[In the following essay, Bernthal analyzes the ways in which Shakespeare used carnival imagery in Henry VI, Part 2, both to defend and condemn Jack Cade's rebellion.]

C. L. Barber was one of the first critics to recognize that Shakespeare portrays the Cade Rebellion of Henry VI Part II as carnival: “an astonishingly consistent expression of anarchy by clowning: the popular rising is presented throughout as a saturnalia, ignorantly undertaken in earnest; Cade's motto is ‘then are we in order when we are most out of order.’”¹ Scholars who have recently examined the Cade Rebellion of Henry VI Part II, among them Michael D. Bristol, Ellen C. Caldwell, Alexander Leggatt, and Phyllis Rackin,² tend to agree that Cade is not only a carnivalesque inverter of rank and privilege, but also, as Leggatt puts it, “one of the most articulate social critics in Shakespeare.”³ Though Cade and his rebels display faulty reasoning and prejudice, they articulate legitimate abuses, many of which concern the English legal system.⁴

Despite the seriousness of Cade's complaints, or perhaps because of their continuing force in Elizabethan England, Cade's message is continually subverted throughout act IV of the play. Cade's Rebellion is, as Robert Weimann notes, “a case of the mocker mocked, the inversion of the inverter.”⁵ For a while, Cade and his crew turn the prevailing concepts of law and rank upside down. They set forth genuine grievances, but the contradictions in Cade's program of reformation are comically obvious. The rebellion is shown to disintegrate from within. It becomes, on the one hand, a comic “antimasque” of the irresponsible and selfish behavior of the nobles who are vying for power,⁶ and on the other, a send up of the crude political comprehension of the English mob; yet even this second judgment is undercut, since several of the rebels (Dicke the Butcher, John, and Smith) are very sophisticated about Cade's pretensions and mock him through heavy-handed asides.⁷ They see through Cade, but support him anyway, undermining both Cade's authority with the audience and the idea that Cade's followers are merely stupid. At the same time, they put into question why they are following Cade at all. Are they just out for a good time and a little bloodshed? How are readers and audiences to know when to laugh with Cade and the rebels and when to laugh at them? The Cade Rebellion gives audience members no simple picture of the motivations or justifications for rebellion, but a chaotic and contradictory one, appropriate to the empirical messiness of revolution.

In the Cade Rebellion we see Shakespeare at the beginning of his career developing a modus operandi for the future: the dramatic generation of interpretative conundrums that modern audiences and critics can revel in, or meditate upon, but not resolve. This, of course, is an aesthetic which professors of English, especially those of a modernist bent, have come to love; but, from Shakespeare's point of view, safety and profitability may have had as much to do with the open-endedness of his plays as aesthetics.⁸ Part of the melange that is the Cade Rebellion certainly results from trying to keep on the good side of the censor, but for Shakespeare, exercising “negative capability” also may have been the best way to attract and retain a mixed audience. Douglas Bruster persuasively argues in Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare:

London's playhouses can best be understood in terms of commerce, as centers for the production and consumption of an aesthetic product. During the Renaissance, the cornucopian plays which even today appear to offer almost everything to almost everyone delivered many myths in different voices to audiences which seem to have been themselves extremely heterogeneous. What Norman Rabkin calls the “common understanding”—the tendency or ability of Shakespeare's plays to offer (even affirm) simultaneously, without contradiction, contradictory themes, messages, and ideological stances—was, I would argue, ultimately a product of early modern market forces which shaped dramatic commodities to answer the various manifestations of social desire.⁹

Shakespeare's portrayal of the Cade Rebellion provides a fine example in support of Bruster's argument. Carnival offers some thing for everyone because it expands to address every repressed desire, including the need for bodily pleasure, social transgression, and protest; at the same time, because carnival does come to an end, it can reinforce social and political order. Whether carnival is inherently revolutionary or conservative is trumped in Shakespeare's theater by its use as a commercial device to give everyone in the audience some of what they want, even when those desires are contradictory. The genius of Shakespeare's drama may be that it allows us to enjoy, within a few hours, pleasures that normally exclude each other. Cade's trial scenes, with their carnivalesque inversions of the legal system, display Shakespeare's method in particularly sharp focus, giving the audience a chance both to laugh at that popular figure of derision, the lawyer, while at the same time affirming the rule of law—and the scenes do this while building to a crescendo, starting with the lowliest legal operative, a clerk, and ending with a judge and counselor, Lord Say.

Shakespeare sets up Cade's trial scenes by introducing the corruption of justice as a continuing subject in act I, where “three or foure Petitioners” are intercepted by the duke of Suffolke and the queen. Suffolke reads the petitions, finding that the first is against the servant of his ally, Cardinal Beauford, as the petitioner says, “for keeping my House, and Lands, and Wife and all, from me” (Folio H, p. 123). The second petition is against Suffolke himself by another petitioner on behalf of his entire township “for enclosing the Commons of Melforde” (Folio H, p. 123). The charge of enclosure would particularly raise audience hackles, enclosure being condemned by the clergy and legislated against by Parliament throughout the sixteenth century.¹⁰

By showing the presentation of these petitions, Shakespeare provides background about the political condition of the realm and the people's perceptions of who can be trusted. The petitioners are seeking Duke Humfrey of Gloster, the Lord Protector; in other words, they are seeking to present their petitions to the king's council, the strongest member of which is Humfrey, rather than to several other courts which could also claim jurisdiction, such as local manorial courts, courts of assize, or common pleas courts. The implication is that Suffolke controls the administration of justice in his own dukedom and that the petitioner for Melforde has been forced to bring his suit to Westminster, where, as a last resort, he hopes to get an impartial hearing from Gloster. The petition against the cardinal's man stresses that England is in the grip of a few men who exercise power with no regard to law, in this case, the court faction led by Suffolke and the queen. Their pursuit of power at court mirrors how nobles govern throughout the countryside. In The End of the House of Lancaster, R. L. Storey describes the situation in the years just preceding the Wars of the Roses:

The Yorkist manifesto of 1461 was not exaggerating when it said that riot, murder, robbery and the like had flourished in the time of Henry VI … The feuds of the nobility in the more outlying parts of the kingdom attained the proportions of private wars … Known offenders were sooner or later subjected to the formal procedures of the judicial system, but there was apparently little danger of conviction and punishment. Juries of country gentry would not convict their own kind. Instead of keeping order and protecting the weak, the law was more commonly misapplied to the advantage of those able to control it. The corruption and oppression of local government was the main burden of the Kentish rebels of 1450.¹¹

The historic Cade rebels presented a complaint to the crown that included a long catalog of judicial misconduct: the selling of the goods and property of those accused of treason before they are convicted (thus ensuring that they would be); the leasing of judicial offices to people who used them to gain money through extortion and false accusations; the taking of default judgments against defendants who had been neither summoned nor notified of suits pending against them; and the illegal evicting of people from their property, which is precisely the complaint of the first petitioner in act I.¹² The complaint of the commons of Kent does not reflect a rebellion aimed at anarchy; rather, it shows a desire to see fair enforcement of the laws in place. Stowe comments that there was nothing in the articles “but seemed reasonable.”¹³ Cade's Rebellion was a step forward in sophistication from the John Ball Rebellion of 1381, in which killing all the lawyers, burning all the law books and legal records, and starting from scratch were the principal goals of the rebels. Dicke the Butcher's cry, “The first thing we do, let's kill all the Lawyers” (Folio H, p. 138), owes more to Holinshed's portrayal of the Ball Rebellion than it does to that of Jack Cade.¹⁴

The grievances of Kent would have resonated with Shakespeare's audience in a way that seemed very contemporary. Although humor at the expense of lawyers has its origins far back in western culture, there is evidence that during the half-century leading to the English Revolution, the public's animus against lawyers reached an all-time high. As Wilfrid R. Prest explains in The Rise of the Barristers, the number of lawsuits filed during this period grew steadily, and the legal profession grew in proportion. Lawyers were commonly regarded as avaricious, covetous, dishonest, ambitious, and proud.¹⁵ The perceived rarity of the “good” lawyer is evidenced by an epitaph which survives in three versions, one attributed to Ben Jonson: “See how God works his wonders now and then, / Here lies a lawyer and an honest man.”¹⁶ Prest notes that “hostility towards common lawyers seems to have burgeoned precisely as the profession grew in size and social prominence during the sixteenth century.”¹⁷

The lawyers saw themselves in a better light. In a “device” performed before Queen Elizabeth in 1588, the gentlemen of Gray's Inn presented a speech in which the followers of Astraea, the goddess of justice, with whom Elizabeth was often identified, described themselves and their calling as follows:

They with attentiue mindes and serious wits,
Reuolue records of deepe Judiciall Acts,
They waigh with steaddy and indifferent hand
Each word of lawe, each circumstance of right,
.....One doubt in mootes by argument encreasc'd
Cleares many doubts …
The language she first chose, and still retaines,
Exhibites naked truth in aptest termes.
Our Industrie maintaineth vnimpeach't
Prerogatiue of Prince, respect to Peeres,
The Commons libertie, and each mans right.(18)

In this passage, lawyers are the heroes of justice and the purveyors of a special language most suited for the communication of truth. Thus, two extremely different views of law, lawyers, and legal language existed during Shakespeare's day and almost certainly within Shakespeare's variegated audience. In Henry VI Part II, Shakespeare brings these two views into collision through the Cade Rebellion.

The grievances of the commons as displayed in act I set the stage for a kind of revenge tragedy in act IV. Katharine Eisaman Maus gives a succinct description of the hero of revenge tragedy as “someone who prosecutes a crime in a private capacity, taking matters into his own hands because the institutions by which criminals are made to pay for their offences are either systematically defective or unable to cope with some particularly difficult situation.”¹⁹

In Henry VI Part II, both of these criteria apply. The commons as a group are in the position of Hieronimo from The Spanish Tragedy. They have grievances for which they cannot find redress because Henry's court and his court system have been corrupted.

Shakespeare presents the rebels' preoccupation with judicial corruption through the mouth of Holland, a rebel who, just prior to Cade's entrance as the leader of the rebellion, says, “Let the Magistrates be labouring men,” virtually introducing Cade as magistrate (Folio H, p. 138).²⁰ Cade himself does not advocate the end of the legal system as part of his platform, but promises, as the Lord of Misrule, that “seuen halfe peny Loaues sold for a peny: the three hoop'd pot, shall haue ten hoopes, and I wil make it Fellony to drink small Beere” (Folio H, p. 138). The first cry against the legal system comes from Dicke the Butcher, who speaks the most famous line of the play: “The first thing we do, let's kill all the Lawyers.”

In this context, Cade gets his first case, sitting in judgment of the clerk Emanuell. Emanuell's trial becomes a carnivalesque inversion of benefit of clergy and a wholesale condemnation of literacy, which Emanuell does not realize until sentence is passed, and he is hung with his pen and inkhorn about his neck.

CADE:
How now? Who's there?
WEAUER:
The Clearke of Chartam: hee can write and reade, and cast accompt.
CADE.
O monstrous!
WEA.
We tooke him setting of boyes Copies.
CADE.
Here's a Villaine.
WEA.
He's a Booke in his pocket with red Letters in't
CADE.
Nay then he is a Conjurer.
BUTCHER.
Nay, he can make Obligations, and write Court hand.
CADE.
I am sorry for't: The man is a proper man of mine Honour: vnlesse I finde him guilty, he shall not die.

(Folio H, pp. 138-9)

With Cade's “vnlesse I finde him guilty, he shall not die,” Shakespeare gives us a parody of judicial crocodile tears. The arbitrary is rhetorically inflated to sound as if it were due process. Cade continues his parody of judicial arrogance by using the condescending second person familiar toward Emanuell and calling him “Sirrah.”

Emanuell, who quickly proclaims that he can read and write, simply does not realize that he has entered a jurisdiction in which being able to recite Psalm 51:1—the “neck verse” which saved first-time capital offenders from execution—is itself a capital offense, for it is a metonymic representation of literacy.

CADE.
Come hither Sirrah, I must examine thee: What is thy name?
CLEARKE.
Emanuell.
BUTCHER.
They vse to writ it on the top of Letters: Twill go hard with you.
CADE.
Let me alone: Dost thou vse to write thy name? Or hast thou a marke to thy selfe, like a honest plain dealing man?
CLEARKE.
Sir I thanke God, I haue bin so well brought vp, that I can write my name.
ALL.
He hath confest: away with him: he's a Villaine and a Traitor.

(Folio H, p. 139)

The rebels' anger at benefit of clergy is well founded. The practice allowed guilty first offenders to escape, while putting the innocent illiterate to execution. It was invoked with a regularity that continually displayed the system's unfairness. David Cressy observes: “[Lawrence] Stone has suggested that ‘47٪ of the criminal classes of Jacobean London could read,’ since they successfully pleaded benefit of clergy. The Middlesex records in fact show 32٪ of the capital felons in the reign of Elizabeth and 39٪ in the reign of James successfully claiming clergy, a somewhat lower percentage than cited by Stone.”²¹

That Emanuell should have to pay for the sins of the system is, of course, unfair. He, like Cinna the poet in Julius Caesar, is a victim of the mob, and his fate represents humanism's worst nightmare: that something like the fall of Rome could happen again, that literacy and learning could be directly attacked and civilization and religion plunged into another dark age. Emanuell's name, meaning “God be with us,” is especially pregnant in a time when the printed English Bible was becoming the presence and authority of God in the homes of England.

Though the hanging of Emanuell could have been seen as an emblematic execution of literacy and religion, from a more populist viewpoint, the scene demonstrates something else: “[a]n attack on the records and recorders whose presence permitted and promoted the oppressive collection of revenues … the recording of arrears, and the registration of property so that it could be controlled and alienated by the state and its (in this case often corrupt) agents.”²²

Emanuell's trial is potentially very funny. He is so obtuse about his situation, such a respectful little victim, that comedy vies with the scene's more serious aspects. Here, Shakespeare not only mixes genres but also blends them, producing revenge comedy.

The next trial scene, which occurs only in the Quarto, is even more savage. The trial of the Sargiant-at-law is a comic reversal of Suffolke's and Margaret's treatment of the suitor in act I, in which Cardinal Beauford's servant had taken the suitor's house and wife and all. Here, the situation is inverted when a Sargiant-at-law complains to Cade that he has been dispossessed of his wife:

SARGIANT.
Justice, justice, I pray you sir, let me haue justice of this fellow here.
CADE.
Why what has he done?
SARG.
Alasse sir he has rauisht my wife.
DICKE.
Why my Lord he would haue rested me,
And I went and entred my Action in his wiues paper house.
CADE.
Dicke follow thy sute in her common place,
You horson villaine, you are a Sargiant youle,
Take any man by the throate for twelue pence,
And rest a man when hees at dinner,
And haue him to prison ere the meate be out of his mouth.
Go Dicke take him hence, cut out his toong for cogging,
Hough him for running, and to conclude,
Braue him with his owne mace.

(Quarto G2v)

This brief scene emblematizes law as rape. The courts under the control of Suffolke have failed to provide a remedy for the “taking” of the first suitor's wife. Under these circumstances, it is metaphorically appropriate that Cade's man, “Dicke,” likens rape to the serving of legal papers, entering his “Action” in the Sargiant's wife's “paper house.” The law has become what it has been used to legitimate, and this being widely recognized, there is no longer any need to cloak rape with a veneer of legality—one simply proceeds directly to the rape, rape having become law. The Sargiant is sentenced to be emasculated in two ways. First, he is to be deprived of that piece of anatomical equipment which he most relies upon to commit legal rapes—his tongue. He is to be “houghed” to keep from running, which has a double sense. “Houghing” is the clearing of one's throat, as a lawyer might be expected to do before making a long speech or “running on.” It is also the cutting of the hough sinew, the tendons behind the knee, an operation performed on cattle to keep them from running off. Here, the tongue fills in for the hough sinew: the Sargaint will never run off in court again. Cade's final order, that the Sargiant be “braved” with “his own mace,” implies that the Sargiant is to be emasculated. The joys of metaphoricity are connected to the joys of mutilation in a manner that may have been quite hilarious to the audience and quite gratifying for any unfortunate litigants in attendance. The Sargiant is hardly a sympathetic victim, not simply because he is a lawyer, but because he is stupid enough to seek relief from Cade and sycophantic enough to call him “sir” and treat him as a legitimate judge, a comment on lawyers' willingness to grovel to anyone to get what they want.

The final trial in the Cade Rebellion is Lord Say's, who is accused of losing Maine and Normandy to France, speaking French (and therefore speaking with the tongue of an enemy), of promulgating literacy, hanging those who cannot read, enforcing the criminal and tax laws, and putting an elegant footcloth on his horse. Again, the rebels' charges mix anger at legitimate grievances with large doses of comic—but dangerous—ignorance. The rebels are particularly concerned with the losses to France, and they have legitimate reason to be angry since many of them appear to be veterans of French campaigns. Dicke the Butcher says, “[W]eel haue the Lord Sayes head, for selling the Dukedome of Maine” (Folio H, p. 139), and when the messenger arrives shouting that Lord Say has been captured, he says, “heeres the Lord Say, which sold the Townes in France” (Folio H, p. 140).

In Cade's extemporaneous indictment of Say, the first charge involves France: “What canst thou answer to my Maiesty, for giuing vp of Normandie vnto Mounsieur Basimecu, the Dolphine of France?” (Folio H, p. 141). Yet it is evident from the very beginning of the play that if anyone is to be credited with the loss of Maine, it is Suffolke, who has traded Maine and Anjou to bring Margaret to England. Somerset's ineffective government has cost the English Normandy. There is no indication in the play of any involvement by Say. The rebels simply assume, with no proof at all, that Say is responsible, and their ignorance of the true political situation subverts their claims to rule.

The displacement of learning by ignorance is augmented by rebel errors in logic. The accusation against Say for speaking French forms the major premise of an erroneous syllogism that is set forth in this exchange between Cade and Stafford:

CADE.
He [Say] can speake Frenche, and therefore hee is a Traitor.
STAFFORD.
O grosse and miserable ignorance.
CADE.
Nay answer if you can: The Frenchmen are our enemies: go too then, I ask but this: Can he that speaks with the tongue of an enemy, be a good Councellour, or no?

(Folio H, p. 139)

Of course, Cade uses speaking “with the tongue of an enemy” in a double sense, providing an example of the four-terms fallacy. Syllogistically, Cade's speech also exemplifies the formal error of the “excluded middle”: Say speaks French; our enemies speak French; therefore, Say is our enemy. In much Shakespearean word play this would just be good fun, but in this instance, Cade's speech also prefaces a grave political and judicial error. Either way, Stafford's comment, “O grosse and miserable ignorance,” accurately describes the quality of Cade's argument. Cade's ignorance and illogic seem to be a straightforward demonstration of the Elizabethan line that the great herd of people are incapable of political thought—that democracy is indeed the worst form of government.

But there is a complicating factor; Cade seems to know exactly what he is doing. His use of fallacies may be a rhetorical strategy that Cade uses to manipulate his followers, and yet, the effect of fallacious argument on his men is questionable. As I have indicated, the play clearly shows that many of Cade's followers know that he is a fraud, but they do not seem to care. They are willing to go along with Cade as if the rebellion were a carnival, and perhaps this is because Shakespeare also wants his audience to enjoy the rebellion as if it were carnival, for if carnival and rebellion oscillate with each other from beginning to end, the audience need never feel seditious in enjoying them. Rather, under the blessing of carnival, the audience may join John, Smith, and Dicke the Butcher for an afternoon of innocent bloodthirstiness, treason without guilt.

Whatever the reasons for the deflationary comments of Cade's own men, their continual cracks about Cade contradict the idea that commoners are too stupid to understand politics. If the asides were included to appease censors who were afraid the audience would take Cade seriously, then Shakespeare was put in the ironic position of having to demonstrate the perspicacity of Cade's people in order to demonstrate their stupidity. From the perspective of the audience, there must have been those who felt the play once again revealed the evil of that many-headed monster, the multitude. There must have also been those who noticed the civil war within the form of the play itself and who received an ambivalent message about the people's capacity to govern, and that ambivalence—that measure of doubt in relation to the Elizabethan line—would itself have been radical. But the commercial element must also be considered. Many in Shakespeare's audience, such as the apprentices, enjoyed a good riot, and others, such as the “gentlemen” of the Inns of Court, enjoyed riotous behavior. A play that offered a vicarious riot, in which all participants were forgiven, must have been alluring to red-blooded young Englishmen and profitable to those who offered it.

Cade's second charge against Say, for promulgating literacy, recapitulates the main charge against Emanuell, and thus doubly emphasizes the rebels' attack on literacy:

CADE.
Thou hast most traiterously corrupted the youth of the Realme, in erecting a Grammar Schoole: and whereas before, our Fore-fathers had no other Bookes but the Score and the Tally, thou hast caused printing to be vs'd, and contrary to the King, his Crowne, and Dignity, thou hast built a Paper-Mill. It will be prooued to thy Face, that thou hast men about thee, that vsually talke of a Nowne and a Verbe, and such abhominable wordes, as no Christian eare can endure to heare.

(Folio H, p. 141)

Cade goes on to set forth benefit of clergy as a grievance: “[T]hou hast put them [poor men] in prison, and because they could not reade, thou hast hang'd them, when (indeede) onely for that cause they haue beene most worthy to liue” (Folio H, p. 141). Say defends himself ably, citing his record as a counselor and judge:

Justice with favour haue I alwayes done,
Prayres and Teares have mou'd me, Gifts could neuer.
.....Large gifts haue I bestow'd on learned Clearkes,
Because my Booke preferr'd me to the King.
.....Long sitting to determine poore mens causes,
Hath made me full of sicknesse and diseases.

(Folio H, p. 141)

Here, Say becomes the pattern of the good judge, an example of which has already been provided in the play by Duke Humfrey. Say's defense is so effective that even Cade says in an aside: “I feele remorse in my selfe with his words: but Ile bridle it: he shall dye, and it bee but for pleading so well for his life” (Folio H, p. 141). Death can be the subject of comedy so long as the playwright is presenting a biter-gets-bit situation, as in some revenge tragedies (e.g., Vindice's exploits in The Revenger's Tragedy), or when the stage victim is so unreal in dramatic presentation that he evokes little or no pity. Say, a palsy stricken old man, beaten up by a mob, has dramatic reality, as opposed to Emanuell or the Sargiant-at-law, who go to their deaths like cartoon cats.

Having given the audience a chance to rebel vicariously at the abuses of justice, and to have quite a good time doing so, Shakespeare then gives his playgoers a chance to redeem themselves in the Say episode by sympathizing with justice abused. At the point when Say is executed, and the heads of Say and his son-in-law are brought onto the stage, the genre of the rebellion changes from carnivalesque satire to tragedy, but the tragic element does not last long. Shakespeare quickly goes to his next task, which is reincorporating the rebels into English society. He does this by providing rituals of repentance, forgiveness, and redemption.²³ First the rebellion is disbursed by bringing Buckingham and Clifford onstage and having them invoke the name of Henry V, which suggests that the common Englishman is loyal so long as he has good leadership. The rank and file of Kentishmen become patriots again and appear before Henry VI with halters around their necks, asking forgiveness, and Henry VI, the generous king, does forgive them. Finally, Cade the snake is killed by a loyal Kentishman, Alexander Iden, when Cade is found, as many critics note, in the garden of Iden. Iden, in effect, becomes the representative of Kent, a redeemer, who smites the traitor on the head. If the audience feels guilt about its imaginary participation in Cade's venture, it is forgiven when the Kentishmen are pardoned and erased when Cade the scapegoat is killed and beheaded, as if the fall of man, or at least the men of Kent, has been reversed.

One might interpret Shakespeare's portrayal of the Cade Rebellion in accordance with critical legal theory as an unmasking of the Tudor (and all other) judicial systems: a demonstration that judicial decision making is really just the exercise of raw power cloaked in the rhetoric of equitable language. Cade is not that much different from any other judge. He merely shows the judicial emperor to have no clothes by mimicking judicial language whenever he renders an obviously unjust decision. However, the Cade Rebellion furnishes only three trial scenes in a play which is virtually constructed from scenes of judicial decision making, and the play as a whole provides a much more complicated look at the rendering of good judgments.

Earlier in the play, when Duke Humfrey decrees a trial by combat between Thumpe, the apprentice armorer, and his master Horner, Shakespeare portrays the limit of judicial reasoning. Humfrey is faced with a charge of treason by one man against another, and there is no way to determine whether the accuser or denier is telling the truth. Since the task is impossible to reason, Humfrey, in medieval fashion, decrees trial by battle, leaving God as the ultimate arbiter of justice. In this case, judicial reasoning abdicates in the face of utter uncertainty.²⁴ But there is another trial in which Gloster plays the part of a good epistemologist who works his way to the truth through evidence and reason. Saunder Simpcox is a beggar who claims to have just received his eyesight as the result of a miracle at St. Albans. When Gloster questions him, Simpcox is able to identify colors by name, a feat which, Gloster points out, the “blind man” could not manage, having had no opportunity to form links between the words for color and their referents. Gloster's discovery of Simpcox's fraud is sound. Shakespeare does not show in Henry VI Part II that forensic proof is impossible. He shows that it is difficult to come by, that the system is subject to serious corruption, and that corruption can dress itself in language suffused with legitimacy. Cade, for all of the legitimate complaints he represents, is the Lord of Misjudgment as well as the Lord of Misrule, as Shakespeare makes abundantly clear, titillating his audience with a satire of clerks and lawyers, but preserving the honor of the judicial system by inverting the inverter, Cade.

In Henry VI Part II, Shakespeare explores both the functioning of the legal system and people's attitudes toward it. Though Shakespeare's mind may have acquired the humanistic habit of viewing an issue from many sides, perhaps it was the heterogeneity of his audience that made his “negative capability” marketable and that encouraged him to mix genres.²⁵ By carnivalizing the Cade Rebellion, Shakespeare hit on a dramaturgic device that allowed him to mix satirical comedy and tragedy in the form of history, criticizing the legal system and criticizing its critics, all at the same time. Above all, he provided his audience with a feast of contradictory pleasures and satisfactions: rebelling and putting a rebellion down, sinning and being redeemed. Act IV of the play stands as a savvy example of knowing how to please, by the man who would become the most successful commercial playwright of all time.

Notes

1. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1959), p. 14.

2. Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 89-90.

   For a thorough discussion of the historical Cade Rebellion, the documents pertaining to it, and how the rebellion illuminates Henry VI Part II, see Ellen C. Caldwell, “Jack Cade and Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2,” SP [Studies in Philology] 92, 1 (Winter 1995): 18-79; Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 16-22; and Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 210-22.

3. Leggatt, p. 18.

4. For historical studies of the Cade Rebellion and the grievances of the commons of Kent, see I. M. W. Harvey, Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); and Helen M. Lyle, The Rebellion of Jack Cade, 1450 (London: Historical Association, 1950).

5. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), p. 240.

6. Leggatt, p. 16.

7. Although Cade's program is egalitarian, he proclaims his right to rule on the basis of birth. Dicke the Butcher draws the audience's attention to this contradiction by questioning Cade's birth:

   CADE.

   My Father was a Mortimer.

   BUT.

   He was an honest man, and a good Bricklayer.

   .....

   CADE.

   My wife descended of the Lacies.

   BUT.

   She was indeed a Pedlers daughter, & sold many Laces.

   .....

   CADE.

   Therefore am I of an honorable house.

   BUT.

   I by my faith, the field is honourable, and there was he borne, vnder a hedge: for his Father had neuer a house but the Cage.

   (Folio H, p. 138)

   When Dicke proposes that the laws of England only come out of Cade's mouth, John and Smith, two other rebels, completely undermine the notion that the crowd is following Cade blindly:

   JOHN.

   Masse 'twill be sore Law then, for he was thrust in the mouth with a Speare, and 'tis not whole yet.

   SMITH.

   Nay John, it will be stinking Law, for his breath stinkes with eating toasted cheese.

   (Folio H, p. 140)

   Rather than using modern, conflated editions of the plays, I will refer in all instances to Folio and Quarto versions. For Folio, which I refer to here, I am using The Second Part of Henry the Sixt in Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (London, 1623; rpt. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 120-46. References are indicated by genre (H, for History) and by page number within that genre section of the Folio.

   For Quarto I am using William Shakespeare, The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (London, 1594; rprt. Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1985). References to Quarto are indicated by quire letter, leaf number, and recto (r) or verso (v) of that particular leaf.

8. See Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

9. Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 3. Bruster makes reference to Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967). For an extensive argument that Shakespeare's audience was not particularly heterogeneous, but rather wealthy and “privileged,” see Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576-1642 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981). Rebuttals to Cook, which I believe are more convincing, favor the heterogeneous audience. See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987).

10. See William C. Carroll, “‘The Nursery of Beggary’: Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart Period,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 34-47.

11. R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (London: Barrie and Rockcliff, 1966), p. 8

12. The Jack Cade Rebellion was the first popular uprising in England in which the participants issued a written complaint to justify their actions, and it is strangely ahistorical that Shakespeare portrays the Cade rebels as if they were the antiliterate members of the 1381 Ball Rebellion. The entire complaint is contained in Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (London, 1577; rprt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), 3:222-3; and in John Stowe, The Chronicles of England (London: Richard Tottle and Henry Binneman, 1580), pp. 641-2.

13. Stowe, p. 640.

14. The systematic extermination of lawyers, judges, law books, and all legal records was the object of the Ball Rebellion, not the Cade Rebellion. See Holinshed, 2:737. Caldwell notes this, p. 58. See also Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Temple Smith, 1973).

15. Wilfrid R. Prest, The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar, 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). See esp. chap. 9.

16. Prest, p. 285.

17. Prest, p. 287.

18. Thomas Hughes and others, The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587; rprt. New York: AMS Press, 1970). See the third unnumbered page in the introduction by Nicholas Trotte.

19. Katharine Eisaman Maus, introduction, in Four Revenge Tragedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. ix-xxxi, ix.

20. The two minor comic actors George Beuis and John Holland are designated in the Folio script by their real names.

21. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), p. 17.

22. Caldwell, p. 59.

23. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 1-29, 23-5. Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare's task at the end of the Cade Rebellion is to resolve the problem of how killing peasants can be made to seem heroic. I would argue, however, that Shakespeare has so shifted the problem, in the context of commercial theater, that he does not really confront it at all. For Shakespeare, the task is how to make a rebellion more funny than it is offensive, and how to forgive the rebels in the end, taking them back into the fold as loyal Englishmen.

24. See Craig A. Bernthal, “Treason in the Family: The Trial of Thumpe v. Horner,” SQ 42, 1 (Spring 1991): 44-59.

25. See Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), esp. chap. 2.