SOURCE: Hattaway, Michael, ed. Introduction to The Second Part of King Henry VI, by William Shakespeare, pp. 1-69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

[In the following excerpt, Hattaway views Henry VI, Part 2 as a radical political work that features Shakespeare's sweeping reconstruction of English history concentrated on the power of the mighty.]

FROM 1 HENRY VI TO 2 HENRY VI

1 Henry VI may well have been written to show how the history of a nation is never to be understood in isolation. The Wars of the Roses, which form the subject of the second two parts of the sequence, can be fully understood only in the context of the Hundred Years War, dramatised incidents from which formed the substance of the first play. 1 Henry VI portrayed the decline of England's empire over France and the accompanying decay of the ideals of feudalism that had sustained the order of the realm. That play also established themes—the deaths of the old Titans from the reign of Henry V, the attacks on Duke Humphrey the Protector, the origins of the York-Lancaster quarrel, and Suffolk's bid for power through his intimate relationship with Queen Margaret—but all the events of the play were presented as much for their potential as for their actual significance, so that the end was no conclusion. Just as 1 Henry VI began with a funeral, the traditional end of tragedy, so 2 Henry VI begins with a marriage, the traditional end of comedy. These inverted dramatic patterns help create a new and ‘open’ form, the political play—perhaps in fact all Shakespeare's history plays ought to be redesignated ‘political plays’.

In Part 2 the political focus is on the way the loss of empire breeds further insurrection: by the colonised, by the nobles, and by the people. In this play France is, to all intents and purposes, finally lost (3.1.83-5), Ireland erupts in revolt (3.1.282-4), and York is laying claim to the throne and not just jostling for authority. To further their cause, the Yorkist party have fomented a popular revolt led by York's creature, Jack Cade. No republican freedom, however, will emerge from the decay of empire, but merely the loosing upon the kingdom of the wars of the barons. These events conspire to undermine the power of the king and even the monarchy: Shakespeare, after writing the long prelude of Part 1 in which he sketched out the swelling acts of his imperial themes, now turns to a closer examination of how, as the Lieutenant interrogating Suffolk puts it, ‘reproach and beggary / Is crept into the palace of our king’ (4.1.101-2).

RADICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

Shakespeare, in fact, while seeming in this text to be both anti-aristocratic and, on occasion, anti-plebeian, can still be radical. His radicalism comes not just from allegiance to one estate in the realm, but is to be understood in its literal sense: it derives from an ability to root out the causes of political dilemmas, to demonstrate the partiality of contesting explanations of particular events—while showing that there is no easy way of discriminating between one set of values and another—and from a tendency to demolish myth through demystification. Shakespeare's history serves as an art of demonstration, rather than, as it had been in the hands of medieval chroniclers, an art of interpretation. Interpretation, wrote Walter Benjamin, ‘is not concerned with an accurate concatenation of definite events, but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world’.¹

Such enquiry could appear ‘oppositional’: on 12 November 1589 the Privy Council had written to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor of London, and the Master of the Revels asking them each to appoint someone to scrutinise all plays performed in and about the City of London because the players had taken ‘upon themselves to handle in their plays certain matters of divinity and state unfit to be suffered’.² There is no sign in the Folio version of the play of certain passages found in the Quarto, and this may well be the result of censorship consequent upon this instruction.³ The sequence which shows Cade at the height of his power (4.5.0 sd-4.6.5) may equally have been censored.⁴ This suggests that not only were playhouses seen as centres of disorder and riot but that the plays performed in them could appear subversive.

The writing of history … entails the making of political statements. At the end of Henry V, Shakespeare, looking back to his earlier work, has the Chorus say of the hero of that play:

                                                                                Fortune made his sword,
By which the world's best garden he achieved,
                    And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King
                    Of France and England, did this king succeed,
Whose state so many had the managing
          That they lost France and made his England bleed.

(Epilogue, 6-12, emphasis added)

With its stress on the way man ‘manages his own state’, makes his own history, 2 and 3 Henry VI share with Marlowe's Edward II the quality of documentary.⁵ Moreover, Shakespeare refuses to glamorise any of the events which precipitated change. After dramatising emblematically in Part 1 the origin in the Temple Garden of the Wars of the Roses, he now shows us, with a gesture towards the Genesis myth perhaps, a world ‘after the garden’ in which political deals are struck as individuals compete for power. Shakespeare's reading of the troublesome reign of Henry VI, accordingly, takes its nature not from the visitation of divine vengeance for an original sin (the deposition and murder of Richard II) committed two generations before but from the aspirations of particular estates.⁶ Even Edward Hall, one of Shakespeare's principal sources for the sequence, sardonically offers in the course of his chronicle a secular alternative to the model of providentially ordered history he had earlier set out in the ‘Introduction into the History of King Henry the Fourth’, with which his chronicle began:⁷

For many of the nobility, and more of the mean estate, wisely pondering the estate and condition of the realm, perceiving more loss than increase, more ruin than advancement, daily to ensue; remembering also that France was conquered, and Normandy was gained by the French people in short space, thought with themselves and imagined that the fault of all these miserable chances happened either because the king was not the true inheritor to the crown, or that he or his council were not able of wit, policy, and circumspection to rule and govern so noble a realm, or so famous a region.⁸

King Henry might invoke the idea of divine judgement, as for example when he hears of Gloucester's death (3.2.136-40), but Shakespeare's laying out of motive, event, and consequence offers spectators no real demonstration that the troubles of the kingdom are the consequence of divine displeasure or retribution. God's purposes are in no way to be deduced from the play.

In this fallen world no political value is left untested—and in performance the text may have been coloured even more with populism. Early in the play Gloucester invokes the old military values that informed Part 1. When he realises that Suffolk has given away many of the remaining French provinces his outburst reads thus in the Folio text:

What, did my brother Henry spend his youth,
His valour, coin, and people in the wars?
Did he so often lodge in open field,
In winter's cold and summer's parching heat,
To conquer France, his true inheritance?
And did my brother Bedford toil his wits
To keep by policy what Henry got?

(1.1.75-81)

q1's version of the text, which may contain material the gist of which was censored, or which may record what a player, himself sceptical of the court's version of honour, thought of Suffolk's betrayal, reads like this:

What, did my brother Henry toil himself
And waste his subjects for to conquer France?
And did my brother Bedford spend his time
To keep in awe that stout unruly realm?

(tln 101-4)

The emphasis changes from a focus on the heroism and honour of the English champions to the cost of their wasteful struggle to conquer and control. Later Lord Say will pay with his life because Cade's rebels hold him responsible not only for the actual loss of Normandy but for high subsidies they had to pay to prosecute these wars (see 4.7.17-18).

Without the monarch's imperial control, all of these conflicting political and economic forces serve to lay bare the nature of the rest of the institutional fabric of the kingdom. One of the central events of the play, the murder of good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, symbolises the extinction of equity, the final term of Saturnian rule incarnate in Henry V, just as the death of Talbot in 1 Henry VI stood for the end of feudal valour. Hall describes Gloucester thus: ‘the duke, being very well learned in the law civil, detesting malefactors and punishing their offences, got great malice and hatred of such as feared to have condign reward for their ungracious acts and mischievous doings’.⁹ The murder of such a figure marks a change in the nature of the state: the play seems to embody Machiavelli's model of political degradation, as illustrated in the Discorsi:

I must … observe that some of the writers on politics distinguished three kinds of government, viz. the monarchical, the aristocratic, and the democratic; and maintain that the legislators of a people must choose from these three the one that seems to them most suitable. Other authors, wiser according to the opinion of many, count six kinds of governments, three of which are very bad, and three good in themselves, but so liable to be corrupted that they become absolutely bad. The three good ones are those which we have just named; the three bad ones result from the degradation of the other three, and each of them resembles its corresponding original, so that the transition from the one to the other is very easy. Thus monarchy becomes tyranny; aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy; and the popular government lapses readily into licentiousness.¹⁰

In 2 Henry VI, in the absence of a strong monarchy, we see what is, in effect, an oligarchy. Popular rule under Cade collapses into anarchy. The decline into tyranny will be complete when Richard III mounts the throne. In such a world men revert to their atavistic states:¹¹ Clifford's evocation of Medea's archaic savagery at the end of the play is a measure of how family bonds—the pietas of the ancients emblematized in his second figure of Aeneas—are swept aside by the will to power and revenge:

Meet I an infant of the house of York,
Into as many gobbets will I cut it
As wild Medea young Absyrtis did;
In cruelty will I seek out my fame.
                              [He takes his father's body up on his back.]
Come, thou new ruin of old Clifford's house:
As did Aeneas old Anchises bear,
So bear I thee upon my manly shoulders;
But then Aeneas bare a living load,
Nothing so heavy as these woes of mine.

(5.2.57-65)

Henry VI too was haunted by his father, and in Part 3, at the battle of Towton, he will see a son who has killed his father and a father who has killed his son. Thus are brought home to him the evils he has created by failing to control the peers of England.

The radical nature of Shakespeare's historical analysis can be seen from another perspective by comparing the trilogy with ‘history’ plays on similar themes written about a decade later, in 1599: Sir John Oldcastle, for example, a collaboration by Drayton, Hathway, Munday, and Wilson, or Thomas Heywood's Edward IV. These were produced when Queen Elizabeth was confronting the crisis posed by the insubordinate but popular Earl of Essex.¹² The former deals in part with the rebellion of the Earl of Cambridge, York's father, and treats it as a simple case of treachery,¹³ and the latter takes the absolute power of the monarchy for granted: the institution is revered by the populace and the sensual failings of the hero happily condoned. Neither play attempts the great confrontations of authority with power which are the true subjects of Shakespeare's histories.

GREATNESS AND GOODNESS

Monarchical rule does not depend merely upon the power of office but upon the personal authority of the ruler.¹⁴ After the titanic rule of Henry V, England under his pious young son contained a partial power vacuum into which all the malcontent factions seen forming in 1 Henry VI were drawn. Throughout Part 1 the king and the kingdom had been protected by the valour of Talbot and the testy magistracy of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who had foiled the plans of his uncle the Cardinal of Winchester to take over the government of England. Talbot is now dead, and in this play Henry attains his majority and dismisses Gloucester, throwing ‘away his crutch / Before his legs be firm to bear his body’ (3.1.189-90). Henry has an overweening confidence that his virtue can stand alone, and an inability to understand that, as Machiavelli had demonstrated, monarchical authority derives as much from the way he is perceived as from anything else. To his courtiers he seems merely a holy fool, a man who, according to his wife, is more interested in observing antiquated papal rituals than in wielding his imperial sceptre. This may, however, be too simple a view of his character. Rather, within the welter of the political action he stands—in the main—for goodness, and in this play the hard question is put: is greatness in a monarchy to be built upon goodness, or is it only to be won through ‘policy’, the skills Machiavelli deemed necessary for the acquisition and maintenance of princely power? Like Machiavelli, Shakespeare emerges as a realist and does not align himself with those Christian humanists who tended to assert that only a good man could be a great man.¹⁵

Henry, however, obviously considered himself as one who should play the two roles of emperor and shepherd, the great man and the good man, roles that were supposed to be combined in the person of the Holy Roman Emperor.¹⁶ His marriage had done something to restore empire by joining the houses of England and France,¹⁷ although the league was not to last long. Sometimes Shakespeare gives us an imperious Henry who realises that moral virtue is not enough and who can be politic and ruthless:

Tell him I'll send Duke Edmund to the Tower—
And, Somerset, we will commit thee thither,
Until his army be dismissed from him.

(4.9.38-40)

However, all too often, especially after the death of Duke Humphrey, Henry's religious inclinations blind him to political realities: his tendency to perceive men as instruments of God's will¹⁸ makes him peculiarly ineffectual, destined for goodness but not for greatness. He looks constantly to heaven for miracles: those around him (and the audience) are far more pragmatic concerning these matters. ‘They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless:’¹⁹ these lines from All's Well that Ends Well point to a long-running debate over whether, by Shakespeare's time, the age of miracles was in fact well past.²⁰ Before the demonstration early in the play that the restoration of Saunder Simpcox's sight was a fraud, Henry had been all too ready to take it as a miracle; he likewise treats the news of the putting down of the Cade rebellion in 4.9 as a miracle, although the previous scene has demonstrated to the audience that it was put down by the lion-and-fox tactics of Clifford. Henry's goodness is thereby rendered impotent by the sheer strength of the forces ranged against him and the machinations of ‘the great’—including his wife Margaret.

But personality is not to be isolated from event. 2 Henry VI, like all of Shakespeare's political plays, not only offers us chronicles and portraits of great men but analyses the meshing of personality and situation and anatomizes institutions and not just events. Central to its concerns is an analysis of the function of the monarchy itself and an examination of the relationship between the personality of Henry VI and the role he has to play. The king had to serve two functions: the symbolic, mystical, quasi-divine role as incarnation of the body politic of the kingdom, ‘a corporation in himself that liveth ever’,²¹ and the role of a ‘natural’ man subject to the vicissitudes of change, the whips and scorns of office. The conflict between these two ‘bodies’, the politic and the natural, the discrepancy between ideals and realities, was all too noticeable in Shakespeare's time—it is manifest in the interrupted ceremonies which are such a notable feature of the history plays,²² and in the way, within the estate of nobility, allegiance falls prey to alliance. The nature of the institution itself, in other words, was perceived to be subject to strain.

In Part 1 we saw that Henry was not introduced merely as a martyr king,²³ and in Part 2 his predicament does not come just from his personality but rather from the conditions of the body politic. Like Hamlet and like characters in King John, he has to confront an intractable political problem: the conflicting and irreconcilable claims of those who held the crown by possession and those who wanted it held by right. Shakespeare compounds the ethical dilemma by making York obviously cravenly ambitious—most of the time—and making Henry party to the cause and not just judge of it. Henry, in other words, faced a political as well as an ethical dilemma, compounded by the fact that his own rule was part of the problem.

LAW, JUSTICE, AND THE ‘MIRROR SCENES’

The play is particularly concerned with the nature and workings of law in such a society. It used to be argued that Shakespeare measured men against an ideal moral order, indicating that actions could be measured against laws that had their origins in the natural and ultimately the divine. Critics were inclined to look to theologians such as Richard Hooker, who was committed to looking for correspondence between the heavenly order and terrestrial practice,²⁴ rather than to historians such as William Harrison, who interrupted his survey of the laws of England with a sceptical observation that might have astounded a previous generation:

For what hath the meditation of the law of God to do with any precise knowledge of the law of man, sith they are several trades and incident to divers persons.²⁵

In England under Henry, law bears little relation to divinity and stands divorced from equity. The regnal and judiciary roles of the king's court are hopelessly confused, so that the status of the institution itself is compromised. The Duchess of Gloucester, having been enticed into treason by agents provocateurs planted by her political adversaries, is banished, and the prosecution of her case makes it easier for the court—in a scene where it has been actually constituted as a parliament—to find a pretext to have her husband murdered before his case can come to trial. The age's conversion of self-interest into policy, of law into expediency, is proclaimed by the Bishop of Winchester, Cardinal Beaufort, himself:

That he should die is worthy policy;
But yet we want a colour for his death:
'Tis meet he be condemned by course of law.

(3.1.235-7)

The feudal ritual of trial by combat (archaic by Shakespeare's day although, significantly, the form preferred by King Henry²⁶) is reduced to the grotesque fight between the drunken armourer and his apprentice—Shakespeare developed this scene from a couple of sentences in the chroniclers, who do not specify what the treasonable remarks were.²⁷ It serves to mirror the realities of the play: instead of seeing justice determined by God with regard to the rights of the adversaries, here we see simply a trial of might. The tone of the encounter is caught by the terse marginal gloss on the event that we find in Holinshed: ‘Drunkenness the overthrow of right and manhood’.²⁸ The fight, moreover, was occasioned by the accident of one of the petitions reaching Suffolk. This lord prevents the right of the other petitioners to have their complaints heard by the Protector²⁹ and takes only one forward: it is in Suffolk's interest to broadcast the supposed treachery of York. Justice, already subservient to power, becomes propaganda, and the process of the trial is reduced to sickening show as a sober man beats a drunken man to death.³⁰ Looked at from a converse point of view, the scene suggests that the Duke of York's claim to the throne might be right in law, but that his prosecution of his case will destroy the commonwealth.

In this trial scene the outcome is dictated by main force—and the apprentice is, significantly, rewarded by the king. Moreover, after Horner has been struck down and has confessed his treason, York attributes the victory of the apprentice to divine intervention—but equally to more secular cause: ‘Fellow, thank God, and the good wine in thy master's way’ (2.3.89-90). Henry, on the other hand, characteristically exposes his inability to perceive any of the realities of the moment:

Go, take hence that traitor from our sight,
For by his death we do perceive his guilt;
And God in justice hath revealed to us
The truth and innocence of this poor fellow,
Which he had thought to have murdered wrongfully.

(2.3.93-7)

The Horner duel is one mirror sequence that reflects on the themes of justice and equity in the political world. Another, for which Shakespeare went to a complementary source, Foxe's Acts and Monuments of Martyrs, is the false miracle in which Saunder Simpcox claims to have recovered his sight and demonstrates that he can immediately distinguish colours (2.1). Simpcox's fraud is peremptorily exposed by Duke Humphrey in a manner that seems essentially populist. His demonstration is theatrical and convincing, his motives are just, and yet his methods—which include the torture of whipping—may be of dubious propriety.³¹ For Humphrey, like Angelo when he is examining Pompey in Measure for Measure (2.1), converts an examination into a summary trial, a procedure introduced shortly before the time of the play as a way of getting malefactors to confess and of avoiding the corruption of jurors.³² Humphrey's disregard for the forms of justice serves to make him more vulnerable to York's charge at the Parliament of Bury that he devised ‘strange tortures for offenders’ (3.1.122).

It may be possible to read this scene allegorically:³³ it is only by custom and not by virtue that men's true colours are to be perceived, and ‘colour’ is a significant pun—it means pretext. Simpcox, in other words, perceives men's pretensions to rank. What is also notable about the sequence is the way his wife's plea to Humphrey, ‘Alas, sir, we did it for pure need’ (2.1.154), falls completely on deaf ears. Monarch, episcopacy, and aristocracy are oblivious to the economic plight of their inferiors. Even before the death of Humphrey, Astræa seems to have been totally banished from this declining world.

After the death of Humphrey the people want to take the law into their own hands and wreak their revenge on Suffolk and the court (3.2.235ff.). Later we hear: ‘The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers’ (4.2.63). But although there is something invigorating in the carnivalesque radicalism of the Cade scenes, the rebels are easily converted from their cause, and their mob cruelty makes it apparent that their kind of summary justice is no better than that exercised by the political élite. Justice is compromised by revenge—as it is when York slays Old Clifford. Although York claims that his deed expresses ‘justice and true right’ (5.2.25), we feel that he, against the judgement of his better self perhaps, is simply avenging his family's honour. Later, Young Clifford will exact a bloody payment from York's son Rutland and then from York himself.³⁴

Equity and justice are explored in another mode in 2.2, where York expounds his claim to the throne. Technically, according to the law of primogeniture, his claim is correct, but the catalogue of his ancestry is impossible for a playhouse audience to follow. (Significantly it was mangled in the reported texts from which q derives.)³⁵ It is the liturgy of a man obsessed, and Warwick, in a comic moment, speaks with terse irony when he asks, ‘What plain proceedings is more plain than this?’ (2.2.53). Later, in 4.2, Cade will parody the claim. Shakespeare is a realist: the restoration of the de jure line will cause more harm than the occupation of the throne by a man who de facto wears the crown.

… [T]herefore, there is no easy relationship between equity and justice, between Law and the laws of a kingdom. Or, as Marilynne Robinson put it: ‘The point Shakespeare is making is very subtle and finely honed. The implication of all these scenes is that poetic justice—and retribution precise enough to seem divine—cannot substitute for the regular and scrupulous functioning of the law.’³⁶

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE

In 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare explored archetypes as he wrote his prologue to his account of the Wars of the Roses. In Part 2, he traces the alliances and factions of the reign, evokes in imagery those predatory animals that roam the garden of the state.³⁷ The stage fights of Part 1 took on the qualities of ritual combats between the great powers of England and France, male and female, right versus right, as Joan la Pucelle led her country to victory and herself to degradation and death: the play depicted the deaths of the titanic survivors of an ancien régime. The particular conspiracies and allegiances we see forged and forging in Part 2 demonstrate the end of political consensus. Now it is a question of right versus might: motives are concealed behind pretexts; concern for the commonweal conceals desire for private wealth. Power remains in the hands of the patriciate but, as in Part 1, although the people have only a small role to play, the actions of the nobles are scrutinized from what may well be a populist point of view.

The play might at first sight seem to be a mirror for magistrates, a demonstration, in the mould of medieval tragedy, of the remorseless turning of Fortune's wheel and the consecutive falls of great men. (In fact, ‘fortune’ appears only four times in the play as opposed to sixteen occurrences in 3 Henry VI.) After good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester has gone, Winchester, Suffolk, Stafford, Say, Cade, Somerset, and Clifford die according to a strong dramatic rhythm. The pattern of this, one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, would thereby seem to anticipate some accounts of his latest, Henry VIII, which is structured about the falls of Buckingham, Cromwell, and Wolsey. But in 2 Henry VI Shakespeare is less interested in this simple dramatic pattern, an ‘anthology of falls’:³⁸ rather he is concerned with the particular political allegiances that may make the details of the plot difficult to follow but which bring out the significance of the action in high relief.³⁹ In The Prince Machiavelli had shown how different men might prepare and act out different parts: in his Discorsi he showed the multiplicity of causes that might obtain in the interaction of Nature and Fortune. Shakespeare's analysis is as complex.

The political centre of the play is the bond between Henry and Gloucester. The king's supporters include Somerset, the Cliffords, as well as Buckingham and the Staffords. This Lancastrian alliance is threatened from three quarters: by the dynastic claim of York, by the long-standing rivalry between Gloucester and his uncle Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, and by the adulterous relationship between Queen Margaret and Suffolk. The loyalty of the Nevilles, the Earl of Salisbury and his son the Earl of Warwick, is shattered by Henry's inability to maintain dominion over France (1.1.106ff.), and they are the first to commit themselves whole-heartedly to the Yorkist cause (2.2.53ff.). The court is threatened further by the enmity between Gloucester's wife Eleanor and Queen Margaret (1.3.133ff.) as well as that between Warwick and Suffolk (3.2.158ff.). Around them all York lays his conspiratorial mines so that these political engineers will be hoist with their own petards:

                                                                                          I am not your king
Till I be crowned and that my sword be stained
With heart-blood of the house of Lancaster;
And that's not suddenly to be performed
But with advice and silent secrecy.
Do you as I do in these dangerous days:
Wink at the Duke of Suffolk's insolence,
At Beaufort's pride, at Somerset's ambition,
At Buckingham, and all the crew of them,
Till they have snared the shepherd of the flock,
That virtuous prince, the good Duke Humphrey:
'Tis that they seek; and they, in seeking that,
Shall find their deaths, if York can prophesy.

(2.2.64-76)

The narrative action, then, concentrates on the eclipse of Lancastrian power. This is marked by the death of Gloucester, which comes as the climax to Act 3, and the subsequent end of his old adversary Winchester. Act 4 begins with a fustian speech from the Lieutenant who will execute Suffolk, which may seem to turn all that follows to a vision of hell—its function is not unlike the Porter's scene in Macbeth.

The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea;
And now loud-howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night,
Who, with their drowsy, slow, and flagging wings
Clip dead men's graves, and from their misty jaws
Breathe foul contagious darkness in the air.

(4.1.1-7)

But although a lot of what follows is mindless and barbaric, it is difficult to argue that Act 4 with its chronicle of various populist uprisings is simply a grim vision of rule under the iron age of the people. For in this play, unlike Part 1, the commons do come to stand for values that are worth taking seriously, even if the action of the play suggests a frightening and inevitable disparity between the embodiment of a political idea and a political idea as idea. (There is, equally, a demonstration of the way that the idea of hierarchy which the aristocrats express is distorted by their embodiment of it.)

The sequence begins with the summary execution of Suffolk, who pays with his life for what is seen to be his part in all the ills of the kingdom. The Pirate Lieutenant's indictment (4.1.70ff.) reveals a complete understanding of the political situation, and a determination, typical of nearly all popular revolt in the early modern period, to protect the monarchy from ‘reproach and beggary’ (4.1.101). There follows the dramatisation of the Cade rebellion, which, like the Falstaff scenes in the Henry IV plays, stands not as ‘comic relief’ but as a vision both of the limits of government and of the consequences of aristocratic factionalism. Immediately the Cade rebellion is over, York's claim to the throne moves to the centre of the action.⁴⁰

Like 1 Henry VI, the play had begun with a public ceremony, the first meeting, after their proxy marriage, between Henry and Margaret; it ends raggedly, again like the earlier play, with the couple in flight, vanquished at St Albans by ‘dogged York, that reaches at the moon’ (3.1.158). Like 1 and 2 Henry IV, moreover, the play is only partly about the personality of the king whose name furnishes it with a title.⁴¹ It is about a segment of the reign—the full title of q1 summarises the political activity we have analysed: The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Iacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first claime vnto the Crowne. All of these events create a theme: the relationship between the power and the authority of the monarchy. The political climax of the play comes in 5.1, where York has triumphed over the king. There Shakespeare exposes the limits of monarchical authority when the obedience upon which the king's own power rests is in dispute. The ‘body politic’ is empowered by the ‘body natural’, and not vice versa. The clinching moment comes when Salisbury opposes his conscience to the Lancastrian claims for automatic loyalty:

KING Henry
For shame! In duty bend thy knee to me,
That bows unto the grave with mickle age.
SALISBURY
My lord, I have considered with myself
The title of this most renownèd duke;
And in my conscience do repute his grace
The rightful heir to England's royal seat.
KING Henry
Hast thou not sworn allegiance unto me?
SALISBURY
I have.
KING Henry
Canst thou dispense with heaven for such an oath?
SALISBURY
It is great sin to swear unto a sin,
But greater sin to keep a sinful oath.

(5.1.173-83)

It is a key moment, a demonstration of Shakespeare's radicalism in that he is asking the kind of question that princes did not want to be asked: as a Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner (1483-1555) wrote in 1553, ‘Obedience is due, but how far the limits requiring obedience extend, that is the whole question to be demanded.’⁴² The gloss in the Geneva Bible (1560) to Romans 13.5—‘Wherefore ye must be subject, not because of wrath only, but also for conscience’—appropriates the biblical text into anti-papist polemic, but implicitly admits that rebellion might be a matter of conscience: ‘For no private man can contemn that government which God hath appointed without the breach of his conscience; and here [St Paul] speaketh of civil magistrates: so that Antichrist and his cannot wrest this place to establish their tyranny over the conscience.’ Marlowe made a jest in earnest that was recorded in his table talk on the matter: ‘all the apostles were fishermen and base fellows neither of wit nor worth … Paul only had wit, but he was a timorous fellow in bidding men to be subject to magistrates against his conscience.’⁴³

Not that Salisbury can be taken as a simple moral positive. We may be aware here of a distinction between legalism and lawfulness, or we might conjecture that although Salisbury's cause is just, his motives may be more pragmatic: is York likely to be a better (because stronger) king than Henry?

The rest of the act demonstrates York's consolidation of his authority by main strength with the killing of Old Clifford and Somerset. Shakespeare demonstrates that it is the ‘rebel’ York who is a man of conscience while, with brilliant irony, Clifford, the king's champion at this point, is a monster, a Tamburlaine-like killing machine.⁴⁴

CADE

Affairs at court and on the battlefield occupy most of the play, but Act 4 contains an important inset, Jack Cade's rebellion, which adds a dimension at once comic and horrific to the portrayal of insurrection and mutiny.⁴⁵ Since the appearance in 1959 of C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, scholars have been accustomed to relate drama to occasion, in particular to patterns of holiday and recreation, and the Cade episodes have been explained according to this model. Barber himself describes the sequence as ‘an astonishingly consistent expression of anarchy by clowning’.⁴⁶ Barber's book now seems to be apolitical, in fact to be written according to a Freudian paradigm, in that his key formulation is that the comic experience may be defined as a process of release leading to clarification and social harmony. This play does not end harmoniously, and issues, if they are clarified, are not resolved.

More recently critics have been offered a similar but political model, that constructed by Mikhail Bakhtin, who would argue that in comedy we encounter the elements of carnival—demotic, satirical, deflationary, extra-institutional, devoted to the celebration of community and local solidarity at the expense of national interest or hierarchical order⁴⁷ or ‘the specialized appreciation of durable literary values’.⁴⁸ What, though, is the function of carnival? Is it a riot that turns to insurrection as took place in Shakespeare's day at Romans,⁴⁹ or is it merely a safety valve?⁵⁰ Is it a moment when, in this case through a theatrical re-presentation, society ritually purges itself of what are commonly taken to be its undesirable elements, in a mode similar to the way in which, on Shrove Tuesday, the apprentices in ritual disorder sacked brothels and theatres?⁵¹ This was a period of turmoil, as the success of the rebellion demonstrates. Does carnival reveal how the ranks of governors were able to draw upon internalized ideological constraints in the people, given that they had limited powers of coercion at their disposal? Did the conjuring of disorder demonstrate the seeming necessity of order? As Machiavelli⁵² and Weber⁵³ demonstrated, authority is predicated upon disorder.

In the theatre, are endings necessarily conclusions? We shall be looking at a populist uprising that is defeated—should we resist the temptation that besets all adherents of historicism to empathise with the victors?⁵⁴ Are the questions posed in the course of the play more important than the historical and dramatic answers it offers?

In his long soliloquy at the end of the Parliament scene (3.1), York reveals that he has stirred up the rebellion of Jack Cade, whose wild martial strength and politic skills he had observed in Ireland.⁵⁵ The imagery of the lines taps into the vein of witchcraft and conjuring that runs through the play, but again we are aware of the realities of power at York's disposal. York in fact hopes to convert a typical medieval revolt against aristocratic tyranny⁵⁶ into a full-scale popular rebellion which would enable him to seize the throne.

The wind that York blew through the kingdom, as Hall aptly puts it,⁵⁷ provides one cause for popular insurrection, and this was the cause that was most widely propounded when the rebellion was discussed in Shakespeare's time. Cade's rebellion had been described by Stephen Gardiner as simply an extension of the Yorkist revolt, a general manifestation of the way ‘the license of the people comes from the factions of the nobles’,⁵⁸ and Holinshed begins his account of the rebellion by stating that ‘those that favoured the Duke of York … procured a commotion in Kent’.⁵⁹ We must, however, like Shakespeare, consider a second cause, the efficient cause, which is the ‘furious rage of the outrageous [i.e. outraged] people’ against those responsible for the loss of Anjou—notably the ‘flagitious’ Suffolk, ‘the abhorred toad and common nuisance of the realm of England’.⁶⁰ Shakespeare points to the importance of this by showing the execution of Suffolk in the scene that comes just before the beginning of the rebellion. By indicating these two instances of popular outrage against England's loss of self-esteem, he indicates that in part Cade's rebellion was a spontaneous uprising: aristocratic rebellion is the catalyst rather than the cause of popular revolt over specific social issues⁶¹—a distinction that is blurred by Hall, who refers to Cade and his followers simply as ‘proud rebels’.⁶² It may also be notable that the rebels do not mention the death of Duke Humphrey—they are reacting against conditions rather than events. Their own poverty and England's loss of empire are linked in their minds because the taxes for the French wars had weighed heavily upon them. This is why they are so proud to have captured Lord Say, who was held to be responsible for these. In order to amplify these grievances Shakespeare went beyond the chroniclers' treatment of the uprising in the context of the Yorkist rebellion⁶³ and incorporated into the sequence details taken from the account of another rebellion, that of Wat Tyler in the reign of Richard II.⁶⁴ This was, moreover, no local riot as were most of the Plantagenet and Tudor uprisings: Cade and his followers captured London.

Shakespeare indeed may be underlining divisions in society that are deep enough to be called class divisions. I acknowledge that from drama and theatre history alone we cannot recreate a model that would enable us to measure the radical thrust offered by the political drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. But it is possible to offer a coherent reading of some of the drama that would question the conclusion the editors of a recent and most distinguished collection of essays in social history would offer to us. Working from an analysis of cultural models, patterns of behaviour, and local community, Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson conclude that ‘a class society had not in our period yet arrived’.⁶⁵

I cannot dispute their conclusion if I work from the same material and the same premises. But it seems that yet again literary critics have something to offer the cultural historians. Jonson may have been working from a background in medieval social theory, but Volpone and The Alchemist offer a thorough indictment of contemporary entrepreneurial rapacity. In this play it is not simply a cultural difference marked by manners of speech or behaviour: the economic chasm between those with silk coats and those with leather aprons gapes wide in this sequence and might be seen as a reactive protest to the sumptuary laws of the Elizabethan period,⁶⁶ themselves surely a manifestation of a hierarchical society's obsession with rank at a time of political crisis.⁶⁷ Seen from this perspective, the Henry VI plays offer a searing indictment of aristocratic factionalism and the haughtiness of prelates.⁶⁸ The nobility in this set of plays does constitute a class—or, if we prefer, an élite—defined by the conflict between individual aspirations of its members and everything that constitutes the interest of the plebeians.⁶⁹

The social composition of the rebels needs some preliminary analysis. The rebellion is certainly not just an occasion for ‘mechanicals’ to be forced into their customary stage role of clowns,⁷⁰ for the disorder includes not only the marginal and dispossessed. As in many of the uprisings of the early modern period (including Kett's rebellion of 1549), we find here no ‘peasants' revolt’, but a group dominated by the middling sort of rural artisans or ‘handicraftsmen’ (4.2.8),⁷¹ including a tanner, a butcher, and a weaver. The two kinds of division—horizontal between social groups and vertical between political factions—described by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in his account of an analogous insurrection which occurred in France in 1580,⁷² intersect, therefore, at this historical moment.

Not that the Cade rebellion is just a social documentary: it has its part to play in the construction of the drama. Duke Humphrey foresaw the mischief that York was brewing and deployed theatrical metaphors that might seem to turn political action into theatrical game.

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

(3.1.151-3)

Indeed, the uprising of the commons becomes a shadow play of the substantial quarrel between the aristocrats: the first lines of the first plebeians we meet suggest that they are wielding weapons that are obviously theatrical properties, the traditional mock weapons borne by fools and soldier clowns in Tudor interludes.⁷³ York's description of Cade as a ‘Morisco’ (3.1.365), a morris dancer, also places him in this tradition of revelry or ritual misrule. This does not mean, however, that the episode is thereby depoliticized:⁷⁴ on the contrary, carnival served to legitimise protest by imposing ritual forms upon it.⁷⁵ Subversion is equated with celebration. Moreover, Cade's genealogy is a parody (4.2.31ff.) of the genealogy of York: like his master, he uses de jure arguments to mask his tyrannical ambitions. (Compare the parody in the Horner episode of the aristocratic form of justice, the trial by combat.) As Ronald Knowles writes, ‘ultimately Cade is an inverted image of authority, both its distorted representative and its grotesque critic’.⁷⁶

It is impossible, therefore, to argue, as Tillyard did, that the Cade scenes simply offer the ‘impious spectacle of the proper order reversed’,⁷⁷ producing a homiletic demonstration of the evils of rebellion—the play would scarcely have been a success in the popular playhouses if they had. If, in order to explain a political play, we invoke a metaphysical ‘order’, we have to be careful, as we translate it to the social sphere, to ask ourselves, ‘Whose order?’ Riot and ‘disorder’ are not synonymous.⁷⁸ Although Dick the Butcher in 4.2 witheringly exposes in his asides the contradictions of Cade's claims (27ff.), and Holland in 4.7 mocks Cade's justice, the audience is simultaneously made aware that matters of real moment for the people are being raised. Shakespeare seems to have wanted to set his spectators laughing and then demonstrate that this combination of noble provocation and popular combustion is no laughing matter.

The disorder of the revolt in fact generates glimpses of an alternative order, of political radicalism: ‘we are in order when we are most out of order’ (4.2.164).⁷⁹ Bullough ignores the paradox and, following the chroniclers, unwarrantably uses this line to claim that Shakespeare thus brands the rebels as a ‘rabble’.⁸⁰ No, Cade's rebellion in Shakespeare's text is a political act and not a moral aberration or manifestation of base passion, as riots are portrayed in Ariosto, Spenser, and Drayton,⁸¹ or of duncical folly, as John of Leiden's anabaptist rebellion at Münster in 1534⁸² was portrayed in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594).⁸³ There is in 2 Henry VI no speech proclaiming that obedience to authority was enjoined upon men by St Paul, as there is in Sir Thomas More (c.1595).⁸⁴ Sir Thomas More says to the rebels in that play:

                                                                                                    What do you, then,
Rising against him that God himself installs,
But rise 'gainst God?

(2.4.128-30)

Cade's rebels seek reformation (4.2.53) and liberty (4.2.158), not anarchy, and a production could bring out, without denying or suppressing Cade's extremism and, at least in the opening of the sequence, a ‘profound sense of legitimacy’⁸⁵ that we might weigh against the consuming appetites of the rulers. The demands of the rebels are a mixture of those categorised by E. P. Thompson as belonging to ‘the moral economy of the crowd’⁸⁶ and more millenarian demands: they are not simply reacting to violations of a time-hallowed order of landed society such as the loss of common land by enclosure (4.2.56-7)⁸⁷ and the loss of their ‘ancient freedom’ (4.8.24), but are proposing a new egalitarian and libertarian order (see 4.2.1ff.).

Their utopia is a utopia of reconstruction as much as one of escape.⁸⁸ A tract of 1589 by Bishop Cooper, a contribution to the Marprelate debate, indicates how the rebels' ideas were part of the currency of debate at the time of the play's composition: ‘At the beginning (say they), when God had first made the world, all men were alike, there was no principality; then was no bondage or villeinage: that grew afterwards by violence and cruelty. Therefore why should we live in this miserable slavery under those proud lords and crafty lawyers, etc.’⁸⁹

In most critical accounts of the play, however, the rebels have been branded as a rabble—indeed, it is still a commonplace to claim that Shakespeare, like Horace, hated the profane mob.⁹⁰ The followers of Cade are described as a ‘rabblement’ in the opening stage direction to 4.8, but it is important to note that, in the period, the word could be used without contempt (OED Rabble 2). If critics do generate some sympathy in themselves for the plebeian cause, they tend to water it down by pointing out that Cade's economic reforms seem to derive from the land of Cockaigne.⁹¹ Cade may well, on the contrary, through the insistent and demagogic rhythms of his prose, be offering an oblique comment on the massive price rises of Shakespeare's period:⁹²

There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer; all the realm shall be in common and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass.

(4.2.54-7)

This deprivation caused by inflation, moreover, coupled with the violence of the gentry, was a likely cause of the breakdown of the traditional corporate orders of the common people.⁹³

We can demonstrate the emergent ideological claims of the rebels by examining Shakespeare's deployment of source materials. Hall wrote little about the emerging ‘manifesto’ of the rebels, noting only that the ‘Kentishmen be impatient in wrongs, disdaining of too much oppression, and ever desirous of new change and new-fangleness’.⁹⁴ Accordingly, as we have seen, Shakespeare turned from Hall to ‘Holinshed's or Grafton's account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, regarded as representative of popular revolts, and led by a[nother] Kentishman’, John Ball.⁹⁵

Act 4, Scene 2 opens with a conversation (1-25) between two artisans of unspecified vocations, Bevis and Holland, which reveals a thoroughgoing radicalism, a desire to put down gentlemen and magistrates and install a new order of workers. Their rich prose, informed by both chop-logic and messianic discourse, is both comic and serious, and their aspirations derive from the kind of egalitarianism that inspired John Ball, whose catch-phrase question ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then a gentleman?’⁹⁶ was well known:⁹⁷

BEVIS
Come and get thee a sword, though made of a lath: they have been up these two days.
HOLLAND
They have the more need to sleep now then.
BEVIS
I tell thee, Jack Cade the clothier means to dress the commonwealth, and turn it, and set a new nap upon it.
HOLLAND
So he had need, for 'tis threadbare. Well, I say, it was never merry world in England since gentlemen came up.
BEVIS
O miserable age! Virtue is not regarded in handicraftsmen.
HOLLAND
The nobility think scorn to go in leather aprons.
BEVIS
Nay more, the king's council are no good workmen.
HOLLAND
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.
BEVIS
Thou hast hit it: for there's no better sign of a brave mind than a hard hand.

(4.2.1-15)

Even though, as we have seen, the first line of the sequence signals that the rebels are playing well-known parts, both as rebels and as clowns, the scene draws the audience towards an alternative and populist vantage-point from which they might continue to view the main action. The scene gains an added resonance with the entrance of Dick the Butcher, a member of a trade prominent in the Kett rebellion of 1549,⁹⁸ who shares their apocalyptic vision. Unlike the cabals of the nobles, the gathering represents a group and not a faction.⁹⁹

Unfortunately for these radical artisans, however, as we have seen, York's creature Cade hijacks the leadership of the revolt. (We might compare the way in which the Münster rebellion turned into a dictatorship ruled by Jan Bockelson as John of Leiden.)¹⁰⁰ Now Cade's brand of radicalism, as opposed to that of his fellows, is, like most of the aspirations that emerged during the course of the rebellions of the Tudor period,¹⁰¹ informed by conservatism and megalomania—there will be no egalitarianism in Cade's commonwealth or true communism. For although ‘all the realm shall be in common’ (4.2.56-7), Cade will be king, and riches will be distributed as an act of largesse to enhance Cade's rule. (Hall does note that the Kentish men were partly roused by ‘fair promises of liberty’.)¹⁰²

In Ball's revolt, the grievances of the insurgents resulted in a ritual act of supplication to the king against the nobles. Here, Cade's ambition prevents this traditional solution, and the rebels are disbanded by Clifford's invocation of the fear of French invasion (4.8.31ff.). Given that the rebellion was in part an extension of the revolt of York, the treatment of the rebels by his arch-enemy Clifford is notable. Clifford does not point out that they have been misled by the treachery of York but appeals to their national sense of honour. This manifests an extraordinary esprit de corps, perhaps reflecting part of a change in the ideology of honour that occurred between the time of the action and the time of play's composition. Before Kett's rebellion of 1549, it has been argued, espousal of honour by the nobility had a subversive potential—as we see in the action of the play. After this watershed, new concepts of order and obedience ‘branded dissidence as the activity only of the brutal and ignorant “commons”’.¹⁰³ The commons are branded for actions for which the peers were responsible.

In the theatre, on the other hand, the rebels might well take on the characteristics of a mob.¹⁰⁴ Dick the Butcher, so sceptical of Cade's claims to rule, is caught up in the excitement of the massacres, and if Shakespeare arouses our sympathy, he is careful to prevent our being carried away on a tide of hysterical empathy by showing the slaughter of the Clerk of Chartham, executed because he could read and write.¹⁰⁵ Although this may appear as a horrendous example of mindless violence, it may equally reflect on the abuse of benefit of clergy, the privilege claimed by the literate that enabled them to escape execution by virtue of being able to read and write. We might remember how later in the sequence Cade furthers his cause by a species of populist justice in his campaign against the lawyers (part of the case of the rebels in The Life and Death of Jack Straw)¹⁰⁶ and the lettered. His indictment of the Lord Say (4.7.19ff.), although muddled, does demonstrate how learning and literacy could function as tools of oppression.

But it is the mode of the representation that is of interest. I want to point out how this surge of dispensation of justice by the people may well have been seen from a double perspective, with a degree of horror but also with a degree of glee as the privileged get their comeuppance. My evidence comes from the source. Shakespeare again turned from his principal source, Hall, but this time to Holinshed. The unruly commons, he wrote, put precept into practice:

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

This talk liked well the ears of the common uplandish people, and by the less conveying the more, they purposed to burn and destroy all records, evidences, court-rolls, and other muniments, that the remembrance of ancient matters being removed out of mind, their landlords might not have whereby to challenge any right at their hands.¹⁰⁷

This is written from the point of view of orthodox morality, but it would seem that Shakespeare may have caught the tone of these sequences not from the text but from the marginal glosses. For against the first of those two paragraphs we read ‘Lawyers, justices, and jurors brought to “blockam feast” by the rebels’.¹⁰⁸ This reconstitutes the slaughter into a carnival of violence, enacted in the grisly display whereby the heads of the executed Lord Say and Sir James Cromer are made to kiss at the end of their pikes (4.7.112-3). Against the second we read, ‘The next way to extinguish right’. This deftly inverts argument of the text, for whereas Holinshed intended his reader to understand the way in which the nobles were deprived of their rights, this second gloss offers the example as a means for so doing.¹⁰⁹ Moreover the fate of Say and Cromer stands as an awful revenge of the people upon the justices: like Duke Humphrey, Lord Say thought of himself as an upright judge and, like Duke Humphrey, he meets his end after a perfunctory ‘trial upon examination’.

The same dialogic technique is used in the account of Cade in A Mirror for Magistrates, 1559. The verse ‘tragedy’ is headed ‘How Jack Cade Traitorously Rebelling against his King was for his Treasons and Cruel Doings Worthily Punished’, but the prose gloss which follows the poem notes that God always uses rebels to his glory: ‘For when kings and chief rulers suffer their under-officers to misuse their subjects and will not hear nor remedy their peoples' wrongs when they complain, then suffereth God the rebel to rage and to execute that part of his justice which the partial prince would not.’¹¹⁰

After the rebels have been deflected from their aims, Cade is killed in a garden by a man called Iden: does this scene mark some kind of moral positive, and is this poetic justice? Cade is a rebel and even may stand indicted in the eyes of some of the audience for diverting the energies of the commons' insurrection. But the spectacle of his death is no more enlightening than that of Horner. Although Shakespeare, with true magnanimity, demonstrates how Cade provokes Iden into attacking him, we see a strong man slaughtering a starving one as a sober man had earlier in the play beaten to death a drunken one (2.3). When Iden learns who Cade is, he shows as he kills him no stoic calm, certainly no Christian forgiveness, just hatred—wishing he ‘might thrust his soul to hell’.¹¹¹ (Is this class hatred?) Perhaps Cade's emaciated state is an emblematic comment on his spent force as a political figure and his moral bankruptcy as an individual. Iden, moreover, having entered to proclaim his abhorrence of the court and courtly ambitions at the opening of the scene, at its close goes off in triumph to court to claim the honour that he knows will be his reward. The Kentish garden turns out to be another failed paradise in which ideals are vitiated by ambition.

These sequences stand, therefore, not only as echoes but as retorts to the crescendos of violence sounded by the nobles, in particular the murder of Duke Humphrey.¹¹² The ills of the nation, moreover, derive not just from the rampant will to power displayed by the aristocrats, but from their conspicuous consumption. Margaret's lines about Dame Eleanor serve not only to mark her disdain for an upstart but also to offer a clue to a modern director:

She sweeps it through the court with troops of ladies
More like an empress than Duke Humphrey's wife.
Strangers in court do take her for the queen:
She bears a duke's revenues on her back
And in her heart she scorns our poverty.

(1.3.72-6)

Winchester's death scene (3.3)—he does not ‘die well’—is a demonstration that the wealth massed by the cardinal is not sufficient to save him from death. Cupidity is the root of all suffering.

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin, ‘The storyteller’, in his Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, 1970, p. 96.

2. Chambers, IV, 306; several cancelled pages in the 1587 edition of Holinshed dealing with the Babington plot and recent events in Scotland and Ireland indicate that his Chronicles were in fact censored; see Janet Clare, ‘“Greater themes for insurrection's arguing”: political censorship of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage’, RES 38 (1987), 169-183.

3. See Appendix 2, pp. 230-3; Cairncross, pp. xxv-xxix; Clare, ‘Greater themes’.

4. See Textual Analysis, pp. 219-20.

5. See Hattaway, chap. 6.

6. Holinshed (p. 208) does ascribe to God displeasure at the marriage of Henry with Margaret of Anjou and relates the events of reign to this (see Appendix 1, p. 221); Hall (p. 205) calls the marriage ‘infortunate and unprofitable’.

7. Hall, pp. 1-2; E. M. W. Tillyard took this part of Hall's text as the key to the whole ‘cycle’ of history plays and let it inform his reading of 2H6 [The Second Part of Henry the Sixth]—see Shakespeare's History Plays, 1944, pp. 147ff.; compare J. P. Brockbank, who argues that Shakespeare reproduces a scheme of retributive justice he finds in the chronicles, but recoils from it by investing scenes of retribution with an atmosphere of horror. See ‘The frame of disorder—Henry VI’, in J. R. Brown and B. Harris (eds.), Early Shakespeare, 1961, p. 90.

8. Hall, p. 219.

9. Hall, p. 209; Humphrey became proverbial as an exemplary statesman: in a work by Thomas Dekker, a character is described as being so depraved that ‘he would revolt from Duke Humphrey’ (The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie, 1604, sig. b2^r).

10. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, I.ii., trans. L. Ricci, 1950 edn, pp. 111-12.

11. See Robinson, pp. 16-19.

12. See J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I, 1952 edn., chap. 21.

13. Drayton, Works, I, 420-6; compare his ‘Duke Humphrey to Eleanor Cobham’, 90-110, in England's Heroical Epistles, 1619 (Works, II, 226).

14. These notions can be explored in Richard Tuck, ‘Power and authority in seventeenth-century England’, The Historical Journal 17 (1974), 43-61.

15. The relationship between these concepts was explored, for example, in Virgilian epigrams translated by Chapman and included in his Petrarch's Seven Penitential Psalms, 1612 (Poems, ed. P. B. Bartlett, 1941, pp. 227-30).

16. Compare 3H6 [The Third Part of Henry the Sixth] 2.5, and see Frances Yates, Astraea, 1975, pp. 25-6.

17. In this connection compare the praise of Charles V, sprung from the union of Austria and Aragon and celebrated by Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Sir John Harington, 1591, XV, xxi, ff.

18. Compare 3H6 [The Third Part of Henry the Sixth] 4.6.18.

19. AWW [All's Well That Ends Well] 2.3.1-2.

20. Thomas, pp. 92-3 etc.

21. Dr John Cowell, The Interpreter or Book Containing the Signification of Words, 1607, s.v. ‘King’, quoted in E. H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, 1957.

22. See Michael Hattaway (ed.), 1H6 [The First Part of Henry the Sixth], pp. 14-21.

23. ‘In 1494, Pope Alexander VI ordered the appointment of a commission to investigate the reports of the numerous miracles of Henry VI said to have occurred in many parts of England, and a magnificent chapel in Westminster Abbey—now known as the Chapel of Henry VII—was prepared to receive the mortal remains of Henry VI’ (H. Mutschmann and K. Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism, 1952, p. 354). The unsuccessful attempt by Henry VII to have Henry VI canonised by Pope Julius is described by Bacon: ‘The general opinion was, that Pope Julius was too dear, and that the king would not come to his rates. But it is more probable that the pope … knowing that King Henry the Sixth was reputed in the world abroad but for a simple man, was afraid it would but diminish the estimation of that kind of honour, if there were not a distance kept between innocents and saints’ (Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry VII, ed. J. R. Lumby, 1881, p. 207; compare Holinshed, p. 325, Hall, p. 304).

24. See Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1593, Book 1.

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

26. See 3.2.232-5; for trial by battle see Thomas, pp. 260-1 and G. Holderness, L. Potter, and J. Turner, Shakespeare: The Play of History, 1988, pp. 26-32.

27. Hall, pp. 207-8; Holinshed, p. 210, has the servant hanged—Shakespeare has him rewarded (see Appendix 1, p. 222).

28. Holinshed, p. 210; see p. 30 n. 2.

29. Williams, p. 22.

30. For the willingness of Tudor monarchs to prosecute people as obscure as Horner for treason, see Kevin Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History 1550-1750, 1987, p. 108.

31. For a warning to Tudor princes to confine their punishments to what was decreed by law, see John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes, 1559, sigs. hii^v-hiv.

32. See William Lambarde's handbook for justices of the peace, Eirenarcha, 1581, p. 431, and Williams, p. 228. Later Gloucester will be accused of devising punishments contrary to ‘form of law’ (3.1.38).

33. I am indebted for some aspects of my reading of this scene to a private communication from Ronald Knowles.

34. See 3H6 [The Third Part of Henry the Sixth] 1.3-4.

35. See Appendix 2, pp. 234-5.

36. Robinson, p. 146.

37. James L. Calderwood, ‘Shakespeare's evolving imagery: 2 Henry VI’, ES 48 (1967), 482-93; Virginia M. Carr, ‘Animal imagery in 2 Henry VI’, ES 53 (1972), 408-12.

38. Frank Kermode, ‘What is Shakespeare's Henry VIII about?’, in W. A. Armstrong (ed.), Shakespeare's Histories, 1972, pp. 256-69.

39. Emrys Jones notes that a ‘characteristic of the early Shakespeare is the unflagging invention, the profusion of thematically pointed episode and incident’ (The Origins of Shakespeare, 1977, p. 166).

40. Interesting structural comparisons can be drawn with Julius Caesar concerning the relationships between the deaths of Caesar and Duke Humphrey and the rise of Brutus and York.

41. See Larry S. Champion, Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories, 1980, p. 5.

42. Concerning True Obedience, cited in J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought, 1928, p. 128; see R. E. Burckhardt, ‘Obedience and rebellion in Shakespeare's early histories’, ES 55 (1974), 108-17; Frances A. Shirley, Swearing and Perjury in Shakespeare's Plays, 1979, pp. 80-1.

43. Recorded by the informer Richard Baines, MS Harleian 6848, fol. 185-6; see Peter Milward, Shakespeare's Religious Background, 1973, p. 219.

44. See 5.1-2.

45. Some of what follows appears in my article ‘Rebellion, class consciousness, and Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI’, Cahiers élisabéthains 33 (1988), 13-22.

46. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, 1959, p. 13.

47. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolksky, 1984.

48. Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater, 1985, p. 4.

49. See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans, 1979.

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

51. Hattaway, p. 49.

52. G. H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 1959, p. 294.

53. David Little, Religion, Order, and Law, 1970, pp. 20-1.

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

55. ‘York calls Cade his “substitute”, but he is also his alter ego, his carefully-hidden demon. These two are never on stage at the same time, and could well and profitably be played by the same actor’ (Robinson, p. 120).

56. Williams, p. 322.

57. Hall, p. 219.

58. Stephen Gardiner, A Machiavellian Treatise, ed. and trans. Peter Samuel Donaldson, 1975, p. 121.

59. Holinshed, p. 220.

60. Hall, p. 219.

61. Williams, p. 313.

62. Hall, p. 220.

63. Holinshed has flattering things to say about Cade—see Appendix 1, pp. 227-8. For an account of the Cade scenes which argues that Cade represented the antithesis of everything Shakespeare stood for, see Richard Wilson, ‘“A mingled yarn”: Shakespeare and the cloth workers’, Literature and History 12 (1986), 164-81.

64. See Appendix 1, pp. 228-9.

65. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, 1985, p. 4; some evidence of class antagonism is cited by Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680, 1982, p. 150.

66. See N. B. Harte, ‘State control of dress and social change in pre-industrial England’, in D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (eds.), Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England, 1976, pp. 132-65.

67. See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641, 1965.

68. See John Foxe, quoted by Bullough, p. 127.

69. See E. P. Thompson, ‘Patrician society, plebeian culture’, Journal of Social History 7 (1974), pp. 382-405.

70. See Anat Feinberg, ‘The representation of the poor in Elizabethan and Stuart drama’, Literature and History 12 (1986), 152-63.

71. See Diarmaid MacCullough, ‘Kett's rebellion in context’, in Paul Slack (ed.), Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England, 1984, pp. 39-62.

72. Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans.

73. See 4.2.1ff.; compare TN [Twelfth Night] 4.2.126 and 1H4 [The First Part of Henry the Sixth] 2.4.137; and see David Wiles, Shakespeare's Clown, 1987, pp. 121-2.

74. François Laroque, “Shakespeare et la fête populaire: le carnaval sanglant de Jack Cade”, Réforme, Humanisme, et Renaissance 11 (1979), 126-30. Laroque argues that Cade's ‘jacquerie’ turns to carnival, an inversion of the normal order. For carnival see also Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1978, pp. 182ff.; for a critique of Burke and an attempt to use the anthropological categories of Victor Turner to explain Elizabethan carnival, see Wiles, Shakespeare's Clown, pp. 172ff.

75. See Thomas Pettitt (‘“Here comes I, Jack Straw”: English folk drama and social revolt’, Folklore 95 (1984), 3-20) who points out that the historical Jack Cade may have used the Whitsun festivities of 1450 to forward or cover his enterprise, and that the Great Revolt of 1381 led by Wat Tyler (who may have used the carnival name of ‘Jack Straw’—see Holinshed, II, 736) reached its climax, as Holinshed pointed out (ibid.), on Corpus Christi day (13 June); for the ritual roles of butchers (consider Dick the Butcher) in carnivals see Michael D. Bristol, ‘Lenten Butchery: legitimation crisis in Coriolanus’ in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced, 1987, pp. 207-24.

76. In a private communication.

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

78. Slack, Rebellion, pp. 1-2.

79. See M. E. James, ‘The concept of order and the northern uprising of 1569’, Past and Present 60 (1973), 59-83; K. Wrightson, ‘Two concepts of order’, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People, 1980, pp. 21-46.

80. Bullough, p. 96. See also C. A. Patrides, ‘“The beast with many heads”: Renaissance views on the multitude’, SQ 16 (1965), 241-6; Christopher Hill, ‘The many-headed monster’ in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England, 1974, pp. 181-204.

81. Orlando Furioso, VI, 60-70; FQ, II, ix, 13-17, v.ii.30-54; Drayton refers to ‘that rake-hell Cade’, Poly-Olbion, XXII, 531 (Works, IV, 438).

82. For this and anabaptism generally see Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1970 edn, pp. 261ff.

83. Nashe, Works, II, 232-41.

84. See the text in C. F. Tucker Brooke (ed.), The Shakespeare Apocrypha, 1908, 2.4.112ff.; on the history of the play, see Carol A. Chillington, ‘Playwrights at work: Henslowe's, not Shakespeare's, Book of Sir Thomas More’, ELR 10 (1980), 439-79; for St Paul, see pp. 18-20 above.

85. Slack, Rebellion, p. 1.

86. E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the crowd’, Past and Present 51 (1971), 76-136; Sharpe, p. 110.

87. Suffolk is accused of enclosing by one of the Petitioners early in the play (1.3.19-20).

88. See Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopia, 1922, p. 15.

89. T. Cooper, An Admonition to the People of England, 1589, ed. E. Arber, 1895, p. 118 (cf. pp. 144-5, 148, 159, 168-9); quoted by Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 1975 edn, p. 115. The Bishop used the sentiments as an argument for suppressing Presbyterians.

90. See D. Goy-Blanquet, ‘Pauvres Jacques: chroniques et spectacles en Angleterre au xvi^e siècle’, in Elie Konigson (ed.), Figures théâtrales du peuple, 1985, pp. 49-74.

91. See Gormon Beauchamp, ‘The dream of Cockaigne: some motives for the utopias of escape’, The Centennial Review 25 (1981), 345-62.

92. See D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth, 1983, chap. 5; John Walter and Keith Wrightson argue that dearth could, in fact, often ‘serve as an active element in the maintenance of social stability’, ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’, in Slack, Rebellion, p. 108; inflation is attributed to high consumption by aliens and strangers (foreigners) in Sir Thomas More 2.4.

93. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, 1935.

94. Hall, p. 219.

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

96. Holinshed, cited Bullough, p. 133. Ball speaks the lines in the anonymous Life and Death of Jack Straw (1593-4; Bullough, p. 139, lines 82-3); see Norman Cohn, The Pursuit, pp. 198-204; for a contemporary argument against equality, see Sir John Cheke, The Hurt of Sedition, written in 1549 and included in the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles (III, 1042-55).

97. See Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, pp. 114-5; Charles Hobday, ‘Clouted shoon and leather aprons: Shakespeare and the egalitarian tradition’, Renaissance and Modern Studies 23 (1979), 69-78.

98. Slack, Rebellion, p. 52. The Kett rebellion was the last (until 1607) large-scale protest movement, although various plots and conspiracies punctuated the reign of Elizabeth; about the time that the play was written there were localized protests by the oppressed against enclosures and the cost and effects of the wars in the Netherlands (see Williams, pp. 326, 342-3 and B. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 1980).

99. See Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage, p. 26.

100. See Cohn, The Pursuit, pp. 271ff.; a contemporary account of the anabaptist revolt was provided by Joannes Philippson (Sleidanus), A Famous Chronicle of Our Time Called Sleideane's Commentaries, trans. J. Daus, 1560, Book 10, folios 129ff., although there is no evidence that Shakespeare knew this work.

101. See Slack, Rebellion, p. 6.

102. Hall, p. 220.

103. Slack, Rebellion, p. 13, drawing upon Mervyn James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485-1642, Past and Present, Supplement No. 3, 1978; for the gentry's withdrawal from armed political demonstrations in the sixteenth century, see Fletcher and Stevenson, Order and Disorder, p. 10.

104. On crowd scenes in this and other plays see Margot Heinemann, ‘How Brecht read Shakespeare’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds.), Political Shakespeare, 1985, p. 226.

105. On the tenuousness of a firm division between literate and non-literate social classes, see Fletcher and Stevenson, Order and Disorder, pp. 11-12. It may be that the Clerk is executed as a scapegoat for those who escaped hanging by claiming ‘benefit of clergy’, i.e. having the rudiments of literacy, displayed by knowing their ‘neck-verse’ (the beginning of Psalm 51); see 4.7.35-6 n.

106. Bullough, pp. 144, 519; for later Leveller hostility to lawyers see Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, pp. 103, 133-6, 194.

107. Holinshed, II, 737.

108. The phrase ‘blockam feast’, which is not recorded in OED, is found in Mirror, ‘John, Earl of Worcester’, 118. This sardonic populist tone is to be heard elsewhere in the margins, as, for example, when the death of the Duke of York is explained as ‘a purchase of God's curse with the pope's blessing’ (Holinshed, p. 269 and see p. 14 above).

109. Compare the attack on book learning by the Münster anabaptists (see Cohn, p. 267).

110. Mirror, pp. 171, 178.

111. 4.10.72.

112. The exhibition of Gloucester's corpse could well have quoted the stage image of the exhibition of Henry V's corpse in Part 1. Stage directions indicate that it was ‘discovered’, but it may well have been then thrust out on the stage, the contorted features a travesty of the order supposed to be figured forth in his trial.

Unless otherwise specified, biblical quotations are given in the Geneva version (1560).

Abbreviations and Conventions

Other Works Cited and General References

Abbott: E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearian Grammar, 1878 edn (references are to numbered paragraphs)

Alexander: William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander, 1951

Arber: E. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554-1650, 5 vols., 1875-94

Baldwin: T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere's ‘Small Latine & Lesse Greeke’, 2 vols., 1944

Bell: J. Bell ed., Shakespeare's Plays, 9 vols., 1774

Bentley: G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols., 1941-68

Boswell-Stone: W. G. Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare's Holinshed: The Chronicle and the Historical Plays Compared, 1896

Brewer: E. C. Brewer, The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, n.d.

Brockbank: J. P. Brockbank, ‘Shakespeare' historical myth: a study of Shakespeare's adaptations of his sources in making the plays of Henry VI and Richard III’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1953

Bullough: Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols., 1957-75

Cairncross: 2 Henry VI, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross, 1957 (New Arden)

Cam.: Works, ed. William Aldis Wright, 9 vols., 1891-3 (Cambridge Shakespeare)

Capell: Mr William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, ed. Edward Capell, 10 vols., 1767-8

Cartwright: Robert Cartwright, New Readings in Shakespeare, 1866

Cercignani: F. Cercignani, Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation, 1981

Chambers: E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols., 1923

Collier: Works, ed. John P. Collier, 8 vols., 1842-4

Collier²: Works, ed. John P. Collier, 1853

Collier MS: Perkins' Second Folio, 1632 (Huntington Library)

Colman: E. A. M. Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare, 1974

conj.: conjecture

Dekker, ND: Thomas Dekker, Non Dramatic Works, 5 vols., 1884-6

Delius²: Werke, ed. Nicolaus Delius, 7 vols, 1854-[61]

Dent: R. W. Dent, Shakespeare's Proverbial Language: An Index, 1981 (references are to numbered proverbs)

DNB: Dictionary of National Biography

Drayton: Michael Drayton, Works, ed. J. W. Hebel, 5 vols, 1951

Dyce: The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Alexander Dyce, 6 vols, 1857

Dyce²: The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Alexander Dyce, 9 vols., 1864-7

Eds: Various editors

ELR: English Literary Renaissance

ES: English Studies

f: Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 1623 (First Folio)

f2: Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 1632 (Second Folio)

f3: Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 1664 (Third Folio)

f4: Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 1685 (Fourth Folio)

Fabyan: Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France, 1516, reprinted 1811

Farmer: Richard Farmer, in Johnson Var. (see below)

FQ: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 1977

Freeman: Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Arthur Freeman, 1967, (Signet)

Grafton: Richard Grafton, A Chronicle at Large of the History of The Affayres of England, 1569, reprinted in 2 vols, 1809

Griffiths: Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI, 1981

Hall: Edward Hall, The Union of the … Families of Lancastre and Yorke, 1548, reprinted 1809 (page references are to the 1809 edn)

Halliwell: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. James O. Halliwell, 16 vols, 1853-65

Hanmer: The Works of Shakespear, ed. Thomas Hanmer, 6 vols, 1743-4

Hart: 2 Henry VI, ed. H. C. Hart, 1909 (Arden)

Hattaway: Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre, 1982

Henslowe: Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, 1961

Holinshed: Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, second edition, 1587, reprinted in 6 vols, 1808 (unless otherwise specified, page references are to vol. III of the 1808 edn)

Hudson: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Henry N. Hudson, 11 vols., 1851-6

Hulme: Hilda M. Hulme, Explorations in Shakespeare's Language, 1962

Irving: The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall, 8 vols., 1888-90

Johnson: The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson, 8 vols., 1765

Johnson Var.: The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 10 vols., 1773

Jonson: C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson eds, The Works of Ben Jonson, 11 vols., 1925-52

Keightley: The Plays of Shakespeare, ed. Thomas Keightley, 6 vols., 1864

Kittredge: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. George Lyman Kittredge, 1936

Kökeritz: Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation, 1953

Long: John H. Long, Shakespeare's Use of Music: The Histories and Tragedies, 1971

Mahood: M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay, 1957

Malone: The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. Edmond Malone, 10 vols., 1790

Mason: John Monck Mason, Comments on … Shakespeare's Plays, 1785

McKerrow: Unpublished edition of 2 Henry VI, cited in Wells and Taylor (see below)

Metamorphoses: Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (1567), ed. J. F. Nims, 1965

Mirror: The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell, 1938

Montgomery: ‘The Contention of York and Lancaster: a critical editon’, ed. William Montgomery, unpublished D Phil dissertation, University of Oxford, 1985

Munro: The London Shakespeare, ed. John Munro, 6 vols., 1958

Nashe: Thomas Nashe, Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols., 1904-10, revised by F. P. Wilson, 1958

Neilson: The Complete Dramatic and Poetic Works of William Shakespeare, ed. William Alan Neilson, 1906

Noble: Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge, 1935

NQ: Notes and Queries

obs.: obsolete

OED: Oxford English Dictionary

Onions: C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, revised by Robert D. Eagleson, 1986

Partridge: Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy, 1968 edn

PBSA: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

Pelican: The Second and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth, ed. Robert K. Turner Jr. and George Walton Williams, 1967

Plutarch: The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Thomas North, 8 vols., 1928 ed.

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

Pope: The Works of Shakespear, ed. Alexander Pope, 6 vols., 1723-5

PQ: Philological Quarterly

q1: The First part of the Contention betwixt the two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, 1594; prepared in facsimile by William Montgomery, 1985

q2: The First part of the Contention betwixt the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, 1600

q3: The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and York, 1619; prepared in facsimile by Charles Praetorius, 1886

Reed: The Plays of William Shakespeare, [ed. Isaac Reed], 10 vols., 1785

Ren. Drama: Renaissance Drama

RES: Review of English Studies

Riverside: The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 1974

Robinson: Marilynne S. Robinson, ‘A new look at Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part II: sources, structure, and meaning’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1977

RORD: Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama

Rowe: The Works of Mr William Shakespear, ed. Nicholas Rowe, 6 vols., 1709

Rowe²: The Works of Mr William Shakespear, ed. Nicholas Rowe, 2nd edn, 6 vols., 1709

Rowe³: The Works of Mr William Shakespear, ed. Nicholas Rowe, 3rd edn, 8 vols., 1714

Sanders: 2 Henry VI, ed. Norman Sanders, 1981 (New Penguin)

SB: Studies in Bibliography

Schmidt: Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare-Lexicon, 1866 edn

Scott-Giles: C. W. Scott-Giles, Shakespeare's Heraldry, 1950

sd: stage direction

SEL: Studies in English Literature

Seymour: E. H. Seymour, Remarks … upon the Plays of Shakespeare, 2 vols., 1805

sh: speech heading

Shakespeare's England: Shakespeare's England: An Account of the Life and Manner of his Age, ed. Sidney Lee and C. T. Onions, 2 vols., 1916

Singer: The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Weller Singer, 10 vols., 1826

Singer²: The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Weller Singer, 10 vols., 1856

Sisson: Charles Sisson ed., Works, 1954

Sisson, New Readings: C. J. Sisson, New Readings in Shakespeare, 2 vols., 1956

SQ: Shakespeare Quarterly

S.St.: Shakespeare Studies

S.Sur.: Shakespeare Survey

Staunton: The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Howard Staunton, 3 vols., 1858-60

Steevens: The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. George Steevens and Isaac Reed, 4th edn, 15 vols., 1793

Stow: John Stow, The Survey of London, 1603 edn, reprinted in Everyman Library, n. d.

subst.: substantively

Sugden: E. H. Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his Fellow Dramatists, 1925

Theobald: The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Lewis Theobald, 7 vols., 1733

Theobald²: The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Lewis Theobald, 8 vols., 1740

Thomas: K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971

Thomson: W. H. Thomson, Shakespeare's Characters: A Historical Dictionary, 1951

Tilley: M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1950 (references are to numbered proverbs)

tln: Through line numbering

Vaughan: Henry H. Vaughan, New Readings and Renderings of Shakespeare's Tragedies, 3 vols., 1886

Walker: William S. Walker, Critical Examinations of the Text of Shakespeare, 3 vols., 1860

Warburton: The Works of Shakespeare, ed. William Warburton, 8 vols., 1747

Wells and Taylor, Textual Companion: Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, 1987

White: Works, ed. Richard Grand White, 12 vols., 1857-66

Williams: Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime, 1979

Wilson: 2 Henry VI, ed. J. Dover Wilson, 1952 (New Shakespeare)

Reading List

Alexander, Peter. Shakespeare's Henry VI and Richard III, 1929

Baldwin, T. W. Shakspere's ‘Small Latine & Lesse Greeke’, 2 vols., 1944

Berman, Ronald S. ‘Fathers and sons in the Henry VI plays’, SQ 13 (1962), 487-97

Berry, Edward. ‘Twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism: the histories’, in Stanley Wells, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, 1986, pp. 249-56

———. Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories, 1975

Boswell-Stone, W. G. Shakespeare's Holinshed, The Chronicle and the Historical Plays Compared, 1896

Bristol, Michael D. Carnival and Theater, 1985

Brockbank, J. P. ‘The frame of disorder—Henry VI’, in J. R. Brown and B. Harris (eds.), Early Shakespeare, 1961

Brooke, Nicholas. ‘Marlowe as provocative agent in Shakespeare's early plays’, S. Sur. 14 (1961), 34-44

Brownlow, F. W. Two Shakespearean Sequences, 1977

Bullough, G. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, III, 1960

Bulman, James C. The Heroic Idiom of Shakespearean Tragedy, 1985

———. ‘Shakespeare's Georgic histories’, S. Sur. 38 (1985), 37-47

Burckhardt, S. Shakespearean Meanings, 1968

Burke, Peter. The Renaissance Sense of the Past, 1969

Campbell, Lily B. Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy, 1947

Carroll, D. Allen. ‘Greene's “vpstart crow” passage: a survey of commentary’, RORD 28 (1985), 111-27

Champion, L. Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories, 1980

Clare, Janet. ‘“Greater themes for insurrection's arguing”: political censorship of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage’, RES 38 (1987), 169-83

Clemen, Wolfgang. ‘Some aspects of style in the Henry VI plays’, in P. Edwards, I.-S. Ewbank, G. K. Hunter (eds.), Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, 1980, pp. 9-24

Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1970 edn

Colman, E. A. M. The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare, 1974

Cox, John D. Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power, 1989

Dean, P. ‘Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy and Elizabethan “romance” histories: the origins of a genre’, SQ 33 (1982), 34-48

Dessen, Alan C. Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters, 1984

Eccleshall, Robert. Order and Reason in Politics: Theories of Absolute and Limited Monarchy in Early Modern England, 1978

Edmond, Mary. ‘Pembroke's Men’, RES 25 (1974), 129-36

Elton, G. R. England Under the Tudors, 1974

Fleischer, Martha Hester. The Iconography of the English History Play, 1974

George, D. ‘Shakespeare and Pembroke's Men’, SQ 32 (1981), 305-23

Goy-Blanquet, D. ‘Images de la monarchie dans le théâtre historique de Shakespeare’, in E. Konigson (ed.), Les Voies de la création théâtrale, VIII: théâtre, histoire, modèles, 1980

———. Le Roi mis à nu: l'histoire d'Henri VI de Hall à Shakespeare, 1986

Griffiths, Ralph. The Reign of King Henry VI, 1981

Hammond, A. C. The Early Shakespeare, 1967

Hattaway, Michael. Elizabethan Popular Theatre, 1982

Hinchcliffe, Judith. King Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3, Garland Shakespeare Bibliographies, 1986

Hinman, Charlton. The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, 2 vols., 1963

Hobday, Charles. ‘Clouted shoon and leather aprons: Shakespeare and the egalitarian tradition’, Renaissance and Modern Studies 23 (1979), 63-78

Hodgdon, B. ‘Shakespeare's directorial eye: a look at the early history plays’, in S. Homan (ed.), Shakespeare's ‘More than Words can Witness’, 1980, pp. 115-29

Honigmann, E. A. J. Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’, 1985

———. Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries, 1982

Howard-Hill, T. H., ed., 2 Henry VI: A Concordance to the Text of the First Folio, 1970

Hunter, G. K. ‘Truth and art in history plays’, S. Sur. 42 (1990), 15-42

Jackson, Sir Barry. ‘On producing Henry VI’, S. Sur. 6 (1953), 49-52

Jones, Emrys. The Origins of Shakespeare, 1977

———. Scenic Form in Shakespeare, 1971

Kastan, David Scott. ‘Proud majesty made a subject: Shakespeare and the spectacle of rule’, SQ 37 (1986), 459-75

Kay, C. McG. ‘Traps, slaughter, and chaos: a study of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 5 (1972), 1-26

Kelly, F. L. ‘Oaths in Shakespeare's Henry VI Plays’, SQ 24 (1973), 357-71

Kelly, H. A. Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories, 1970

Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare's Political Drama, 1988

Long, J. H. Shakespeare's Use of Music: The Histories and the Tragedies, 1972

McCanles, Michael. Dialectical Criticism and Renaissance Literature, 1975

McFarlane, K. B. England in the Fifteenth Century, 1982

McMillin, Scott. ‘Casting for Pembroke's Men: the Henry VI quartos and The Taming of A Shrew’, SQ 23 (1972), 141-59

Manheim, M. The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play, 1973

Montgomery, William. ‘The original staging of The First Part of the Contention (1594)’, S. Sur. 41 (1988), 13-22

Patrides, L. A. ‘“The beast with many heads”: Renaissance views on the multitude’, SQ 16 (1965), 241-6

Pettitt, Thomas, ‘“Here comes I, Jack Straw”: English folk drama and social revolt’, Folklore 95 (1984), 3-20

Rackin, Phyllis. ‘Anti-historians: Women's roles in Shakespeare's histories’, Theatre Journal 37 (1985), 329-44

Reese, M. M. The Cease of Majesty, 1961

Rhodes, E. L. Henslowe's Rose: The Stage and Staging, 1976

Ribner, Irving. The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, revised edn, 1965

Riggs, D. Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and its Literary Tradition, 1971

Robinson, Marilynne S. ‘A new look at Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part II: sources, structure, and meaning’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1977

Saccio, Peter. Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama, 1977

Shepherd, Simon. Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre, 1986

Siegel, Paul N. Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays: A Marxist Approach, 1986

Slack, Paul. Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England, 1984

Smidt, K. Unconformities in Shakespeare's History Plays, 1982

Sprague, A. C. Shakespeare's Histories: Plays for the Stage, 1964

Talbert, E. W. Elizabethan Drama and Shakespeare's Early Plays: An Essay in Historical Criticism, 1963

Tennenhouse, Leonard. Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres, 1986

Thomas, K. V. Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971

Tillyard, E. M. W. Shakespeare's History Plays, 1944

Warren, Roger. ‘“Contrarieties agree”: an aspect of dramatic technique in Henry VI’, S. Sur. 37 (1984), 75-83

Watkins, Ronald. ‘The only Shake-Scene’, PQ 54 (1975), 47-67

Wells, Stanley, and Taylor, Gary. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, 1987

Wilders, John. The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays, 1978

Williams, Penry. The Tudor Regime, 1979

Williamson, Marilyn L. ‘“When men are rul'd by women”: Shakespeare's first tetralogy’, Shakespeare Studies 19 (1978), 41-60

Winny, J. The Player King: A Theme of Shakespeare's Histories, 1968

Yates, Frances. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, 1975