of carnival may correlate only partly with an audience's sense of the order by which it desires to live.

III

DRAMA AS CARNIVALESQUE

Frankly I do not think we shall ever be in a position to answer the general question of whether the English drama of the sixteenth century served the cause of the monarchy and traditional social structures, or whether it served as an organ for raising consciousness and raising fundamental and radical questions about social and political structure and the relationship between power and authority, law and justice. Even if we can offer a coherent reading of the dramatic texts, vital theatrical evidence is missing: I don’t think we shall ever be in a position to recover the exact tone or theatrical style of any Renaissance production.

There is, of course, no problem in extracting from dramatic texts a catalogue of topics that were anatomized by the drama of the day. These include the nature of justice, crystallized in the question that lies at the heart of revenge plays: how is justice to be found if the fountainhead of justice, the court, is itself polluted. Is a good king necessarily a good man? Is witchcraft a symptom of the devil's work or of stresses in the social fabric? What are the consequences for a marriage from which love has fled?⁹ In previous decades we attempted to relate these questions to biography. Christopher Marlowe seemed to be the prototype of the angry young man. Did his plays simply express his personality? We must ask now ourselves what was the nature of the institution, the theatre, in which these questions were posed. Since the appearance in 1958 of C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, English scholars have been accustomed to relate drama to occasion, in particular to patterns of holiday and recreation. Barber's book now seems to be a-political, in fact to be written according to a Freudian paradigm, in that his key formulation is that the comic experience may be defined as a process of release leading to clarification and social harmony.

Now, of course, we have to accommodate a similar but political model, that offered by Mikhail Bakhtin, who would argue that in comedy we encounter the elements of carnival, demotic, satirical, deflationary, extra-institutional, devoted to the celebration of community and local solidarity at the expense of national interest or hierarchical order or “the specialized appreciation of durable literary values”.¹⁰ What, though, is the function of this carnival? Is it a proto-insurrectionary phenomenon as noted in Romans,¹¹ or is it merely a safety valve,¹² a licensed occasion, a ritual that marks a collusion between governed and governors?¹³ Or is it a moment when society ritually purges itself of what are commonly taken to be its undesirable elements, as when, on Shrove Tuesday, the apprentices in ritual disorder sacked brothels and theatres.¹⁴

In theatre, are endings necessarily conclusions? We shall be looking at a populist uprising that is defeated—should we resist the temptation that besets all adherents of historicism to empathize with the victors.¹⁵ Are the questions posed in the course of the play more important than the historical and dramatic answers it offers?

IV

A NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY?

I want to claim that at the beginning of his career Shakespeare was not a pillar of the establishment—as our contemporary radical dramatist Edward Bond would have it¹⁶—but himself a radical. ‘History’ plays are better considered as political plays: concerned with the analysis of the nature, origins, and transfer of power. Shakespeare offered, in fact, “a negative critique that demystifies or ‘uncrowns’ power”.¹⁷ A previous generation of critics amused themselves with Shakespeare's ‘mistakes’:¹⁸ now we want to attend to his constructional patterns, the nature of the institutions he anatomized.

What may be one of his earliest plays begins with great men of court clustered around the coffin of Henry V and wondering how the British Empire in France had been lost:

Exeter: How was it lost, what treachery
was used?
Messenger: No treachery but want of men and
money.

(1 Henry VI, I.1.68-9)

To me these lines make Shakespeare truly a buccinator novi temporis. St Paul had written there is no power but of God and the powers that be are ordained of God (1. Rom. XIII.1, Genevan version), and here, in this early play, we have a radical and demystificatory if not a materialist challenge to the Pauline assumption that power derives from divinely sanctioned authority. In Shakespeare's later sequence Richard II begs to be read alongside works of Machiavelli as a demonstration of how power is lost as authority is lost: as with Machiavelli, Shakespeare's great theme was how to play the king. Henry IV indicates that England may in fact be ungovernable: how is the authority of the centre to extend to the verges of a kingdom dominated by rumour, how might one banish plump Jack Falstaff without banishing all the world? Henry V demonstrates how to restore stability at home by finding a casus belli, the tennis balls of the Dauphin, and waging a war abroad—busying giddy minds with foreign quarrels (cf. 2 Henry IV, IV.5.213-4).

V

A CLASSLESS SOCIETY?

I acknowledge that from theatre history alone we cannot recreate a model that would enable us to measure the radical thrust offered by the political drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. But it is possible to offer a coherent reading of some of the drama that would question the conclusion the editors of a recent and most distinguished collection of essays in social history would offer to us. Working from an analysis of cultural models, patterns of behaviour and local community, Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson conclude that “a class society had not in our period yet arrived”.¹⁹

I cannot dispute their conclusion if I work from the same material and the same premises. But it seems that yet again literary critics have something to offer the cultural historians. Jonson may have been working from a background in medieval social theory, but Volpone and The Alchemist offer a thorough indictment of contemporary entrepreneurial rapacity—it was a French film, that of Louis Jouvet, that made this most explicit for us. More clearly the Henry VI plays offer a searing indictment of aristocratic factionalism and the haughtiness of prelates.²⁰ The nobility in this set of plays does constitute a class—or, if we prefer, an élite—defined by the conflict between individual aspirations of its members and everything that constitutes the culture or cultures of the plebeians.²¹ The troublesome reign of Henry VI takes its nature not from the visitation of divine vengeance for an original sin committed two generations before but from the aspirations of a particular estate. It would seem to me that their political and material ambitions do define them as a social class. Even Edward Hall, one of Shakespeare's principal sources for the sequence, sardonically offers a secular alternative to the orthodox view of providentially ordered history:

For many of the nobility, and more of the mean estate, wisely pondering the estate and condition of the realm, perceiving more loss than increase, more ruin than advancement, daily to ensue; remembering also that France was conquered, and Normandy was gained by the French people in short space, thought with themselves and imagined that the fault of all these miserable chances happened either because the king was not the true inheritor to the crown, or that he or his council were not able of wit, policy, and circumspection to rule and govern so noble a realm, or so famous a region.²²

We shall see an even more striking example of this technique of offering a alternative populist explanation elsewhere.

1 Henry VI shows how squabbling among his peers cost England her French empire and her hope and champion, Lord Talbot, his life. It is to 2 Henry VI that I want now to turn, for it is that play which contains the nearest thing we have to the portrayal by Shakespeare of insurrection that is more than a local riot.

VI

JACK CADE

Traditionally the rebels have been branded as a rabble—indeed it is still a commonplace to claim that Shakespeare, like Horace, hated the profane mob.²³ The followers of Cade are described as a rabblement in the opening stage direction to IV.8, but it is important to note that, in the period, the word could be used without contempt (OED, ‘rabble’, 2). If critics do generate some sympathy in themselves for the plebeian cause, they tend to water it down by pointing out that Cade's economic reforms seem to derive from the land of Cockaygne.

Cade may well, on the contrary, be offering an oblique comment on the massive price rises of Shakespeare's period:²⁴There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny. The three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer (IV.2.70-2). What is important to notice, however, is that the collective has been hijacked by the Duke of York.

In soliloquy, York reveals that he has stirred up the rebellion of Jack Cade whose wild martial strength and politic skills he had observed in Ireland. The imagery of the lines taps into the vein of witchcraft and conjuring that runs through the play, but we are aware of the realities of power at York's disposal. The wind that York blew through the kingdom, as Hall aptly puts it, provides one impulse towards popular insurrection. The second, the efficient cause, is the furious rage of the outrageous [i.e. outraged] people against those responsible for the loss of Anjou and the murder of good Duke Humphrey—notably the flagitious Suffolk, the abhorred toad and common nuisance of the realm of England.²⁵ Their anger is further fuelled by hatred of enclosures (see IV.2.75). The two kinds of division described by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,²⁶ horizontal between social groups and vertical between political factions, intersect therefore at this historical moment.

It is impossible, therefore, to argue, as Tillyard does, that the Cade scenes simply offer the “impious spectacle of the proper order reversed”,²⁷ producing a homiletic demonstration of the evils of rebellion—the play would scarcely have been a success in the popular playhouses if they had. This is no mere riot, but an occasion when aristocratic rebellion is the catalyst for popular revolt²⁸—a distinction that is blurred by Hall who refers to Cade and his followers simply as proud rebells.²⁹

Duke Humphrey had foreseen the mischief that is brewing:

But [my death] is made the prologue to
their play:
For thousands more, that yet suspect no peril,
Will not conclude their plotted tragedy.

(III.1.151-3)

The uprising of the commons becomes a shadow play of the substantial quarrel between the aristocrats—the first lines of the first commoners we meet (Bevis: Come, and get thee a sword, though made of a lath: they have been up these two days [IV.2.1ff] suggest that they are wielding weapons that are obviously theatrical properties, the traditional mock weapons borne by fools and soldier clowns in Tudor interludes). York's description of Cade as a ‘Morisco’ (III.1.365), a morris dancer,³⁰ also places him in this tradition of revelry—I cannot agree, however, that the episode is thereby depoliticized.³¹ For Cade's genealogy is a parody (IV.2.36ff.) of the genealogy of York: like his master he uses de iure arguments to mask his tyrannical ambitions. We might also, concerning another sequence, argue that the travesty of the trial by combat where Horner the armourer and Peter his apprentice are liquored out of their minds is a demonstration of the emptiness of an aristocratic form of justice, the trial by combat.

The rebellion, however, does not stand simply as a mirror of the intestine broils among the élite. Although Dick the Butcher, in IV.2, witheringly exposes in his asides the contradictions of Cade's claims (ll. 31ff.), and Holland, in IV.7, mock's Cade's justice, the audience is simultaneously made aware that matters of real moment for the people are being raised. Shakespeare seems to have wanted to set his spectators laughing and then demonstrate that this combination of noble provocation and popular combustion is no laughing matter. It is certainly not just an occasion for ‘mechanicals’ to be forced into their customary role of clowns, for the disorder includes not only the marginal and dispossessed. For, as in so many of the uprisings of the early modern period, we find no ‘peasants’ revolt’, but a group dominated by artisans or ‘handicraftsmen’ (IV.2.9),³² including a tanner, a butcher, and a weaver.

The disorder of the revolt, in fact, generates glimpses of an alternative order, of political radicalism: we are in order when we are most out of order (IV.2.182-3)—Bullough ignores the paradox and, following the chroniclers, unwarrantably uses this line to claim that Shakespeare thus brands the rebels as a “rabble”.³³ Nor is it true to claim in respect of this sequence that: “Knowing his countrymen, Shakespeare does not suggest that men chose sides in the Wars of the Roses according to their beliefs in de facto authority or legitimacy. They took sides because of their feudal attachments, because of the appeal of family honour and pride, or as they were prompted by ambition, greed, patriotism, or revenge.”³⁴ It seems to me that the essential characteristic of a populist movement, a coherent ideology, is here, at least in emergent form.

We can demonstrate this by Shakespeare's deployment of source material. Hall wrote little about the emerging ‘manifesto’ of the revels, noting only that the kentishmen be impatient in wrongs, disdaining of too much oppression, and ever desirous of new change, and new-fangleness.³⁵ Accordingly Shakespeare turned from Hall to Holinshed's or Grafton's account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, regarded as representative of popular revolts, and led by another Kentishman, John Ball.³⁶

Act IV Scene 2 opens with a conversation (ll.1-28) between two artisans of unspecified vocations, Bevis and Holland, which reveals a thoroughgoing radicalism, a desire to put down gentlemen and magistrates and install a new order of workers. Their aspirations derive from the kind of egalitarianism that inspired John Ball, whose catchphrase question When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then a gentleman?’³⁷ was well known. Dick the Butcher, a member of a trade prominent in the Kett rebellion of 1549,³⁸ would seem to share their apocalyptic vision. It may be wrong, of course, to see here the antecedents of later working class radicalism: as Raphael Samuel wrote in a review of a recent anthology edited by Tony Benn, “The social doctrines of the Levellers and Diggers are probably better understood in relation to medieval categories and thought—or to what Tawney called the “doctrineless communism of the open field”—than as the testament of the original ancestors of labour”.³⁹

Unfortunately for these three, however, York's creature Cade hijacks the leadership of the revolt. Now Cade's brand of radicalism, like most of the aspirations that emerged during the course of the rebellions of the Tudor period, is informed by conservatism—there will be no egalitarianism in Cade's commonweath or communism. For although all the realm shall be in common (IV.2.76), Cade will be king, and riches will be distributed as an act of largesse to enhance Cade's rule. (Hall does note that the Kentish men were partly roused by fair promises of liberty.⁴⁰)

As in the case of Ball's revolt, the grievances of the insurgents result in a ritual act of supplication to the king against the nobles. Just as the rebellion had been instigated by a creature of the nobility, so it is quashed by politic dealing on the part of the aristocracy, going to the rebels over the head of their leader.

But it is the mode of the representation that is of interest. I want to point how it may well have been seen from a double perspective, with a degree of horror but also with a degree of glee as the privileged get their comeuppance. My evidence comes from the source.

Cade employs a species of populist justice in his campaign against the lawyers and the lettered. Shakespeare again turned from his principal source, Hall, but this time to Holinshed. The unruly commons, wrote the latter, put precept into practice:

beheading all such men of law, justices, and jurors as they might catch, and lay hands upon, without respect of pity, or remorse of conscience, alleging that the land could never enjoy her native and true liberty till all those sorts of people were dispatched out of the way.

This talk liked well the ears of the common uplandish people, and by the less conveying the more, they purposed to burn and destroy all records, evidences, court-rolls, and other muniments, that the remembrance of ancient matters being removed out of mind, their landlords might not have whereby to challenge any right at their hands⁴¹

This is written from the point of view of orthodox morality, the morality of the homilies, but it would seem that Shakespeare may have caught the tone of these sequences not from the text but from the marginal glosses which stand as a dialectic with the text, a splendid example of Bakhtin has taught us to call “dialogism”.⁴² For against the first of those two paragraphs we read Lawyers, justices, and jurors brought to “blockam feast” by the rebels. In our play, as in The Life and Death of Jack Straw, law is perceived as instrument of oppression to the ancient freedom (IV.8.270) of the people:

Dick: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Cade: Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man?

(IV.1.75-8)

This ‘blockam feast’ reconstitutes the slaughter into a carnival of violence, enacted in the grisly display whereby the heads of the executed Lords Say, two figures of justice, are made to kiss at the end of their pikes (IV.7.133).

Against the second paragraph, the one that is the source for the scene in which the Clerk of Chartham is executed for being able to read, we find “The next way to extinguish right”⁴³ This deftly inverts the argument of the text, for whereas Holinshed intended his reader to understand the way in which the nobles were deprived of their rights, the gloss offers the example as a means for so doing.

Perhaps we are meant simply to register the fickleness of the mob, “a real characteristic of a pre-industrial city crowd, united only temporarily to riot over a specific grievance”.⁴⁴ Yet might not that city crowd have been provided by the audience rather than the broils ridiculous shown on the stage? For it seems to me that from that collective life of rebellion a manifesto was emerging, and that the riot over specific grievance generated a brief vision of a brave new world.

Notes

1. Philip Edwards ed., Hamlet, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1985).

2. Harold Jenkins ed., Hamlet, The New Arden Shakespeare (London, 1982).

3. See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1944).

4. See M. Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre (Cambridge, 1980).

5. F. J. Furnivall ed., Elizabethan England, (London, n.d.), p. 51.

6. E. K. Chambers, Appendix D: ‘Documents of Control’, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), vol. 4, pp. 259-345.

7. A. J. Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576-1642 (Princeton, N.J., 1981); Cook's arguments are challenged by Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 1987).

8. Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London, 1982), pp. 88-90; David Wiles, Shakespeare's Clown (Cambridge, 1987).

9. C. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London, 1985).

10. Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater (London, 1985), p. 4.

11. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans (Paris, 1979).

12. For a critique of this model see Bristol, p. 27.

13. Compare Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture’ in Early Modern England”, Past and Present, No. 105 (1984), pp. 79-113.

14. Hattaway, p. 49.

15. Walter Benjamin, quoted by Bristol, p. 7.

16. Edward Bond, Bingo (London, 1974).

17. Bristol, p. 2.

18. G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London, 1975), vol. 3, p. 90.

19. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevension, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, (Cambridge, 1985), p. 4.

20. John Foxe, quoted by Bullough, p. 127.

21. See E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture”, Journal of Social History, vol. 7 (1974), pp. 382-405.

22. E. Hall, Chronicle (London, 1809), p. 219.

23. See D. Goy-Blanquet, “Pauvres Jacques: Chroniques et spectacles en Angleterre au xvi^e siècle”, in Elie Konigson ed., Figures théâtrales du peuple (Paris, 1986), pp. 49-74.

24. Compare E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd”, Past and Present, No. 51 (1971).

25. Hall, p. 219.

26. Le Carnaval de Romans, ch. xi.

27. Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 183.

28. Penry Williams, The Tudor Régime (Oxford, 1979), p. 313.

29. Hall, p. 220.

30. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), p. 117.

31. François Laroque, “Shakespeare et la fête populaire: le carnaval sanglant de Jack Cade”, Réforme, Humanisme, et Renaissance Vol. 11 (1979), pp. 126-30. Laroque argues that Cade's ‘jacquerie’ turns to carnival, an inversion of the normal order.

32. See Paul Slack ed., Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1984), p. 9.

33. Bullough, p. 96.

34. Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 26.

35. Hall, p. 219.

36. Bullough, pp. 96, 128-33.

37. Holinshed, quoted Bullough, p. 133. Ball speaks thus in the anonymous play The Life and Death of Jack Straw (1593-4; Bullough, p. 139, ll. 82-3); see also Charles Hobday, “Clouted Shoon and Leather Aprons: Shakespeare and the Egalitarian Tradition”, Renaissance and Modern Studies, Vol. 23 (1979), pp. 69-78.

38. Slack, p. 52.

39. The Guardian, 4 October, 1984, p. 16.

40. Hall, p. 220.

41. Quoted by Bullough, p. 131.

42. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin Texas, 1981).

43. Bullough, p. 131.

44. Margot Heinemann, “How Brecht Read Shakespeare”, in J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield eds., Political Shakespeare (Manchester, 1985), p. 226; Eric Hobsbawn, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1971), p. 44.

A version in French of this paper was delivered at the conference of the Société Française des Seizièmistes in Paris in December, 1986.