SOURCE: “The Farce of History: Miracle, Combat, and Rebellion in 2 Henry VI,” in The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 21, 1991, pp. 168-86.

[In the essay below, Knowles reexamines the historical sources of Henry VI, contending that Shakespeare's reshaping of historical materials in the three plays demonstrates his departure from the form of chronicle history to the celebrated dramatic mode of Henry IV.]

It has long been a critical commonplace that the low-life scenes of the two parts of Henry IV have a dramatic complexity which shows a distinct maturity in Shakespeare's early dramatic art.¹ Perhaps A. P. Rossiter's is the best known point of view. Rejecting the simple view of Falstaff as a morality figure he found greater ‘complexities … which often result from the use of comic parallelism of phrase or incident. That is, of parody, critically used, or of travesty-by-parallel’. This resulted, he said, from a bi-focal view of persons and history, and the ironic mode of drama generated an ‘essential ambivalence’.² It will be argued here that this celebrated mode of the Henry IV plays is anticipated, more than is usually recognized, in the experimentation of 2 Henry VI, in the miracle, combat, and rebellion scenes.

Such anticipation of the technique of the Henry IV plays has been hinted at before, but not fully realized. Rossiter himself (p. 58) noted in passing ‘the grotesque, Hieronymus-Bosch-like sarcastically-comic scenes of Cade's rebellion’, in which Shakespeare ‘achieved something remarkable’. Also, in one of the major studies of all the English Histories since Rossiter's time, Moody E. Prior gave voice to a gradually revised general view in his consideration that ‘the three parts of Henry VI are the rich ore out of which the later plays are refined’.³ The present essay will show by means of cultural and historical placement that the technique is already essentially in place, and that it already represents a dynamic reconsideration of the main historical materials out of which the play is made.

The most important case is that of the Cade rebellion. It is, however, foreshadowed by the miracle of St Albans and by the trial by combat between Horner and Peter. In the long first scene of the second act of 2 Henry VI, the miracle episode is flanked by the hawking and the arrest of the Duchess of Gloucester. It has not been difficult to assign dramatic function to the scene itself. Hereward T. Price, for example, sees in it a dramatic ‘touchstone’ for the chief characters: ‘We see Henry's simple faith based on an unquestioning mind, Gloucester's scepticism and quiet penetration, the Queen's cruel laughter at the horrible punishments afflicted’. To Price ‘Shakespeare steps outside his plot in order to show the deeper undercurrents in the society he is depicting’.⁴ If, however, we also bear in mind Rossiter's ‘comic parallelism of phrase or incident’ the ‘miracle’ can be seen to have a level of ironic integration within the main action of the Henry VI plays.

In order to gain, Saunder Simpcox and his wife claim that his sight is restored by the divine miracle of St Alban. Gloucester exposes the deceit by getting Simpcox to identify some colours. The parallel can hardly be accidental with the linked sequence of events in 1 Henry VI, IV. i, where the king is blind to the consequences of choosing the colour red, and most characters act out the pretence of what is later called ‘Deceit bred by Necessity’ (3 Henry VI, III. iii. 68).⁵ In the Paris coronation scene of 1 Henry VI we can see a potentially tragic imbalance between loyalty and allegiance, betrayal and faction, as the action unfolds. Talbot's heroism is offset by Falstaff's cowardice and Burgundy's defection, and Gloucester's authority is overwhelmed by the factionalism of the Yorkist Vernon and the Lancastrian Basset, backed by their noble patrons. Yet King Henry foolishly chooses the colour red:

I see no reason if I wear this rose,
That anyone should therefore be suspicious
I more incline to Somerset than York.

(l. 152)

The business of colours is entirely Shakespeare's invention, with no hints in the sources.

This scene, showing Henry's political blindness, comes after the Temple Garden scene, also Shakespeare's invention, in which it is asserted by both sides that even the blind or near-blind can ‘see’ the truth of argument and thus choose the white or red rose. For Richard Plantagenet ‘truth’ is so ‘naked … That any purblind eye may find it out’ (II. iv. 21), while for Somerset truth is ‘so evident, b That it will glimmer through a blind man's eye’ (II. iv. 24-25). The central symbolic action of the scene then follows in the choice of red and white roses.

To a certain extent a metaphorical reading of the miracle scene of 2 Henry VI is encouraged by the way Shakespeare opens and closes it: the characters themselves allegorize the hawking at the beginning, and then, towards the end, use the ‘miracle’ to get at each other:

cardinal Duke Humphrey has
done a miracle today.
suffolk True; made the lame to
leap and fly away.
gloucester But you have done more
miracles than I;
You made in my day, my lord, whole towns to fly.

(l. 153)

This technique of deriving ironical metaphors from actual circumstances occurs later also when the accused Gloucester, about to be led off as a prisoner, warns the king ‘Ah! then King Henry throws away his crutch b Before his legs be firm to bear his body’ (III. i. 190). Seeing the ‘Honour, Truth and Loyalty’ (III. i. 203) of Gloucester, the king is nevertheless blinded by his tears and sees only ‘with dimm’d eyes’ (III. i. 218). Shakespeare added Simpcox's lameness to the historical sources, and presumably a crutch was carried on stage, since he is said to be ‘not able to stand’ (II. i. 146). Simpcox's wife's parting words are ‘Alas! sir, we did it for pure need’ (II. i. 150), the plangency of which is somewhat modulated by the comic flight of Simpcox and the ironic echo of his earlier answer to the Queen's question as to whether he came ‘here by chance,b Or of devotion, to this holy shrine?’. ‘God knows’, he says, ‘of pure devotion’ (II. i. 87-89). His ‘pure devotion’ is somewhat impure, his blindness and lameness are fake, and the miracle bogus. In contrast, the unremitting, single-minded purity of Henry's devotion has rendered him politically blind and lame, as Gloucester's image makes plain, and only a miracle can save him amidst ‘Deceit bred by Necessity’. No miracle is forthcoming.

Shakespeare was under no necessity to use the St Albans material for his story. In choosing to do so he gave the scene ironic point in the literal and metaphorical significance of devotion, colours, and blindness in 1 and 2 Henry IV. Something similar is seen in his inclusion of the combat scene of Horner and Peter. Here Shakespeare also employed the mode of travesty, but with greater comedy and more concentration and force.

The trial by combat in Act II scene iii has of course attracted some attention. Many years ago Clifford Leech saw something like ironic point, considering that ‘the formal combat between the armourer and his man is a parody of chivalric encounter: in a way remarkably sophisticated for this early drama, it implies a critical attitude towards the warring nobles whose quarrels are grotesquely mirrored in this fight between two simple men, one terrified, one drunk’.⁶ More recently Ralph Berry has discussed the trial as a unifying image for the whole play: the play's ‘essential form’, he says, ‘is that of the Trial. The processes of a Trial—charges, investigation, arraignment, defence, verdict, sentence, and execution—compose the pattern that orders 2 Henry VI’.⁷ Of the combat won by the apprentice, and celebrated by the king for the revelation of ‘God in justice’ (l. 106), Berry concludes ‘I put it that the play does not invite us to share the view of Divine Providence advanced by Peter and King Henry’ (p. 6). That might be easily granted. However, I believe that a sharper perspective can be gained by focusing on details such as double ale and the weapons used, and identifying their specific social contexts, for the incident needs interpreting both with regard to historicity and to current social attitude. The chronicles themselves provided very little detail of the circumstances of the combat, but, to judge from his manner of introducing the action—‘the appellant and defendant … to enter the lists’ (ll. 49-50)—it is evident that Shakespeare knew that the combat was under the auspices of the courts of chivalry. Recognition of this helps us to gauge more precisely the burlesque nature of the scene.

Incurring the criticism of Parliament, which feared encroachment on the courts of common law, Richard II had fostered the power and scope of the civil court of chivalry to the extent that the articles of deposition against him included specific details of this abuse. It eventually became possible for any treason appeal to come before this court, although there were conditions which had to be fulfilled. In cases of treason trial by combat was used when there were no witnesses and no evidence, so that one man's word simply stood against another's, provided that both parties were of good repute and not felons.⁸ The practice reached its height under Henry VI. Thus Cater and Davy, the originals of Shakespeare's Horner and Peter, appeared in historical fact in the chivalric setting of the lists at Smithfield.

They may seem an odd pair to have done so, but there were other cases concerning parties of less than knightly standing. A few years earlier, in 1441, for example, two thieves fought in combat ‘at Totehill’ according to Stow,⁹ on what appeal he does not say, and in 1426 ‘a gentleman, Henry Knokkis' defended himself against an appeal of treason made by ‘a certain plebian tailor’ beneath the walls of Edinburgh castle.¹⁰ Even more strangely, an elderly friar was ordered under Henry IV to fight a woman, who had accused him of treason, with one arm tied behind his back. (The charge was then withdrawn.) The Brut chronicle, also, records a fight to the death between a ‘Welsh clerk’ and a knight.¹¹

By the Tudor period, such combat was considered against the law of arms. Spenser makes this clear by showing Calidore at first dismayed to see Tristram, who is ‘no knight’, slay a knight, ‘which armes inpugneth plaine’.¹² In Shakespeare's day, in a work which the playwright may have consulted for the combat scene of Richard II, Sir William Segar spelled out ‘What sorts of men ought not bee admitted to triall of Armes’.¹³ Generally, ‘the triall of Armes apperteineth onelie to Gentlemen, and that Gentilitie is a degree honorable, it were not fit that anie persons of meaner condition, should thereunto be admitted’ (pp. 30-31). In this judgement, amongst the ineligible, beside ‘Theeves, Beggers, Bawdes, Victuallers, persons excommunicate, Usurers, persons banished the Armie’, is ranked ‘everie other man exercising an occupation or trade, unfit and unworthie a Gentleman or Soldier’. To sum up, then, Richard II had promoted a situation in which history itself would furnish burlesques of chivalric practice, whilst Tudor aristocratic exclusivity had heightened awareness of decorum. Thus when Horner and Peter appeared on stage in the 1590s, one drunk, the other terrified, and both carrying less than knightly weapons, the resulting burlesque confirmed the comic tenor of Peter's petition:

peter Against my master,
Thomas Horner, for saying that the Duke of York was rightful heir to the crown.
queen What say’st thou? Did
the Duke of York say he was rightful heir to the Crown?
peter That my master was? No, forsooth:
my master said that he was, and that the king was an usurer.

(I. iii. 25-30)

Yet that exaggeration of the comic will prove to have its serious point.

Details of the combat deserve investigation. It is removed from the traditional Smithfield venue to a ‘Hall of Justice’. Gregory's Chronicle mentions that Cater (like Davy, it is assumed) was in ‘harnys’ (harness) that is, a suit of armour.¹⁴ Shakespeare mentions a curious weapon, a ‘staff with a sand-bag fastened to it’, but no armour. The treason-duel of chivalry, usually on horseback, was never fought without a sword and spear. Shakespeare's weapon, in fact, is closer to the weapon of the duel-of-law, the baton.¹⁵ Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, the Victorian antiquarian, was somewhat baffled by the weapons of Horner and Peter: ‘Shakespeare arms his combatants with batons and sand-bags at the end of them, yet this is the only authority I have met with for the use of this latter appendage’. He then proceeded to speculate that ‘probably such were the weapons of the lower class of people, and were therefore considered by him as appropriate to the parties’.¹⁶ He quotes Samuel Butler's Hudibras in support—‘Engaged with money-bags, as bold b As men with sand-bags did of old’—and suggests a comparison with the fool's baton and bladder. As early as Warburton's edition of the play, in fact, Butler had been used as a gloss, as H. C. Hart recounts in his edition of 1909, where, however, he shows no certainty as to what the weapon actually was.¹⁷ The weapons are in fact combat flails, as distinct from the metal military flail or the agricultural wooden variety. Reference to them seems to be rare, but an excellent illustration survives in one of the most detailed examples of a Renaissance festival book, The Triumph of Maximilian (1526), with woodcuts by Hans Burgkmair and others. [It] shows ‘Five men with (leather) flails’ preceding similar numbers of men with quarterstaves, lances, halberds, battleaxes, and various swords and shields, all collectively representing gefecht, explained by the editor as ‘combats on foot, considered beneath the notice of nobility or royalty until they were fostered by Maximilian, who took part in them himself’.¹⁸

By choosing flails with sand-filled leather bags Shakespeare placed a weapon associated with the lower orders in the high-born milieu of chivalric combat, bringing on his combatants without the expected arms and armour. He also made other significant alterations to the chronicle material. As has always been recognized, Shakespeare links the armourer's treason with York, although it was not so linked in the chronicles. In the sources the armourer is the innocent party and his servant the guilty. Holinshed, for example, following Fabyan, found Davy a ‘false servant’ and Cater ‘without guilt’, while Grafton, following Hall, saw Davy as ‘a coward and a wretche’.¹⁹ That wretchedness could follow from the cowardice, or it might be that Davy is called wretch for falsely accusing his master—presumably the latter, since the chroniclers see ultimate justice in his execution at Tyburn.

In assessing these alterations, we should not miss the question of drink. All sources except Gregory record the drunkenness of the Armourer, but Shakespeare makes a significant change in the liquors consumed. Grafton, following Hall again, records ‘Malmsey and Aqua vite’; Holinshed ‘wine and strong drinke’; Fabyan ‘wyne and good ale’, whilst Shakespeare has ‘sack’, ‘charneco’ and ‘good double beer’ (ll. 60-64). The last item is the telling detail. By the sixteenth century there had developed an association between festive wassail, that is to say, extra-strong ale (‘double beer’ or ‘double ale’), and riot and sedition. In John Bale's King John (1584), for example, Sedition enters, crying

No noise among ye? where is the merry cheer
That was wont to be, with quaffing of double beer?
The world is not yet as some men would it have.(20)

Charles Hobday has noted the subversive meanings of ‘merry’ as egalitarian freedom in the sixteenth century generally and in Shakespeare in particular, quoting the declaration of one of Cade's followers that ‘it was never merry world in England since Gentlemen came up’ (IV. ii. 9).²¹ Again, in The Life and Death of Jack Straw (1593) Tom Miller, the comic rebel-clown, says of the notorious John Ball ‘You … b Find him in a pulpit but twice in the year, b And I’ll find him forty times in the ale-house tasting strong beer’, and in a ludicrous self-indictment he promotes himself as ‘a customer to help away … strong ale’.²² From this we can understand the import of Cade's ‘reformation’ when he ‘will make it a felony to drink small beer’ (IV. ii. 64-65). Double beer only for the rebels! In other words, the Armourer's ‘treason’ is further damned by association with drunken insurrectionaries.

Hall introduced the notion of Horner's height and strength: ‘he beying a tall and a hardye personage’. Shakespeare changes this subtly to Horner's superior technique: Peter knows that ‘I am never able to deal with my master, he hath learnt so much fence already’ (ll. 75-76). Advantage is all on the side of the master, except for his over-confidence encouraged by drink. It could therefore seem that when the Armourer is struck and confesses treason before dying, Peter has ‘prevail’d in right’ (II. iv. 95-96); right seems to have defeated might, so that the combat could be seen as divinely ordered. As Segar puts it:

all Nations … have (among many other trials) permitted that such questions as could not be civilie prooved by confession, witnesse, or other circumstances, should receive judgement by fight and combat, supposing that GOD (who onelie knoweth the secret thoughts of all men) would give victorie to him that justlie adventured his life, for truth, Honor, and Justice.

Hence the king's pious response to what has taken place: ‘And God in justice hath reveal’d to us b The truth and innocence of this poor fellow’ (II. iv. 98-99). The king may see it simply; the audience is more likely to see an irony: it sees the ‘right’ result produced by oddly circumstantial means, by Horner's incapacity through drink. If this is Providence, it is of a kind difficult to credit, except in the simple mind of this king.

The effects produced in this episode show the kinds of complexity so often celebrated in the Henry IV plays. In reshaping this historical material, Shakespeare created comic matter in a burlesquing of the chivalric code, in such a way as to create an ironic inversion of the main lines of action in the play, perhaps of the action of all three Henry VI plays. The combat scene lies in the middle of these plays, in which an overall pattern can be discerned of a falling into a world of brute force, in the demise of chivalry in Talbot's death, in the ineffectuality of Christian piety in Henry VI, and the rise of Machiavellian virtù in Richard of Gloucester. Everywhere Might seems to be overcoming Right, both in the small instance:

plantagenet Now Somerset,
where is your argument?
somerset Here in my scabbard, meditating
that
Shall dye your white rose in a bloody red

(1 Henry VI, II. iv. 59-62)

and in the large confrontation:

warwick Do right unto this
princely Duke of York,
                                                                                          Or I will fill the house with armed men …
                    He stamps with his foot,
and the soldiers show themselves

(3 Henry VI, I.i. 172-73)

Momentarily the comic outcome of the combat scene seems to militate against this general tendency, and to affirm that Right might conquer Might. But such is the travesty of the combat as combat that we seem to have instead an ironic pointing up of the issues, a reminder of what ideally might be rather than an affirmation of Right. To have turned the chronicles around in such a way seems to have been to invoke and then to call in question any sense of divine ordinance in human affairs, and to direct us further towards the conduct of weak men.

The most developed instance of this technique is, however, in the rebellion of Jack Cade in Act IV, for which the comic scenes of the St Albans miracle and the treason combat seem a kind of preparation. Jack Cade is arguably the most complex figure of the Henry VI plays. The complexity of his case derives from three compounded categories, the historiographical, the cultural, and the artistic. Shakespeare follows his contemporaries' propagandistic conflation of Cade's 1450 rebellion with that of Jack Straw and Wat Tyler of 1381. From a cultural point of view Cade's presentation has an affinity with the topsy-turveydom of the Lord of Misrule and the World Upside Down, while in artistic terms it is related to the Vice and the clown. Yet, ultimately, Cade is an inverted image of authority, both its distorted representative and its grotesque critic.

The historical Jack Cade was rather different from the rebels of 1381. Though Brents Stirling points out Cade's execution of Say and Cromer and the freeing of prisoners, he concludes that ‘most of the violence and outrage in Shakespeare's version of the Cade uprising came from the chronicle story of the earlier Peasants Revolt’, from which was taken the anti-literacy of the rebels, the wish to kill all lawyers, the destruction of the Savoy and the Inns of Court, the destruction of state documents, and the ascription to Cade of Wat Tyler's belief that ‘all the laws of England should come forth of his mouth’.²³ Cade, on the contrary, was impressively personable and articulate, in the words of Holinshed ‘a young man of goodly stature and right pregnant wit’, ‘sober in talk, wise in reasoning, arrogant in heart, and stiff in opinion’ (p. 220). Hall considered that Cade, far from being illiterate, was ‘not only suborned by techers, but also enforced by pryvye scholemasters’ (p. 220). Initially Cade's forces were in fact relatively disciplined, and on behalf of his supporters he presented the fully documented ‘Complaints of the Commons of Kent’.

The earlier, mid-Tudor depiction of Cade in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559) is moral and theological. He is heard insisting on the principle of non-resistance to divinely appointed rulers and the individual's responsibility to ‘follow reason’ and ‘subdue their wylles’ and ‘lust’, rather than allow the vagaries of Fortune to rule over them. In the prose discussion following Cade's speech his insurrection is seen as an example of God using rebels to chastise irresponsible rulers and overmighty subjects.²⁴

By the 1590s Cade's rebellion was generally seen more in political than theological terms. Brents Stirling has shown how a conflation of the rebellions of 1381 and 1450 was further linked by conservative propagandists to English nonconformity and to the German Peasant War, by way of the Anabaptists and John of Leiden. John of Leiden was decried for the lowness of his trade, tailoring, and Jack Cade was turned by Shakespeare, without any indication in the sources, into a ‘clothier’ and a ‘shearman’ (IV. ii. 4, 127), that is, one who sheared the nap in the finishing stages of cloth production. Both declared themselves kings, both were opposed to learning, both proclaimed that all would be held in common and that money was to be banned. Given these parallels, it is unlikely that Shakespeare's presentation of Cade as a clothier could be made without some of the audience seeing such parallels implied in a richly compounded stage figure. Shakespeare pointedly concentrates on the anti-literacy of the 1381 rebels and adds a theme of his own, the critique of dress. In doing so he focuses on the authoritarian gradation of society manifested by the sumptuary laws and benefit of clergy.

We hear from Medvedev and Bakhtin that ‘ideological reality’, that is, the ‘philosophical views, beliefs or even shifting ideological moods’, are ‘realized in words, actions, clothing, manners, and organizations of people and things’ [my italics].²⁵ Consider, for example, the sack of the Savoy, John of Gaunt's house, in 1381: the rebels ‘seized one of his most precious vestments, which we call a ‘jakke’, and placed it as a lance to be used for their arrows. And since they were unable to damage it sufficiently with their arrows, they took it down and tore it apart with their axes and swords’.²⁶ It has been suggested, somewhat fancifully, by Thomas Pettit that this represents ‘an effigy for ritual slaying, sparagmos, the tearing apart of the sacrificial victims in many ancient renewal ceremonies’. More soberly Pettit draws a parallel with the rough treatment of the festival dummy figure of Jack o’Lent. However, if we note Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick's observations (p. 68) on the ‘Jakke’—it was a strengthened tunic used as armour yet lined with silk—we can see the symbolic provocation of such a thing. The Latin of Walingham's chronicle, vestimentum preciosissimus ipsius, indicates that such a garment was uniquely noble, combining the martial and the gentle. This the rebels singled out amidst the general havoc. John Ball spoke for them: the nobles, he said, ‘are clothed in velvet and soft leather furred with ermine, while we wear coarse cloth’.²⁷ In fact, Shakespeare did not need to be prompted by a specific incident, for such occurrences derived from the system of visual class distinction being legally enforced in his own day.

Although they seem often to have been more honoured in the breach than the observance, sumptuary laws persisted with various amendments in statutes and proclamations from the reign of Edward III until their final repeal by James I in 1604, even appearing in hortatory form as an Elizabethan homily.²⁸ They attempted to impose the quality, colour, kind, cost, and length of material worn by everybody, from monarch to serf, in order to distinguish their degree.²⁹ Summarizing the period 1400-1600, Harte found that ‘the sixteenth-century Acts contained a vision of society that was more complex and hierarchical’ than in some earlier periods (p. 136). Elizabeth punctiliously followed the strictures of the statute of 1533, which had reversed the relative liberality of former law. The 1533 statute contained ‘exceptionally minute provisions limiting the use of silk and silk-wrought materials, according to the rank or income of wearer, between those kinds that could be used in different garments of external wear’ (Hooper, p. 435). All materials, in varying combinations, were graded according to social standing. At the top end, ‘none … except earls and all superior degrees, and viscounts and barons in their doublets and sleeveless coats … shall wear … cloth of gold, silver, or tinsel; satin, silk, or cloth mixed with gold or silver, nor any sables’. At the lower end, ‘no servingman in husbandry or journeyman in handicrafts taking wages shall wear in his doublet any other thing than fustian, canvas, leather, or wool cloth’.³⁰

Prompted by Elizabeth in 1559, the Privy Council inaugurated a system of surveillance by suggesting to the city corporation ‘that two watches should be appointed for every parish, armed with a schedule of all persons assessed to the late subsidy … in order to see that the prohibition against silk trimmings was being obeyed’ (Hooper, p. 437). The dividing line between gentleman and plebeian was that between him whose annual income, after all taxes, was five pounds and him whose income was ‘forty shillings’. The sartorial manifestation of this in the gentleman was ‘silk in his doublet or jackets’, whereas the man below gentry rank could not wear silk at all, not even as decoration on ‘any shirt, or shirtband, under or upper cap, bonnet, or hat’.³¹ Class consciousness would have been most acute at this dividing line, and at least a century of discrimination, which all of the audience would have recognized, informs Jack Cade's contemptuous remark, ‘As for these silken-coated slaves, I pass not’ (IV. ii. 122).

Bevis's play on words at the opening of the Cade scenes—‘I tell thee, Jack Cade the clothier means to dress the commonwealth, and turn it, and set a new nap upon it … for ’tis threadbare’ (IV. ii. 4-6)³²—alludes to Cade's particular occupation, but in this topsyturvy world he would indeed act the king and he has his own sumptuary proclamation: ‘I will apparel them all in one livery’ (IV. ii. 71). According to Stubbes in the Anatomy of Abuses (1583), the Lord of Misrule invests ‘everie one of these his men … with his liveries, of green, yellow or some light wanton colour’,³³ and it has been conjectured that ‘Jack Cade may have used the Whitsun festivities of 1450 to forward or cover his enterprise’.³⁴ Cade's ‘livery’ as part of his visionary utterances recalls ‘the simple gray cloth in which all Utopians dress’.³⁵ On the other hand, Pettit records of the 1381 revolt that ‘according to the presentiments of the York jurors, the leaders of the disturbances there “gave caps and other liveries of one colour to various members of their confederacy”’ (p. 10). (Ironically, for all the messianic fervour of the German Peasant Revolt, ‘one of the demands of the insurgents was that they should be allowed to wear red clothes like their betters’.)³⁶ Cade's ‘livery’, like his ‘regality’ and the Lord of Misrule burlesque, apes that of the great households with their liveried retainers,³⁷ like those overlooked in earlier sumptuary laws and granted special dispensation by Elizabeth in 1588: ‘the servants of noblemen and gentlemen may wear such livery coats as their masters shall allow them, with their badges or other ornaments of any velvet or silk to be laid or added to their said livery coats.’³⁸

At one point Shakespeare may have had a sumptuary proclamation in mind. The word ‘sumptuous’, found only four times in his plays and only in the histories, is used in Lord Say's protest of probity, innocence, and moderation: ‘Is my apparel sumptuous to behold?’ (IV. vii. 95). This may be an ironic echo of the proclamation in which Elizabeth authorized temporary detention to prove the correctness of dress and degree, ‘because there are many persons that percase shall be found in outward appearance more sumptuous in their apparel than by common intendment’.³⁹

However that may be, it is certain that Cade plays sharply with words when first confronting Lord Say: ‘Ah, thou say, thou serge, nay, thou buckram lord!’ (l. 25). Punning on the name, Cade sees Say's reduced circumstances in terms of a coarsening, from ‘say’ (silk) to ‘serge’ (wool) to ‘buckram’ (a rough linen). Materials correspond to their reversed positions, but beyond the cruelty of the wit there may be a finer dramatic point. Cade's first line had been, ‘Well, he shall be beheaded for it ten times’ (l. 22). As this sentence sinks in, he seems to be prompted by the change visible in Lord Say's face to add the ‘buckram Lord!’ In the sixteenth century ‘buckram’ had, beyond the literal meaning of the ‘kind of coarse linen or cloth stiffened with gum or paste’ (OED, 2), a figurative meaning of ‘stiff’, ‘starched’, ‘stuck-up’; or ‘that has false appearance of stress’ (OED, 4b). Not wishing to provoke the rebels, perhaps, Lord Say had appeared modestly dressed before them, without the distinction of his degree. Here ‘buckram’ may also capture Cade's perception of Say's sudden realization of vulnerability, a superiority of bearing stiffening in shock before the judgement of Cade. And the latter does not let class-based invective drop, as is seen in the following charge of printing books and prompting literacy, and in his rounding on the modest lord, ‘Thou dost ride in a foot-cloth, dost thou not?’ (ll. 44-45), pointing to the undeniable luxury of trappings which give his remarks justification: ‘Marry, thou ought’st not to let thy horse wear a cloak, when honester men than thou go in their hose and doublets’ (V. vii. 47-49).

Symbolic of the ‘honester men’ are the ‘leather apron’ (IV. ii. 12) and ‘clouted shoon’ (IV. ii. 178). Drawing on the work of Keith Thomas and including the example from this play—‘Spare none but such as go in clouted shoon’—Charles Hobday notes of the clouted shoe, the peasant's hobnailed boot, that ‘“clubs and clouted shoon” was a proverbial phrase for a peasant revolt which crops up in Norfolk in 1537, and again in 1549 in connection with Kett's rebellion, and in Leicester in a recusant prophecy of 1586’.⁴⁰ Class contempt is echoed in Bevis's ‘The nobility think scorn to go in leather aprons’ (IV. ii. 12). Unlike aristocratic dress, peasant wear changed relatively little during the Middle Ages. The one common innovation, particularly for smiths and tanners, was the leather apron. This remained an emblem of the lower orders right into this century,⁴¹ a sign of difference as clear as that of spoken language.

From symbolism of clothing we may move to the crucial question of literacy. ‘We are all branded on the tongue’, said Dr Johnson, but in the earlier period the crucial difference was between those who were branded on the thumb and those who were executed instead, according to their inability to read. At the heart of Cade's assault on literacy is his accusation addressed to Lord Say: ‘Thou hast appointed justices of peace, to call poor men before them about matters they were not able to answer. Moreover, thou hast put them in prison; and because they could not read, thou hast hang’d them’ (IV. vii. 39-43). As in the matter of treason combat, history itself furnished grotesque materials, seeming travesties, in the matter of the law of benefit of clergy. In the Middle Ages benefit of clergy was the privilege, available to ordained clerks, monks, and nuns accused of felony, of being tried and punished by an ecclesiastical court. As a consequence of the statute of Pro Clero (1350), which extended the privilege to secular clerks who helped the clergy in church services, it was later extended to all who could demonstrate the ability to read in Latin their ‘neck verse’, Psalm 51.1. By the sixteenth century royal courts had taken control, as benefit of clergy had become an involved law which could exempt those found guilty of certain felonies from the severity of the heavily used death penalty.⁴² But what of those unable to read, who confronted the death penalty? Consider the case of one John Trotter, who claimed benefit of clergy when accused of murder during the reign of Edward III. Though illiterate he seemed able to ‘read’ the Psalter. He could still ‘read’ the verse even when a suspicious judge turned the book upside down. It transpired that a kind-hearted gaoler had allowed two boys to coach him. He was found guilty as a laymen, but if the boys had succeeded in teaching him to read more convincingly, his claim to clergy would have been upheld, though the gaoler would have been punished.⁴³ Such was the travesty of law in history.

Cade's charge to Lord Say applies a logic of inversion and reversal. Instead of being sentenced to death in effect for not being able to speak Latin, Lord Say is condemned for his words on Kent, ‘bona terra, mala gens’. ‘Away with him! Away with him! He speaks Latin’ (ll. 54-55). Because of Cade's logic, in reciprocating authoritarian self-justification in kind, it is impossible to reject his judgement without recognizing the preposterousness of such law in the actual world: this manifest injustice in the play serves to reveal the injustice of all justice based on class.

By adding the Clerk of Chartham episode to the historical confrontation with Lord Say, Shakespeare furthered Cade's comprehensive rejection of authority and law made manifest in writing. The precedents for anti-literacy in the 1381 revolt had nothing as systematic as the allusions in Act IV, which include materials, ‘parchment’, ‘wax … seal’, ‘pen and ink-horn’; production, ‘paper-mill’, ‘printing’; education, ‘grammar-school’, ‘noun’, ‘verb’; and law, ‘justices of the peace’, ‘clerk’, ‘courthand’, ‘obligations’, ‘letters’.

However, as in the previous episodes discussed, it is impossible to rest securely in the sense of simple affirmation of value. As if to surrender subversion to inconsistency, to surrender the social critic to anarchic clown, Shakespeare also shows Cade as feudal monarch manqué: ‘there shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me her maidenhead, ere they have it. Men shall hold me in capite’ (ll. 5-8). Rather than ‘reformation’ here, Jack will insist on his proprietory right, his droit du seigneur.

In these scenes of the play everything is qualified and compromised by the comic mode of the presentation of Cade, particularly when we consider that if the play was acted by Lord Strange's men it is highly likely that the part went to the principal comedian, Will Kemp. It is considered that the Pembroke company, referred to on the bad quarto title-pages of 2 and 3 Henry VI, grew out of Lord Strange's Men, for whom all three parts of Henry VI were written.⁴⁴ Two of Strange's men, Holland and Sinklo (or Sincler) are named respectively in 2 and 3 Henry VI.⁴⁵

The leading comic performer in Strange's company was Kemp. It would therefore appear likely that Shakespeare knew that he could act Jack Cade. Considering Kemp's later Shakespearian roles as Peter in Romeo and Juliet and as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, Michael Hattaway feels that ‘it is safe to conjecture that such players were type-cast and that playwrights wrote parts with their particular skills in mind’.⁴⁶

Internal allusions indicate this to have been the case with Kemp and Cade. In Act III, scene i the Duke of York in soliloquy recounts his suborning of Cade and recalls his fighting prowess in Ireland: ‘And fought so long, till that his thighs with darts b Were almost like a sharp-quill’d porpentine’ (l. 362). He then elaborates with a further simile: ‘And, in the end being rescu’d, I have seen b Him caper upright like a wild Morisco, b Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells. (l. 364) In that allusion to the Morris dance C. L. Barber saw an apt image: ‘Such an upstarting, indomitable gesture is perfect for a leader of a rising which is presented as a sort of saturnalia’.⁴⁷

The claim for saturnalia may be overstated, but there is a point here, for how appropriate it would be if the actor playing Cade was the most celebrated Morris dancer of his day, an obvious draw for a popular and impatient audience. (If so, this was in fact to be his first extensive acting role.)⁴⁸ The character York refers to Cade, but the actor of York may be ushering the famous dancer on to the stage.

Again, just before his demise, Cade remonstrates with his sword: ‘Steel, if thou turn the edge, or cut not out the burly-bon’d clown in chines of beef ere thou sleep in thy sheaf’ (IV. x. 55-57). David Wiles has shown that ‘in Shakespeare … the word “clown” is never found outside stage directions unless used of or (for ironic effect) by the character who is designated as the clown of the play’.⁴⁹ Kemp's famously athletic capers meant that he was well-built, thus, ironically, he is ‘the burly-boned clown’ about to be chined by Iden. What is more, if Sinklo, a notoriously thin actor,⁵⁰ was cast as Iden, his invitation to compare physiques—‘Set limb to limb, and thou art far the lesser’ (l. 45)—has a farcical point reminiscent of the burlesque of the earlier Cade scenes.

There are some comparable cases. As we have seen, Tom Miller the clown appeared with the rebels in The Life and Death of Jack Straw (1593), and in the play Sir Thomas More (1593), to which Shakespeare contributed, Will Kemp acted the clown amidst the rebels, as Wiles shows (pp. 80-81). Such figures could also symbolize the collective nature of an insurrectionary mob, ‘the unruly sort of clowns’, as Sidney has it, reminding us that the rustic buffoon provided the early model for the stage clown.⁵¹ Shakespeare's portrayal of Cade incorporated both cultural and theatrical traditions.

Enid Welsford points out the process whereby the court fool and the public fool ‘came to be reunited in the person of “the Lord of Misrule”, “the Abbot of Unreason”, “the Prince of Fools” who is none other than the traditional mock-king and clown, who has adopted the appearance and behaviour of the court-jester’.⁵² Furthermore, Morris dancing was associated with the Lord of Misrule and his train. With the decline of folk custom and ceremony the spirit of misrule survived in ‘the “immoderate and inordinate jove” of the Elizabethan clown, jig dancer, and “jeaster”, who was accustomed, as Thomas Lodge wrote “to coin bitter jests, or to show antique motions, or to sing baudie sonnets and ballads”, and who indulged in “all the feats of misrule in the countrie”’.⁵³ The ‘jig’, the celebrated specialism of Kemp, as C. R. Baskerville has shown, included ‘legal parody’, ‘satire on the ills of society’, and allusion to the Utopian Land of Cockaygne—all features of the Cade's scenes. In the theatrical tradition the clown as comic actor aped his betters yet scoffed at ranks or classes, made mock prophecies, indulged in chop logic not without some pointed wisdom, yet scorned learning.⁵⁴ Again, all are palpably there in the Cade scenes but in a compounded form incomparably more dynamic than theatrical predecessors, especially when it is recalled that Kemp is not performing as a clown accompanying Cade, but is both impersonating Cade acting clownishly, and derisively evaluating such action as from without, for Kemp as clown ridicules Cade the historical personage. If this surmise about Kemp acting Cade is right, Shakespeare's major innovation in the early history of the clown was to have him act a historical figure of some moment in the chronicles. The dialectic between the ideology of propagandist history and the conventions of art as modified by carnival inversion give the Cade scenes their uniquely ambivalent power.

There are other signs of strange conflations and inversions. At the beginning of Act IV, scene ii, a carefully placed qualification triggers a particular expectation. ‘Come get thee a sword’, says Bevis, ‘though made of lath’. Editors point out that this was the weapon carried by the Vice in the old morality plays. (Feste's song in Twelfth Night, IV. ii. 127-30, puts it plainly enough: ‘like to the old Vice … Who, with dagger of lath, in his rage and his wrath, b ‘Cries “Ah, ha!” to the devil.’) But no sooner has the audience been invited to measure the historical Cade against a Vice figure such as Sedition, than it finds Bevis and Holland invoking the World Upside Down. Deriving from classical adunata (or impossibilia) and the medieval drolerie, the pictorial tradition of the World Upside Down found on sixteenth-century broadsheets depicted a range of social and natural inversion. The social aspect concerns us here—such images as the peasant rides, the king walks; the servant arrests his master; ‘the peasant judges the judge and teaches or refuses the advice of the learned’ and ‘the thief (or poor man) takes the judge or policeman to jail’.⁵⁵ Following Holland's observation on the nobility's scorn for leather aprons, Bevis adds: ‘Nay, more; the king's Council are no good workmen’ (IV. ii. 13-14). On which Holland muses: ‘True; and yet it is said, “Labour in thy vocation”: Which is as much to say as, “Let the magistrates be labouring men”; and therefore should we be magistrates' (IV. ii. 15-17). Holland specifically travesties ‘An Homily Against Idleness’, restricting the meaning of ‘labour’ to what the homily distinguishes as ‘handy labour’, while elaborating on ‘divers sorts of labours, some of the mind, and some of the body’ including the ‘vocation’ of ‘governing the commonweal publicly’, and so on.⁵⁶ The world is turned upside down first by turning language upside down: the King's magistrates are considered poor ‘workmen’ who should therefore carry out manual labour in a revised vocation, thereby taking the place of the regular workmen, like Bevis and Holland, who would assume their office. The judges will be judged, and the judged will become judges, as we see in the following scenes with the Clerk of Chartham and Lord Say.

A larger dimension of burlesque can be seen in the way that Shakespeare carefully made Cade not merely claim the throne but also echo York himself. More than any other critic, David Riggs assembles a persuasive catalogue, saying that Cade imitates his patron York's ‘claims to royal ancestry (IV. ii. 37-50), his intention to purge Henry's court of “false caterpillars” (IV. iv. 36; see also IV. ii. 61-67, IV. vii. 28-30), his detestation of all things French (IV. ii. 159-65), his admiring recollection of Henry V (IV. ii. 149-52), his distaste for “bookish rule” (IV. ii. 81-104), his insistence on martial eminence as requisite for aristocratic station (IV. ii. 76), and his easy association of martial bravery and material prosperity (IV. ii. 61-72)’.⁵⁷ Furthermore, as has always been recognized, Cade parodies aristocratic genealogy (IV. ii. 37-47), reflecting on a major concern through the Henry VI plays in general, and referring to York's claims in particular.⁵⁸ It has also been claimed, more provocatively, that ‘Cade's ramshackle army is the antimasque to York's rebellion’.⁵⁹

To all this may be added a further suggestion that Shakespeare created ‘travesty-by-parallel’ with history itself, by having Cade burlesque the royal entry of the king. The real King Henry VI, returning to London from his coronation in Paris, first assembled his entourage on Blackheath before the entry, during which, as Fabyan records (p. 605), the conduits of Cheapside ran with wine, a festive tradition. In the play Cade and the rebels assemble on Blackheath, then, after his violent entry and his declaring himself ‘Lord of this city’, he gives orders that ‘the pissing-conduit run nothing but claret wine the first year of my reign’ (IV. v. 1-4), ‘King’ Jack even has his royal rhetoric, not echoing King Henry, but echoed by King Henry. His followers deserting him, ‘Was ever feather so lightly blown to and fro as the multitude’ (IV. viii. 54), asks Cade; his subjects deserting him, ‘Look, as I blow this feather from my face … such is the lightness of you common men’ (3 Henry VI, III. i. 83, 88), observes Henry, the failed King echoing the mock king.

Shakespeare repeats this technique in the action, with execution by decapitation. The chronicles express uniform horror at the execution of Lord Say and Sir James Cromer, Cade having their heads hoist aloft ‘and at every corner have them kiss’ (IV. vii. 130). In fact the historical Cade's action, repeated by Shakespeare, duplicated at least one earlier atrocity. In 1381 Suffolk rebels bore the heads of Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Cavendish, and the prior of Edmondsberie, ‘making them sometimes as it were to kisse’.⁶⁰ Cade's protracted, cruelly delayed sentence and execution of Lord Say stresses a barbarity which in more summary execution elsewhere in the plays, though less apparent, is no less real. The depiction of Cade here is not simply the expression of anti-egalitarianism, the anarchic many-headed monster run wild, rather the recognition that such rebellions become a grotesque mimicry of the barbarism of feudal hierarchy. In 3 Henry VI Shakespeare has Warwick order that York's head be replaced by Clifford's on York gate (I. iv. 180; II. vi. 85), a duplication reflecting the Cade scene and which is not in the sources.

The miracle, combat, and rebellion scenes each comment on the main action by developing a comedy that is never free from irony. Even moments of high comedy are darkened by the larger context, creating a particular dialectic between kinds of relief, between relief as release and relief as projection, as in the plastic arts, making distinct by contrast of plane, colour, or line. Here that making distinct by contrast is done in terms of image, allusion, and action. The audience's affective response is checked by this intellectual recognition and compromised by a cumulative irony which, in turn, encourages through anticipation the relief of laughter. Where at one moment we respond to inversion, distortion, and burlesque, at another we find they have become a version, reflection, and duplication. The seriocomic dialectic moves from the stage and becomes not a movement from plot to subplot, but a dialectic between art and life, the play and history.

The ideological certainties of chronicle history have gone. History is dynamically reconstituted by the relativistic freedom of art. We confront not the farce of subplot but the possible farce of history in which self-interest, dishonour, and barbarism invert, distort, and burlesque fealty, honour, and love, while protesting their integrity. But this sense of travesty is critical, not dogmatic, and we are made both participants in, and spectators of, the historical process, by the transformation of foreshortened dramatic time. This is the essentially critical function that these scenes promote, from the tentative beginning at St Albans to the confident staging of Jack Cade, in which Shakespeare drew most fully on the resources of history, culture, and art.

Notes

1. At the outset of this study Sydney Anglo provided several valuable antiquarian references, while Andrew Gurr kept me abreast of current criticism. I am indebted to Cedric Brown for suggestions during composition.

2. Angels with Horns (London, 1961), pp. 46, 51.

3. The Drama of Power (Evanston, Illinois, 1973), p. 9.

4. ‘Mirror Scenes in Shakespeare’, in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, edited by James G. McManaway (Washington, 1948), p. 104.

5. References are to the Arden editions by Andrew S. Cairncross: 1 Henry VI (London, 1962); 2 Henry VI (London, 1957); 3 Henry VI (London, 1964).

6. Shakespeare: The Chronicles, Writers and their Work, 146 (London, 1962), p. 17.

7. Shakespearian Structures (London, 1981), p. 2.

8. Anthony Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility (London, 1973), pp. 124, 198; J. G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970), p. 143. G. D. Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry (Oxford, 1959), is the authoritative study.

9. The Annales (London, 1615), p. 381.

10. G. Neilson, Trial by Combat (Glasgow, 1890), p. 275.

11. Bellamy, pp. 145-46.

12. The Faerie Queene, VI. ii. 7. I am indebted to Anthea Hume for this reference.

13. The Book of Honor and Arms (1590) and Honor Military and Civil (1602), Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints (New York, 1975), p. 30. See the introduction by Diane Bornstein for discussion of Richard II.

14. The Historical Collections of A Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, Camden Society New Series XVII, edited by James Gardner (London, 1876), p. 187. John Nichol's Illustrations of the Manners and Expenses of Ancient Times in England (1797), AMS Press Facsimile (1973), pp. 217, 220, prints the writ for the combat and the costs for disposal and execution.

15. See Neilson, pp. 188-89, for a detailed comparison.

16. A Critical Inquiry into Antient Armour, 3 vols (London, 1842), II, 125.

17. The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth (London, 1909), p. 66.

18. The Triumph of Maximilian I, with a translation of descriptive text, introduction and notes by Stanley Applebaum (New York, 1964), p. 7.

19. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicle (1577), 6 vols (London, 1807-08), III, 210; Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France (1516), edited by H. Ellis (London, 1811), p. 168; Grafton's Chronicle, 2 vols (1569; London, 1809), I, 628; Hall's Chronicle (1542; London, 1809), pp. 207-08.

20. Elizabethan History Plays, edited by William A. Armstrong (London, 1965), p. 80.

21. ‘Clouted Shoon and Leather Aprons: Shakespeare and the Egalitarian Tradition’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 23 (1979), 68.

22. W. Carew Hazlitt, A Select Collection of Old English Plays, 15 vols (London, 1874), V, 381, 483.

23. The Populace in Shakespeare (New York, 1949), pp. 22-23.

24. William Baldwin, The Mirror for Magistrates, edited by Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 170-80.

25. P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Johns Hopkins, 1978), p. 7, cited by Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theatre (New York and London, 1985), p. 20.

26. Thomas Pettit, ‘“Here comes I, Jack Straw”: English Folk Drama and Social Revolt’, Folklore, 95, no. 1 (1984), 12.

27. A Radical Reader, edited by Christopher Hampton (London, 1984), p. 51.

28. See, particularly, 1 Henry VIII c 14, 6 Henry VIII c 1, 24 Henry VIII c 13, The Statues of the Realm (London, 1817), III, pp. 8, 122, 432; 1 and 2 Philip and Mary c 2, ibid, IV, 239; Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, The Tudor Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven and London, 1969), particularly II, nos 464, 542, 601, 646, and III, no. 697; ‘An Homily Against Excess of Apparel’, in Certain Sermons or Homilies (Oxford, 1894), pp. 274-83.

29. See E. Baldwin, Sumptuarie Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore, 1926); Wilfrid Hooper, ‘The Tudor Sumptuarie Laws’, English Historical Review, 30 (1915), 433-49; N. B. Harte, ‘State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-Industrial England’, in Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England, edited by D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (London, 1976), pp. 132-65. I am indebted to Anne Curry for these references.

30. The Tudor Proclamations, no. 542, p. 280.

31. The Tudor Proclamations, no. 697 (1588), pp. 5-6.

32. For a topical interpretation of this in terms of a 1590s industrial dispute between capitalist free marketeers and the guilds, between those who wished to export unfinished cloth and those in London's finishing crafts, see Richard Wilson ‘“A Mingled Yarn”: Shakespeare and the Cloth Workers’, Literature and History, 12 (1986), 171-72. In the Utopian context of IV. ii. 62-72 Bristol (p. 89) sees topical economical reference to inflationary prices.

33. Cited by Pettit, p. 10.

34. H. M. Lyle, The Rebellion of Jack Cade, Historical Association Pamphlet G16 (London, 1950), p. 9; cited Pettit, p. 4.

35. Utopia, Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St Thomas More, Volume IV, Utopia, edited by J. H. Hexter (New Haven, Connecticut, 1965), Introduction, p. xli; cited Bristol, p. 91.

36. James Laver, A Concise History of Costume (London, 1972), p. 86.

37. As a corrective to the one-sided view of peasant revolt in Norman Cohn's influential study The Pursuit of the Millennium (London, 1957), see F. Gaus, ‘Social Utopias in the Middle Ages’, Past and Present, 38 (1967), pp. 16-17, and Rosamond Faith, ‘The “Great Rumour” of 1377 and Peasant Ideology’, in R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston, The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984), p. 73. Both studies indicate how certain conservative beliefs could have radical political implications.

38. The Tudor Proclamations, no. 697 (1588), p. 7.

39. Ibid., no. 646 (1580), p. 457. The phrase ‘sumptuous apparel’ occurs three times in the homily ‘Against Excess of Apparel’.

40. ‘Clouted Shoon and Leather Aprons’, p. 69.

41. C. Willett Cunnington and Phillis Cunnington, A Handbook of Medieval Costume (London, 1973), pp. 178-79. Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lucas, Occupational Costume in England from the Eleventh Century to 1914 (London, 1967), passim.

42. W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 17 vols (London, 1903), III, 294-302.

43. Leona C. Gabel, Benefit of Clergy in England in the Later Middle Ages, Smith College Studies in History, 14, nos 1-4 (October 1928-July 1929, Northampton, Massachusetts), p. 73.

44. Hanspeter Born, ‘The Date of 2, 3 Henry VI’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 25 (1974), 323-34.

45. Ibid., p. 333. See Part Three, ed. Cairncross, p. 66.

46. Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London, 1982), p. 90.

47. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, New Jersey, 1959), p. 29.

48. See one of Tarlton's Jest Book anecdotes: ‘It chanced that in the midst of a Play, after long expectation for Tarlton, being much desired of the people, at length he came forth.’ Quoted by A. J. Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 125-26.

49. Shakespeare's Clown (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 68-69.

50. E. W. Talbert, Elizabethan Drama and Shakespeare's Early Plays (1963; reprinted New York, 1973), p. 13.

51. Cited by Christopher Hill, ‘The Many Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking’, in From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, edited by Charles H. Cater (London, 1966), p. 298. See Wiles, pp. 61-72, for an extended discussion of the word ‘clown’.

52. The Fool (London, 1968), pp. 197-98.

53. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre (Baltimore and London, 1978), pp. 23-24.

54. Talbert, Chapter 2, ‘Aspects of the Comic’, pp. 7-60, especially pp. 56-60 on the Cade scenes.

55. David Kunzle, ‘World Upside Down: The Iconography of a European Broadsheet’, in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, edited by Barbara Babcock (Ithaca and London, 1978), p. 51.

56. Certain Sermons or Homilies (Oxford, 1894), p. 460.

57. Shakespeare's Heroical Histories (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971), p. 124.

58. For example, see Prior, pp. 112-13.

59. Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972), p. 51.

60. Holinshed, II, 744.