SOURCE: Linton, David. “Shakespeare as Media Critic: Communication Theory and Historiography.” Mosaic 29, no. 2 (June 1996): 1-21.

[In the following essay, Linton examines the Jack Cade Rebellion in Henry VI, Part 2, and contends that underlying Cade's suspicion of people who are literate is Shakespeare's belief that literacy can be abused by the powerful to suppress the poor.]

The current tendency to explain everything from election results to the breakdown of the family in terms of media influence attests to the belief that the communicating practices of a culture play decisive roles in the outcomes of human endeavors. In analyzing the nature of these influences and the characteristics of the outcomes, some communications theorists and historians focus on the effects of a medium's form while others attend to its content. Content-analyses most often deal with controversial subjects such as violence, erotica, propaganda or political messages, while effects-analyses focus on the social, psychological or cognitive alterations that result from the use or exposure to a given medium.

Examinations of the impact of the printing press, for instance, have led to a wide range of conclusions: from Claude Lévi-Strauss's contention that literacy favors despotism, through Jack Goody and Ian Watt's more moderate view that literacy contributes to social stratification, to Eric Havelock's conclusion that literacy has been a democratizing influence in human history. Similarly, examinations of the impact of television have led critics like Neil Postman and Joshua Meyrowitz to claim that this medium has contributed to the deterioration of social institutions, while Jib Fowles and Henry Perkinson hold that television has been a positive force in the growth of human understanding.

Yet the thought that communications media deserve scrutiny is hardly a new idea. Four centuries ago a prominent social critic in Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare, embedded in his plays a critique of the effects and uses of print media and literacy, both of which were rapidly reshaping social practices in 16th-century England.

My purpose in this essay is to argue that Shakespeare's understanding of communications and the media of his times entitles him to recognition as a formidable media commentator. First, I will illustrate the scope of Shakespeare's presentation of media and literacy issues by presenting a wide range of examples from all the dramatic forms in which Shakespeare wrote and by showing that his concern is sustained for the full span of his career. Second, I will focus specifically on one play (Henry VI, Part II) which functions as a kind of case study of Shakespeare's interest in particular media practices. In this way, I hope to make an updated and concrete contribution to what previous researchers have already identified as Shakespeare's concern with media issues, and thus by way of providing a context for my discussion I will first provide an overview of this scholarship.

Some of the most influential contemporary communications theorists have noted Shakespeare's use of media themes. Harold Innis commented on the relationship between the printing press and Shakespeare's plays (Bias 55, Empire 148) and Marshall McLuhan, in his usual sweeping fashion, noted that, “A fairly complete handbook for studying extensions of man could be made up from selections from Shakespeare” (Understanding 3). In fact, McLuhan opens The Gutenberg Galaxy with a description of King Lear as Shakespeare's alarmed response to the impact of print. He says that the play is an “almost scholastic demonstration of the need for a ratio and interplay among the senses as the very constitution of rationality” (13), a delicate balance which had been disrupted by printing. In a similar vein, Walter Ong has discussed at length the impact of print and literacy upon mental functions, observations with particular pertinence to Shakespeare's most literate characters such as Hamlet, Angelo and Romeo.

Literary scholars and practitioners of the rehistoricizing enterprise have also directed attention to Shakespeare's treatment of communications issues. Donna Hamilton, for example, situates the plays in the political context of the court patronage system during a time in which, she claims, “writing was understood to be a chief means for reifying authority” (103). Similarly, Annabel Patterson takes the position that Shakespeare should be viewed as a powerful cultural critic whose span of interest included the reading, writing and educational practices of his time and place.

The commercial aspects of 16th-century media practices have also been examined by critics like Arthur Marotti and Edwin Miller who have noted that the press introduced a new patron into the media mix: the reading public. From the beginning of the Gutenberg age the presence of a public readership whose interests sometimes differed from those of court and church patrons created conflicts which have continued to bedevil publishing decisions to this day.

Representing yet another perspective, both Lawrence Stone and David Cressy have examined changes in educational practices and their relationship to literacy, with Cressy drawing our attention to the 16th-century debate in England over the question of whether literacy improved one's chances of attaining salvation. In a more extended vein, one conclusion reached by David Olson in his studies of literacy and its historical origins is that although it is an illusion to think that literacy generates objectivity, literacy nonetheless, “provides us with the concepts for interpretation and reflection” (Mind 33).

Writing from the perspective of feminist theory and with an eye on material culture, Linda Woodbridge has insightfully drawn together material from pre-Gutenberg oral traditions and details from the history of the sewing crafts and cloth-manufacturing industries to identify relationships among print's emergence, quilting and dramatic structure. Although she does not cite McLuhan, she seems to echo him when she claims that print, “embodying the principle of breaking down into small units … seems an obvious impetus to these new structural habits in literature and music” (20).

Drawing upon a rich variety of disciplines, the thriving practice of “Shakesperotics,” to use Gary Taylor's catchy phrase (6), has produced valuable insights into the ways that cultural circumstances in Elizabethan England such as commercial practices, education and politics influenced theater productions and the contents of the plays produced. Equally, students of literacy and the effects of changes in media ecologies have improved our ability to reinterpret historical phenomena, enabling us to have a greater understanding of the workings of both oral and literate cultures. Just as contemporary media theorists and policy makers are struggling to understand the effects of the current shift from word-based to image-based media, others are continuing to ask what it meant in the 16th century to be moving from image and oral communications practices to a greater emphasis on printed materials.

In this way, our own concerns mirror those of the historical periods we study, and thus I would like to introduce my own analysis by observing that just as nearly every 20th-century North American seems to have opinions about television, so given the dramatic events of the 16th century one might well expect that Elizabethan citizens would have thought about literacy, printing and images. Of these 16th-century observations about media, perhaps the most well known is Francis Bacon's Aphorism 129 concerning the nature and impact of the discoveries of his time:

We should note the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients; namely printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world so that no empire, sect, or star appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.

(135)

Consider too, the widely published, vituperative exchanges between Thomas More and William Tyndale about words and images (recently reexamined by David Daniell in his extensive biography of Tyndale), Luther's well-known arguments, the stripping of the altars and destruction of icons, the bonfires of books, the execution of printers and translators and, most important of all, the distribution, first clandestine and eventually state sponsored, of vernacular Bibles. All these factors contributed to an atmosphere in which one could hardly be unaware that there was something about books that warranted attention.

Although use of the word “media” itself was not yet in circulation, Chapman, Bacon and Raleigh all used “medium” in ways quite similar to contemporary usage, i.e., referring to vehicles or channels for information transfer (OED 299). In addition, Bacon's mention of “the Medium of Wordes” suggests that he was also conscious of the uses of other media. Therefore, instead of constituting a form of anachronistic historicizing, it is especially apt to look back at this time through our particular media concerns. Moreover, as I hope to illustrate, this was a technique that Shakespeare himself also employed.

In every one of the 37 plays attributed to Shakespeare, within the first act of each there are references to some aspect of literacy or media (reading, writing, letters, documents, books, etc.); furthermore, 28 of the plays contain such references in the first scene. Sometimes these allusions take the form of plot devices such as the letters which call Othello off to war, or the party list which Romeo and Mercutio intercept from Lord Capulet's non-literate servant. Letters are so common that they are exchanged in all but six of the plays.

The presence of such a large number of media-related references takes on additional meaning if one accepts Cressy's persuasive argument that Shakespeare was in all probability a first-generation literate (57-58). Under the circumstances, it would not be surprising if Shakespeare were sensitive to the differences literacy could make in people's lives. Anyone who has mastered a communications skill which his/her parents lack has probably experienced the complex mixture of pride and alienation which often attends upon such an accomplishment.

Shakespeare's father, though he held a respected position in his community, was at best only able to read, not write. This fact casts an interesting light on the range of parent/child writing relationships depicted in the plays: the love and apologies from Romeo to Lord Montague; the deception of Gloucester by Edmund and of Lear by Regan and Goneril; the education of Helena by her father in All's Well That Ends Well; Claudius's letter to arrange the murder of his step-son, Hamlet; Coriolanus's boastful letters to his mother; Lavinia's pitiful message to Titus pleading for revenge, scrawled in the dust with the stumps of her severed arms. Even if Shakespeare's father had rudimentary reading skills but could not write, the father and son would still have been denied the opportunity to correspond with each other in the ways that the plays take for granted.

In addition to plot devices, there is also a rich variety of media imagery. All but one of the plays make use of media metaphors such as Juliet's teasing Romeo, “You kiss by the book” (1.5.109), or Othello's, “Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, / Made to write ‘whore’ upon?” (4.2.73-74), or Cymbeline's, “O most delicate fiend! Who is't can read a woman?” (5.5.47-48). The single exception to this use of literacy metaphors is King Lear, which is surprising in light of the fact that Lear and Gloucester are repeatedly undone by the deluge of letters which their children use to deceive and defeat them.

Beyond the isolated plot element or metaphor are the matters of theme and social commentary. Generally speaking, literacy can be cast as a positive or negative force in society, and a variety of values can be associated with it. Since Shakespeare's work is widely viewed as the ultimate in literary achievement, the intuitive response might be that he advocates literacy for the pleasures and advantages which official wisdom, both then and now, contends that literacy brings. The evidence of the plays, however, suggests the opposite.

Literacy and the dominant media are presented as phenomena which advance the power of the corrupt and which disadvantage and deceive the innocent. Literacy and its trappings tend to be associated with weak and ineffective individuals or evil, manipulative ones, whereas the idyllic characters and those identified with pastoral utopian visions are almost invariably non-literate or semi-literate at best. The comic characters who often carry the barb of a play's wit and insight are usually the non-literate who skewer their educated betters in the guise of the wise fool. This is not to say that the non-literate characters prevail over the more powerful who can read and write, but that the latter are either morally inferior or in some way incapacitated by their education. While there are advantages to be had from the media associated with literacy, the preponderance of evidence leads to Pericles's opinion that books have a Pandora's box quality to them:

Who has a book of all that monarchs do,
He's more secure to keep it shut than shown,
For vice repeated, like the wand'ring wind,
Blows dust in others' eyes to spread itself.

(1.137-40)

Early in his career Shakespeare introduced media conflict into his plays, most notably in the three parts of Henry VI and in Richard III. Each part of Henry VI includes non-literate characters interacting with the literate in ways that comment on the difference. Part I contrasts the shepherd's daughter, Joan la Pucelle, a girl with “wit untrained in any kind of art” (1.3.52), with the literate members of the French and English courts. Not only is she better than most in strength and intelligence, but her oral skills are also superior, for she conquers the Duke of Burgundy with her rhetoric which Burgundy equates with “roaring canon-shot” (3.7.79). Joan herself comments upon the inferiority of the literate style when Sir William Lucy asks permission to retrieve the body of Lord Talbot whom he identifies with a string of thirteen titles. Joan replies:

Here is a silly stately style indeed!
The Turk, that two and fifty kingdoms hath,
Writes not so tedious a style as this.
Him that thou magnifiest with all these titles
Stinking and fly-blown lies here at our feet.

(4.7.72-76)

Of course, history requires that Joan be defeated and burned, but the issue of the relationship between the literate elite and the non-literate commons has been introduced. We should note too what happens in Part III of Henry VI which presents the literate at their weakest and worst. Throughout the series Henry's failures have been associated with his “bookishness.” Surrounded as he is by a school of aristocratic barracudas, he repeatedly retreats to his books and study, preferring them even to his wife who joins in deriding him for his reading habits. Finally, he wanders the hills of Scotland with his prayer book in hand until he is caught by two gamekeepers who are probably non-literate and with whom he engages in a dispute about the nature of sovereignty. Their literal-mindedness confounds his efforts to save himself, and he is taken away to be killed in prison.

To the same effect, but conversely, Richard III, one of Shakespeare's most malevolent characters, is shown as one who accomplishes his ends in part through the artful use of documents. At the point when he has killed and connived his way onto the throne, he finds that the people do not support his claim and that he must trick them into accepting him. He does this by having an indictment prepared which accuses Lord Hastings of treason and of plotting to murder Richard. It is made clear to the audience that the indictment was prepared after Hastings was actually arrested, and that he was beheaded with disregard for the correct procedures of the law. This is conveyed by a brief scene in which the Scrivener who prepared the document appears on stage alone and explains how the formal appearance is being rigged.

The scene does nothing to advance the plot or to shed light on Richard's already well-established character traits. Instead, it offers the playwright the opportunity to point out the power that documents have to determine the way reality will be perceived. It amounts to little more than an editorial interlude which, again, invites the audience to consider an idea and challenges their thinking. Lest they miss the point, the language is especially blunt:

                                                                                          Who is so gross
That cannot see this palpable device?
Yet who so bold but says he sees it not?
Bad is the world, and all will come to naught,
When such ill dealing must be seen in thought.

(3.6.10-14)

The technique used in these early plays is thus to associate various media and literacy with certain characters or deeds, sometimes by contrasting the literate elite with the non-literate commons and sometimes by exposing to scrutiny the ways that media can be used for evil purposes.

Shakespeare's negative attitude can also be seen in the way that he adapted history. If ever Shakespeare had wanted to present a positive image of a character's relation to books, he might well have chosen Julius Caesar. North's Plutarch treats Caesar's communications skills and concerns with as much respect as his military conquests, telling with wonder how Caesar could ride on horseback and dictate to two scribes simultaneously and of how at the burning of the library of Alexandria Caesar acted as a true bibliophile, risking his life to swim the Nile and save a few books: “holding divers books in his hands he did never let them go, but kept them always upon his head above water, and swam with the other hand, notwithstanding that they shot marvellously at him, and was driven sometime to duck into the water” (92).

Shakespeare's Caesar is a very different man, one who finds readers untrustworthy. Thus he says of Cassius: “He reads much, / He is a great observer, and he looks / Quite through the deeds of men” (1.2.202-04). Although Caesar is probably speaking metaphorically here about Cassius's shrewd insights rather than suggesting that Cassius is dangerous because he is a reader, yet the choice of this metaphor to describe the most devious of the conspirators who later uses forged letters to induce Brutus to join the plot leaves literacy itself tainted by association.

If we turn now to the comedies, we find that Falstaff, Shakespeare's most successful rogue, has his portrait completed as an untrustworthy media manipulator. In The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff sends two women identical love letters. When the women realize it, they jokingly attribute his deceitfulness to the powers of the printing press which, by a strict chronology—if this Falstaff is the same fellow who was Henry V's companion—had not even been invented yet. Even so, Shakespeare did not let an anachronism get in the way of pointing out the potential that the press had for creating junk mail, and of portraying Falstaff as its first practitioner. As Mrs. Page, one of the recipients of Falstaff's love letter, says:

I warrant, he hath a thousand of these letters, writ with blank space for different names—sure, more—and these are of the second edition. He will print them, out of doubt; for he cares not what he puts into the press. …

(2.1.71-75)

As Margreta deGrazia, Wendy Wall and others have pointed out, the physical form of the press itself was, to Elizabethans, a common sexual metaphor and to “‘undergo a pressing’ is to act the lady's part and be pressed by a man …” (Wall 1). Even the pun on the character's name, Mrs. Page, becomes “a sexualized printing metaphor that intensifies culturally widespread ideas about female impressionability” (Wall 346).

Turning to yet another dramatic technique, we find in the use of the wise fool some of the most explicit comments about how a non-literate might view the wonders of literacy. Consider this exchange between Dogberry and a Watchman in Much Ado About Nothing:

DOGBERRY:
First, who think you the most desertless man to be constable?
WATCHMAN:
Hugh Oatcake, sir, or George Seacoal; for they can write and read.

.....

DOGBERRY [to Seacoal, who is literate]:
… and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity. You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch.

(3.3.8-21)

The scene proceeds with more reversed meanings, all of which lampoon the inflated values attributed to literacy. Lest we miss the point, Dogberry insists that he be written down an ass for purposes of getting the record straight. The written communication has come to take precedence over meaningful content even to the extent of having individuals demand the inclusion of self-deprecating statements. In this case Shakespeare has comically staged precisely the idea which found serious expression in the Scrivener scene in Richard III.

Media concerns continued to appear in Shakespeare's plays right up to the end of his work. In The Tempest once again we see the counterpoising of the literate elite in the person of Prospero and the non-literate commons in the person of Caliban, who expresses his attitude in his famous line: “You taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse” (1.2.365-66). Caliban tells Stefano and Trinculo that if they hope to overcome Prospero they must “seize his books,” then “possess his books,” and finally “burn his books” (3.2.90-96). Nevertheless, they miss his point. They have already mockingly expressed their subservience to the book in their drunken enactment of the religious ritual of kissing the book, which they do twice by placing their lips on a bottle of sack and swilling it down while pretending it is a Bible.

The Tempest is unique when it comes to media issues, however, because here, for the first and only time in all of the plays, members of the literate elite actually question the good of the book. Both Gonzalo and Prospero, the two representatives of the values of literacy, doubt its claims to special respect. Gonzalo does so directly when he says that if he were setting up the ideal state, “Letters should not be known,” and Prospero endorses that view with his final act of drowning his book of magic.

Perhaps the most striking example of Shakespeare's interest in print's impact and its political and economic ramifications is found in the second part of the Henry VI trilogy, wherein Shakespeare rewrites history with an eye on his own place and time in his retelling of the episode known as the Cade rebellion.

In 1450, overburdened by the extortionate taxation practices of some of Henry VI's officers, members of the commons in Kent found a leader in Jack Cade who marshalled a force of the discontented to march on London and petition the King. In the course of their campaign they burned a portion of London Bridge, broke open two prisons and recruited the prisoners to join the ranks of the rebellion, beheaded several members of the court, slew an uncounted number of citizens, and spread panic throughout the besieged city. Eventually the rebels were routed, and Cade's head was displayed on a pike on London Bridge as a lesson to malcontents.

Many interpretive lenses have recently been focused on the material: Alexander Leggatt's discussion of the political implications of the rebellion for Elizabeth's court; Stephen Greenblatt's examination of the class issues embedded in the rebellion; Phyllis Rackin's reading of how cultural change shaped the representation of history; Annabel Patterson's analysis of how the representation of the Cade story reflects the “popular voice” in Elizabethan England. No communications scholar or historian, however, has examined the Cade material for its relevance to the communications practices of Elizabethan England.

In order to understand Shakespeare's appropriation of this material we need to recall that at this time he was a young man of 26 having his first plays produced on Bankside, and that across the Thames in London was one Thomas Churchyard, a prolific tract writer, career soldier and court hanger-on who, at the age of 70, was, it seems, a well-known operator in government and court circles. Today he would be called a lobbyist, and among his clients would be those with an interest in media legislation: laws affecting the content, ownership, patents, distribution and manufacture of the materials used in the production of books, pamphlets and other print media. Although there is no evidence that Shakespeare was directly familiar with Churchyard, a consideration of the political climate of the time and an analysis of Shakespeare's handling of the Cade affair encourages one to speculate, if not to argue, that in Henry VI, Part II, known to contemporaries as The Contention, he was questioning Churchyard's lobbying tactics while laying the groundwork for subsequent commentary on the media environment of Elizabethan England.

Shakespeare accomplished his challenge to Churchyard through the ingenious use of a particular rhetorical device known as “prolepsis.” Prolepsis is a kind of anachronism whereby the speaker or writer places a detail or event in a time too early for it to have occurred, thereby heightening the impact of an argument by the artful juxtaposition of two details which cannot mutually occupy the same time. The effect is to throw into relief both elements, forcing them to illuminate each other.

As Phyllis Rackin notes, “During the last fifty years, criticism has had almost nothing to say about Shakespeare's use of anachronism” (89), a shortcoming that she sets out to correct in a long chapter titled, “Anachronism and Nostalgia.” Although she does not explore the proleptic purposes in the Cade material, her generalized conclusion is especially apt: “anachronisms … often debase the objects of historical representation by associating them with the forces of present social change and disruption” (98). Ronald Knowles, writing specifically about the Cade treatment, also notes that in “reshaping this historical material,” Shakespeare created “an ironic inversion of the main lines of action in the play” (199).

Thomas Churchyard was, in Edwin Miller's harsh yet probably justified terms, a “third-rate hack” who “produced much unreadable verse” (93, 118). This opinion was apparently shared by some of Churchyard's contemporaries, one of whom, Sir John Davies, described Churchyard's Chips as “Offals of wit” (Miller 67). Churchyard would turn his pen to any cause which might net him some recognition and remuneration from the well-placed or wealthy, and thus became known as an epitapher and composer of political panegyrics who churned out platitudinous, saccharine verse on the occasion of any noble's death, The Epitaph to Sir Philip Sidney (1587) probably being one of his earliest. Thorough in his enterprise, Churchyard sometimes made use of multiple dedications. In one case, Churchyard's Challenge, twenty individuals are identified as dedicatees, the hope being that at least a few would be flattered into rewarding the writer monetarily. Churchyard was also known to engage in literary spats. As early as 1552 his satirical broadside titled Davy Dyears Dreams provoked a response from one T. Camel. Within the year at least thirteen broadside poems were published by the two sides to the spat (Black Letter Ballads ix). The plodding doggerel which Churchyard wrote made him easy to mock.

In 1588 Churchyard had apparently taken on as a client one John Spillman (sometimes spelled Spielman or Spilman), a German immigrant who had become one of Queen Elizabeth's goldsmiths and received a Crown lease on two mills on the River Darenth near Dartford in Kent (Jenkins 580; Hunter 119). Spillman converted the mills to paper-making but, like any entrepreneur, he wanted to achieve the best possible protection for his investment. The way one did that in Tudor England was to get a legal monopoly, and in his attempt to acquire a Crown patent for his paper-making, Spillman had enlisted the services of Thomas Churchyard.

Churchyard's assistance took the form of a short, poetic treatise titled, A Sparke of Frendship and warm Good-Will, that shows the Effect of true Affection, and unfolds the Fineness of this World. Whereunto is joined, the Commodity of sundry Sciences, and the Benefit that Paper bringeth, with many rare Matters rehearsed in the same. With a Description and Commendation of a Paper-Mill, now of late set up (near the Town of Dartford, by an High German, called M. Spillman, Jeweller to the Queen's most excellent Majesty. In the dedication to Sir Water Raleigh, Churchyard describes himself as an unabashed sycophant, explaining that to “fawne for favor” is “a point of wisdom, which my betters have taught me.” Most of the work consists of an encomium to John Spillman and his paper mill. After a florid description of the wonders of the mill, the blessings of paper and its benefits to human kind, Churchyard gets to his purpose: a pitch on behalf of Spillman's patent application. Several stanzas of Churchyard's work are direct appeals to Raleigh to put in a good word for Spillman at court because of Spillman's financial risks in setting up the plant:

This somewhat more, may move a marvell heere, no profite may, be reapt in many a yeear,
The author than, of this newe Paper Mill, bestowes great charge, and gaynes but worldes goodwill.
Death may prevent, his hope and purpose too, death cuts off all, from him if it so hap,
If losse so fall, what then shall Spilman doe, but so receive the losses in his lap.
This daunger great, deserveth some regard, or of the worlde, doth merit some reward,
Give him good speech, as reason doth require, yeeld duety, so the labror hath his hire.

(17)

Churchyard could not have chosen a better patron for his lobbying efforts, for in 1588 Raleigh was at the peak of his influence with Elizabeth and, moreover, had thrown some favor Churchyard's way in the past. According to the dedication, six years earlier Raleigh had helped him procure from the Queen “some comfortable recreation, to quicken my spirits & keep me in breath.” Reminders of Raleigh's connections to the Queen are found in the illustrations on the first page of the booklet. At the top a floral frieze includes the head of Elizabeth in the center looking down on an attractively set page containing a decorative initial letter “E” consisting of the crowned Queen seated in a throne holding the globe and scepter.

As Arthur Marotti points out, one is well advised to view with some skepticism writers' claims of having special relationships with the patrons whose favors they sought. This is especially so in the case of Churchyard who, in a touching moment of candor, revealed to Raleigh that of the sixteen books he had by then published, he was seldom even acknowledged by those to whom they were dedicated. Unfortunately, it is not known precisely what part Churchyard's lobbying played in the Court's decision or if Raleigh carried the plea to the Queen and others with whom he had influence. Nevertheless, Spillman's application was granted within a year, and in 1589 he obtained a patent giving him the monopoly on paper-making and the collecting, buying or dealing in linen rags, old fishing nets, leather shreds and other materials used in the making of white paper (Berry 109).

Churchyard's praise of paper-making was completely unrestrained. His efforts are worthy of a modern-day publicist's, claiming that his client's product “helps poor and harms no rich” (a politically desirable end, to be sure) as well as having the following virtues:

It witnesse beares of frendship, time and troth, and is the tromp of vice and vertue both,
Without whose helpe no hap nor wealth is won, and by whose ayde, great workes and deedes are done.
.....It tells of warre, and peace as things fall out, and brings by time, ten thousand things about.
For schollars fit, and merchants all alike, for plowe men good, that digs and delves the dike.
.....If paper be, so precious and so pure, so fitte for man, and serves so many wayes,
So good for use, and will so well endure, so rare a thing, and is so much in prayes:
Than he that made, for us a paper mill, is worthy well, of love and worldes good will.
And though his name be Spillman by degree, yet Help-man nowe, he shall be calde by me.

(9-10)

To understand what this had to do with Shakespeare and his plays, one more detail has to be added about the political climate of Elizabethan England as it concerned the artists and intellectuals of the day.

Raleigh's chief rival, both at court and in the literary scene, was Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. Shakespeare, through his own patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece, was part of the group surrounding Essex and, therefore, by association, a likely foe of Raleigh and whatever causes he might champion. Shakespeare, however, was a dramatist and was not about to engage in a simple polemic against Churchyard or his client. His technique in Henry VI, Part II was much more subtle.

Almost the entire fourth act of the play deals with the Cade rebellion. The story is told in the context of York's plotting against King Henry VI, and by some scholars it is believed that it is meant to reflect on the Essex rebellion against Elizabeth. The parallels are striking, but equally fascinating is the fact that the central metaphors used to express the rebels' cause are based on media references and specifically the media products that Thomas Churchyard was busy advocating. Cade, moreover, was just the kind of figure Churchyard had railed against in several of his tracts: A Discourse of Rebellion, drawne forth to warne the wanton wittes how to keepe their heads on their shoulders (1570) and Scourge for Rebels (1584). Furthermore, the details are rhetorically structured in such a way as to reconfigure proleptically the historical facts so that they comment on Churchyard's claims for the benefits of paper and printing.

The first Cade scenes consist of the rebels debating and joking about what they will do when they take over the government. Dick the Butcher says, “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers” (4.2.78). Cade agrees but directs his ire at the medium of the law, not its practitioners:

Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings; but I say 'tis the bee's wax. For I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.

(4.2.79-85)

It is the parchment that undoes a man and the sealing wax that stings, rather than those who use them. Although Cade comes across as crude, his media-determinist analysis is provocatively subtle.

The next strategy in the play is to have the Clerk of Chatham charged with the crime of literacy:

SMITH:
The clerk of Chatham: he can read, and cast accompt.
CADE:
O, monstrous!
SMITH:
We took his setting of boys' copies.
CADE:
Here's a villain! … Come hither, sirrah, I must examine thee. … Dost thou use to write thy name, or hath thou a mark to thyself, like an honest plain-dealing man?
CLERK:
Sir, I thank God, I have been so well brought up, that I can write my name.
ALL:
He hath confessed—away with him! He's a villain and a traitor.
CADE:
Away with him, I say; hang him with his pen and ink horn about his neck.

(4.2.77-109)

Of course, hanging a man for being able to write his name is a ridiculous notion, and though Cade here appears both ruthless and deranged, Shakespeare is simply setting the audience up for an idea that he will present just a few scenes later.

This idea is dramatized when Cade is shown confronting Sir Humphrey Stafford, the King's emissary, and wherein Shakespeare explores a media hypothesis which the pioneers of anthropological linguistics, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, would refine centuries later—the idea that the language one speaks, its grammar and vocabulary, structures the way one sees the world. Stafford tries to persuade the rebels to lay down their arms and promises that the King will pardon them. Cade responds by using a rhetorical device that was sure to work with his audience: France bashing. The political disgrace of Cade's day was the loss of the French provinces which the English had won not many years before under the popular Henry V. To be accused of being soft on France was a harsh charge. Cade refers to one of the Lords attending the King:

CADE:
… and more than that, he can speak French, and therefore is a traitor.
STAFFORD:
O gross and miserable ignorance!
CADE:
Nay, answer, if you can: the Frenchmen are our enemies; go to then, I ask but this: can he that speaks with the tongue of an enemy be a good counsellor, or no?

(4.2.164-70)

Opposition to the kind of education associated with bilingualism has apparently become another focus of the rebellion.

In the next Cade scene, two nobles, Lord Say and his son-in-law, are escorted in and Cade charges them with a string of media crimes and misdemeanors:

… Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school; and whereas before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used and, contrary to the King his crown and dignity thou hast built a papermill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. 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 hanged them when indeed only for that cause they have been most worthy to live.

(4.7.30-43)

This speech is the only one in the play to identify the rebels' complaints, and all seven of the accusations have to do with literacy, education and communications technology! Moreover, most are proleptic inventions, which are remarkable on at least five accounts.

First, the charges have nothing in common with the demands that were made by the original Jack Cade. In fact, nowhere in either Hall's or Holinshed's histories of the Cade affair is there any mention of Cade attacking reading, writing, paper making, or printing as Shakespeare has him do. Hall describes Cade as “sober in communication, wyse in disputyng” (221). The bill of particulars which was submitted to King Henry VI took the form of a proclamation and contained 21 “items” which spelled out in detail what the rebels wanted. It repeatedly accused the King's counselors of not acting in his or the nation's best interests, sometimes referring to particular officials by name and eight times using the word “traitor” to describe them. The gist of the proclamation is that evil members of court have been using their influence to gain special patents and privileges in exchange for “bribes” and “extortion.”

Rather than being opposed to written documents, the proclamation demands that the King see to it that all “lettars patentes” be made accessible to the commons “opynly to be rede and cryed.” In effect, they were demanding a “sunshine law” so that the affairs of state would be open to the public. This item concludes by setting the example which they wish the King to follow. They recognize the sanctity and status of the written word and invite the King to judge them by it: “by this owr wrytnge ye may conceive and se whethar we be the frynedes ethar enimys” (Gairdner 94-98).

The second proleptic aspect of Shakespeare's treatment of the Cade affair is that the original Jack Cade could not possibly have made the charges that Shakespeare wrote for him. The printing press was being invented in Germany the same year that Cade was leading his rebellion and would not show up in England until 24 years after Cade was killed. Paper-making arrived even later, 45 years after the date of this scene (Hunter 477).

A third anachronism pertains to the fact that there was not during Cade's time any special effort to build grammar schools for the purpose of general education. This too came much later during the early years of Elizabeth's reign, a point which Goldberg, Cressy and others have examined at length.

Fourth, we should recall that the study of language with “talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear” was not as characteristic of Cade's mid-15th century as it was of Shakespeare's late-16th century, when books on rhetoric, letter writing, grammar, style and literary technique were widely distributed and many of these books were popular enough to go into frequent, revised editions.

Finally, the last charge, that people were hanged because they could not read, is the only one that was true in both Cade's and Shakespeare's times due to the practice known as “benefit of clergy.”

To appreciate the significance of the latter point one should recall that toward the close of the 13th century literacy replaced “first tonsure” as the means of proving that one deserved the benefit of clergy, that is, exemption from the jurisdiction of civil courts for most criminal charges. “First tonsure” was the practice of shaving the top of the head of male members of religious orders so that God could see more clearly into the goings on in their minds, or at least to remind the individual that God knew what he was thinking. It came to be used as the way officials sorted out priests and monks from other prisoners in jails so they could be tried by ecclesiastical courts. Clever lay criminals quickly adapted their hair styles in order to get transferred out of civil jurisdiction which was often more harsh in its punishments. Literacy, which many religious had achieved, was harder to acquire on short notice, though some career criminals memorized the “neck verse” biblical passages usually employed in court, should the need arise. The scripture most often used was the first verse of Psalm 51, its appeal to God for mercy and acknowledgment of transgression being deemed appropriate didactic content (Cressy 16).

Although literacy had spread more rapidly with the arrival of printing, the practice of granting the literate special treatment in the courts remained, as Leona Gabel has discussed at length. By Shakespeare's time there were many more non-religious literates than in Cade's day, and the out-datedness of the law was obvious. As a result, in 1576, only fourteen years before the assumed date of this play's production, there was some legislative tinkering with the practice which resulted in the removal of the connection between the privilege and the Church (Gabel 125).

While the implementation of the benefit of clergy had been changed, the results had not. People continued to be executed because they could not read, and pardoned or able to escape charges if they could. As Lawrence Stone reports, “of the 204 men sentenced to death for a first offence by the Middlesex Justices in 1612-14, no fewer than ninety-five successfully pleaded benefit of clergy” (43). This means that even twenty years after the production of this play the practice was still prevalent and surely familiar to Shakespeare's audience.

Though much of Cade's speech would have made little sense to his own contemporaries, the audience in Shakespeare's London would have been given much to think about through these proleptic elements. The absurd idea of the Clerk of Chatham being hanged because he could write thus becomes a means of reminding the audience that their own society still hangs people for not being able to read. Similarly, the paper-mill reference, since it could have no relevance to the original Cade's time, can be understood as a topical reference to paper-making in an Elizabethan context. Various estimates place the performance of this play a short time after the publication of Thomas Churchyard's appeal to Raleigh and the ensuing granting of Spillman's application for a paper-making patent.

Given the fact that Elizabeth and the Privy Council had probably already approved the Spillman request, the remarks of Shakespeare's Cade seem to be a critique of the decision and those who advocated and granted it: Churchyard, Raleigh, Elizabeth. Cade is the ideal ventriloquist's dummy for expressing these sentiments, particularly because he was from Kent and Spillman's mill was in Kent. Shakespeare hides the critical opinions by coupling them with other statements that are obviously foolish. Furthermore, everyone knew that Cade was a rebel and that any manner of rebellious idea might issue from him. In the end, both on stage and in history, he is captured and killed. His rebellion is smashed; his program fails.

Nevertheless, the political understandings and intellectual processes of Shakespeare's audience would have been stimulated by new ideas even if expressed through a social reprobate. The defeat of the character is remembered, but perhaps the ideas are too. As ventriloquist, Shakespeare has slyly made the dummy express the dangerous truth and then reprimanded the dummy on the point of Iden's sword. Those who knew of Churchyard's finagling on behalf of Spillman and of the value of his paper-making monopoly must have been intrigued or even tickled to hear Cade's attack on that enterprise, especially if they shared a critical attitude toward it.

At this distance, it is of course hard to know whether the audience attributed the anachronisms in Henry VI, Part II to an ignorance of the correct chronology of the technological or social developments of the past, or if it responded to the proleptic juxtaposition with a heightened consciousness of the social practices the author had brought into focus. In any event, as modern readers we are able to see that in his handling of the Cade affair, Shakespeare was conducting an examination of the workings of the system in which both he and Thomas Churchyard functioned.

As I have also attempted to suggest, throughout his work Shakespeare maintained the view that literacy and print media were not unalloyed blessings. Of the many instances in which Shakespeare's characters express opinions about these matters, perhaps the one that best reflects the view of caution that seems to characterize the playwright's perspective, at least as it pertains to the commons, is that of Imogen in Cymbeline who cries, “To write and read / Be henceforth treacherous!” (5.2.318-19).

The title of David Olson's most recent contribution to the study of literacy is The World on Paper which aptly captures what Shakespeare's Cade (but not his historical forebear) was objecting to: a world confined to the page, a world which limited participation to those who had the educational, cognitive and economic wherewithal to become what might be called one of the “paper people.” The links Shakespeare makes between Cade's rebellion and Churchyard's efforts in Spillman's behalf, as well as the many other barbed comments on literacy, imply that Shakespeare himself harbored a skeptical view. Even though he had to write down the words of his own plays, they were, after all, being composed for presentation in an oral medium.

There are, in short, striking similarities between the observations embedded in Shakespeare's plays and those spelled out by contemporary scholars. The theories established by McLuhan and Erving Goffman—the view of media as cultural environments in which social roles and political relationships are altered by changes in the communications practices and technologies which dominate human interaction—resonate with the plays and with what we know of 16th-century conditions. In turn, Shakespeare's view is echoed by those such as McLuhan, Goody, Graff, Havelock and Ong who claim that literacy not only changes the amount and kinds of information to which one has access but that it also has far-reaching social and psychological significance.

This debate over just what those changes are, what their social and/or psychological significance might be, and what, if anything, should be done about them promises to continue. While Elizabeth Eisenstein contends that the press was instrumental in ushering in science and rationality, her position is disputed, at least to a degree, by Jonathan Goldberg who instead stresses the role of education and pedagogical practices as shapers of social order. Goldberg contends that the focus on literacy as a determinant of social practices is too “logocentric,” or media determinist. Mark Edwards, in his examination of the spread of Martin Luther's fame and message, synthesizes the competing views by contending that the Luther Reformation was a product of both print and the oral dissemination of Luther's radical ideas.

Communications theory and historicized literary studies are two of the many disciplines presently undergoing reconceptualization, growth and diversification. There are, however, few instances of cross-pollination between them. Yet if one looks at the literary product as an archive of records containing valuable reports about communications practices and at media theory as having the ability to enhance understanding of the content, dissemination and reception of literature, both enterprises should be enriched by the contact.¹

Note

1. A portion of the research for this essay was conducted during a summer seminar sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities under the direction of Annabel Patterson. Thanks are also due to members of Shakespeare Associations of America seminars.

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