have, in forms and genres that they did not create. (If the peasant is a female the necessary metamorphosis demands even more radical re-fashioning of the self.) When an educated gentleman decides to present a peasant or a worker as the hero of his invented action, he invests him with his own notion of virtue, with altruism or courage, patience or industry, or continence, perhaps. Until the revolutionary theater of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the virtues with which the working class was usually endowed were those that facilitated their domination by the ruling class. When propagandists of the Right or the Left offer us images of correctly adjusted proles contrasted with unhappy and rebellious—that is to say, criminal—proles, the result is always distortion and often trivialization. Historically the only times that any proletariat has trooped off to a theatrical performance featuring itself it has been dragooned by the most crushingly authoritarian cultural institutions. Chinese ballerinas are still dancing "The East is Red" but the great theatrical mass performances of the 1920s in Red Square are now less likely to be revived than ever.

All literary culture is descended from other literary culture that is, was, and ever shall be under the aegis of the elite. Though as a consequence of the information explosion the small national elites of the world before Gutenberg have become the international elite, the proportion of the human race represented by this literate elite is hardly larger than it was in preindustrial society. In the rich world, during the five hundred years since the invention of printing, literary culture has gradually become popularized as the masses have acquired literacy and associated skills. Though the resulting demotic culture can no longer be described as aristocratic, it is not working class. It is commercial. Literature of all kinds is sold and in turn encourages buying of other items of consumption, having become the tool of mobility from one life-style to another. It is the achievement of commercial culture to conceal the existence of the poor from even the poor themselves. Now that the success of any piece of writing depends upon a complex of factors stemming from the structure of the publishing industry and the current condition of the market, more and more the intelligentsia defines itself as the group that does not read best-sellers.

Shakespeare was the most commercial of commercial writers. Though he might have preferred to write poems under the patronage of a delicately nurtured highly educated aristocrat, he wrote plays. We need not be surprised that he wrote the plays as well as he could; even Jeffrey Archer writes as well as he can. So far from talking down to his audience, Shakespeare invariably spoke up to them, regardless of whether he found himself in amphitheater or playhouse. The job of literary historians would be much easier if we could discern from the writing which audiences are catered for in which plays. Caviar was offered to the general, and the general were invited not only to like it, but to dislike it if they chose. The particular too had to endure unfamiliar fare, coarse, droll, and anti-intellectual, whether they liked it or not.

Shakespeare's characters express fear of the multitude,³ much as the actors would express fear of the audience.

An habitation giddy and unsure
Hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.

(2 Henry IV 1.3.89-90)

In metadramatic terms "the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wav'ring multitude" (Induction to 2 Henry IV, 18-19) feared by the characters and the audience feared by the actors are one and the same. In the expanded illustration of the commonplace, which was also the motto of the Globe Theater, Totus mundus agit histrionem, the audience for every human act is God or metonymically "heaven." The converse, that the audience is God-like, Vox populi, vox dei, is equally true.⁴ Nowadays when the cheapest seats are the highest up, in the part of auditorium usually called "the Gods," most of the audience sits above the stage. The higher the circle, the more seats are crammed into it, and the larger the proportion of the applause that should come from those skyey regions. Even in Shakespeare's theater, when the greatest number of the audience stood below the stage, they assumed the role of heaven.

Heauen the Iudicious sharpe spectator is,
That sits and markes still who doth act amisse.

⁵

The grammar of this statement works both ways. There was no gentleman playwright who did not question the right of his audience to sit in judgment upon his work. Whetstone complained that in the theater ignorant people laughed their betters to scorn;⁶ Gosson condemned the theater because it taught nothing.⁷ Lyly writhed under the "precise judgments" of the gentlemen in his more select audience.⁸ Andrew Gurr quotes Beaumont's commendatory poem for Fletcher's play The Faithful Shepherdess as evidence of the capacity of the playhouse.⁹ I find the passage more useful, because the figure of a thousand is too round to be totally convincing and Beaumont does not say that they sat there at one time, as an indication of the expectations playgoers brought with them.

Why should the man, whose wit nere had a staine,
Upon the publike stage present his vaine,
And make a thousand men in judgment sit,
To call in question his undoubted wit
Scarce two of them can understand the lawes
Which they would judge by . . .

Beaumont then reassures his colleague because appearing in print ensures that his public must at least have "the Quallitie / Of reading," which he was afraid was more than half his "shrewdest judges had before."¹⁰ Though Jonson might sneer at

The wise and many headed Bench that sits
Upon the Life and death of Playes, and Wits

and especially at the "shops Foreman or some such brave sparke, that many judge for his sixe-pence,"¹¹ Shakespeare never did. Though Middleton might revile "a dull Audience of Stinkards sitting in the Penny Galleries of a Theater and yawning upon the players"¹² and Drayton his "thick-brained Audience,"¹³ Shakespeare did not. Though Hamlet may despair of the groundlings with their taste for "inexplicable dumb shows and noise" (3.2.12-13), Shakespeare himself never instructed his audience how to behave. In the relatively few prologues and epilogues in the canon, the audience is never addressed with anything but courtesy, unless we except Gower, the poet in the theater, who speaks to his audience with reverence approaching devotion:

If you, born in these latter times
When wit's more ripe, accept my rhymes,
And that to hear an old man sing
May to your wishes pleasure bring,
I life would wish, and that I might
Waste it for you like taper-light.

(Pericles, Prologue to act 1)

In the conceit of the poet burning away like a candle before the shrine of his audience flickers a distorted, slightly self-parodying version of the divine authority of the audience.

When Marston tells his audience in the Epilogue to Sophonisba that he "not commandes Yet craves" their applause, he describes the justice of their hands "as due";¹⁴ neither Shakespeare nor Puck nor Prospero nor Rosalind ever suggests that applause is his to command. Marston's assumptions about the audience's duty are the same as those of the Duke of Buckingham at the Guildhall in Richard III. For obvious reasons the audience does not witness the Duke's bad performance or the audience's reaction: we learn from his dazed report that

They spake not a word,
But, like dumb statuas or breathing stones,
Stared each on other and looked deadly pale—
Which, when I saw, I reprehended them,
And asked the Mayor, what meant this wilful silence?

(3.7.24-28)

Bolingbroke, by contrast, invites the great unwashed to become his audience, diving into their hearts, 'with humble and familiar courtesy'

What reverence did he throw away on slaves,
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles.

Off goes his bonnet to any oysterwench.
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well.

(Richard II 1.4.26-31)

Coriolanus is told by his mother to win over the plebs by exactly these measures, to go into the marketplace, with his bonnet in his hand and his knee bussing the stones (3.2.73-75). In replying that he will "mountebank their loves" Coriolanus develops the implicit theatrical parallel. In the event Coriolanus cannot subdue his pride; the genuine hero refuses to play a fake hero, will not sell cheap what he has held most dear, and is whooped out of Rome, the city for which he has risked death so many times, by the common voice of slaves. The performance of the refusal to perform does not involve the rejection of the plebeians' right to judge within the theater, however; Coriolanus asserts it himself:

Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at.

(5.3.183-86)

The fact that he is wrong about their reaction sharpens the spectators' awareness of his alienation. Though Coriolanus's refusal to perform is thoroughly understandable, it is only justifiable as long as we inhabit his solipsistic world; once he has invoked the offstage mob, another unwelcome truth begins to surface. Like the hero in the theater, the hero on the battlefield is made by common consent. It is a rash reading of the play that sees it as an attack on the power of the commons, for when Coriolanus turns upon the common people he dishonors the memory of those dead in his service:

You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate
As reeks o'th' rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air.

(3.3.124-27)

Those same unburied corpses are Coriolanus's undoing. The mob strips him of his heroism in exactly the same way that the unerected wits of a common audience might cry down an actor on the stage. The individual's truth to himself is irrelevant at best and at worst disastrous (despite Polonius). That the artist-hero is utterly dependent upon the meretricious may be thought a cynical idea; in fact, it is a tragic theme.

Coriolanus expects to rule by acclaim, but only a dynasty that accepts no duty towards its subjects and rules by divine right may, and often must, rule out of the sight of its subjects. To do so it usually asserts itself to be of a different order of creation, indeed, to be divine. A god-king lives concealed from the vulgar gaze by ranks of hierophants, appears masked, and speaks a different language from his subjects, who are forbidden to look upon him, but must prostrate themselves at his passing. The monarch who invites his subjects to look upon him, to watch him walk, fight or dance, pray or make love, invites them to judge his performance. The consent of a king to perform before his subjects is a step on the road to constitutional monarchy that leads ultimately to "free" elections. At election time power brokers must become hucksters; at such times and at such times only the politician must mount the hustings and entertain the crowd, momentarily his master. The politician on any stage, be he king or commissar, is vulnerable at last.

No English monarch understood this better than Elizabeth, whether she was expressing anxiety about the theatrical representations of Richard II, or painting her face and gilding her hair for yet another appearance as Astraea or stripping a lady-in-waiting of a gown too widely padded or too bright with jewels. The fact that the writing of chronicle plays ended with the death of Elizabeth has often been noticed;¹⁵ it may be that Eliza-beth knew that she had the glamor and charisma to play the king convincingly and delighted in confronting her audience while her bookish successor feared to empower the mob.

Though we may choose to disbelieve John Northbrooke, who wrote in 1577 that "enterludes" taught people "howe to disobey and rebell against princes . . . to ransacke and spoyle cities and townes"¹⁶ to subject the speech and behavior of kings to the judgment of the vulgar is by no means simply to endorse power and legitimacy. Joseph Hall saw that allowing theatricals to present kingship as a matter of mere bombast and strutting, only to be outfaced by the clown and the appreciation of the crowd for the clown, was a way of undermining duly instituted authority:

A goodly hoch-poch, when vile Russettings
Are match'd with monarchs, & with mighty kings.

¹⁷

Henry Crosse expressed the same argument in prose more cogent in Vertues Commonwealth in 1603:

Is it fit that the infirmities of holy men should be acted on the stage . . . ? there is no passion wherwith the king, the soveraigne majestie of the Realme was possest, but is amplified and openly sported with, and made a May-game to all beholders.¹⁸

The arguments of both Hall and Crosse are aesthetical before they are political, for both are repeating what they had learned about theatrical decorum from Horace, who had learned it from Aristotle. In the modernized versions of Scaliger and Castelvetro the classical aesthetic came to dictate the deportment and depiction of monarchs both on the stage and off, but attempts to apply it on the English stage, as in the English court, were doomed never to succeed.

To point out that Shakespeare defied the classical criterion (which he certainly knew and understood) by allowing commoners both on the stage and off to rub shoulders with his kings is not to refute Taylor's claim that the proletarian in the Shakespearean theater is seen from above. It has been argued, mostly with approval, that Shakespeare brings his proles upon the stage in order to place them as subordinates in the social-political-cultural order. On the Shakespearean stage, for one thing, patricians tend to speak verse and commoners to speak prose. Yet verse is not in itself superior to prose. Verse is not a language forbidden to the commoners on Shakespeare's stage, any more than the patricians are constrained to express themselves in verse. When commoners speak blank verse, their utterance is intensified rather than falsified, as for example in Richard II, when the Virgilian gardener expresses himself in denser and more stately blank verse than his royal interlocutors who are reduced by his gravity to mere pettishness (3.4).¹⁹ Only patricians, on the other hand, are shown to be guilty of false taste and mannerism in their versified utterance. Shakespearean kings speak every language from the true Marlovian to pseudo-Marlovian fustian, Marinist sonnets, rhyming doggerel, and prose of every hue; they orate, they confide, they erect themselves, and they collapse, their right supported and protected by the handful of wooden swords that represents the real hews and sinews of the body politic, the laboring masses who supply its footsoldiers. We do not know all those who might be guilty of the indiscretion bewailed by Whetstone in 1578: "Many tymes (To make mirthe) they make a Clowne companion with a Kinge: in theyr grave Counsels, they allow the advise of fooles,"²⁰ but Shakespeare is clearly one of them. Only in the play can the rude unlettered hind catechize (catch the conscience of) his king.

Recent investigations of the composition of the Shakespearean audience have tended to disprove the old idea of the Shakespearean moment, when the laborer, the merchant, the justice, and the lord were all entertained by the same fare at the same time in the same place. Nowadays we tend to the view that after about 1594 the Shakespearean theater audience, especially in the private theaters, was as middle-class and as well heeled as it is today and that the fare offered represented their preferences because much the larger part of the box office receipts came from their pockets.²¹ A caveat is to be entered, however. Though perhaps we must temper our fantasies of a pit filled with roaring groundlings who had bought their own tickets, we must not forget the ubiquity of the poor in preindustrial society. It is only in the modern world that rich and poor live apart. The London bourgeois of 1600 lived amidst shoals of menials and dependants, most of them as ragged and battered as the average household servant today in, say, Bombay. The poorer the household, the scruffier the servants. Many householders came to the theater attended by these same servants. All kinds of individuals were employed by the playhouse itself, ticket sellers, ticket collectors, ushers, cleaners, scene shifters, carpenters, seamstresses, laundresses, and locks will keep out neither beggars nor small boys. As a place of promiscuous resort the playhouse attracted, besides beggars and small boys, prostitutes, pick-pockets, and army officers in search of recruits. The preachers and cavilers were outnumbered; according to Florio, "every man" delighted in plays.²² The play leveled the audience if the ticket prices did not, but it leveled it upwards.

There is no greater need to posit for the end of the sixteenth century a theater-going proletariat that knew what it wanted and how to get it than there is for today. We may agree that neither in the amphitheater nor the halls were the riffraff the arbiters of taste. It is not the unlettered auditor who can find words to pooh-pooh the play or even to praise it, though the horde of apprentices might be the most vociferous in reacting more spontaneously. Nashe has a droll story that emphasizes both the vulnerability of the illiterate masses who have no dignity to stand upon and the falseness of the studied reactions of those who prize their dignity above their pleasure; a justice who

hauing a play presented before him and his Towneship by Tarlton and the rest of his fellowes, her Maiesties seruants . . . the people began exceedingly to laugh, when Tarlton first peept out his head. Whereat the Iustice, not a little moued, and seeing with his beckes and nods hee could not make them cease, he went with his staffe, and beat them round vmercifully on the bare pates, in that they, being but Farmers & poore country Hyndes, would presume to laugh at the Queenes men, and make no more account of her cloath, in his presence.²³

Shakespeare, if not Hamlet, appears to have been ready to accept the spontaneous reaction of "barren spectators"; in no Shakespearean play is a patrician action undermined by a proletarian response. Instead we have in both A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labour's Lost an unsophisticated offering derided and derailed by a sophisticated onstage audience, to the irritation of the actual audience. The peasants and artisans on the stage, however confused and o'erparted, acquire more power and more reality when sophisticated spectators strip them of their flimsy disguises. Likewise, in Shakespearean prologues and epilogues, with their emphasis on striving day by day to please, the unmasked actors do not exalt themselves above the audience as the schoolmen do, but quail before the audience's judgment as the tradesmen did, whose intents were "extremely stretch'd and con'd with cruel pain" to do their auditors' service.

If the poor were nowhere else in the theater, they were on the stage. The onstage kings are as often rogues and mountebanks "glad to play three hours for two pence," as Dekker says in The Raven's Almanacke (1609).²⁴ The thought gives added plangency to the words of the King of France, at the end of All's Well That Ends Well:

The King's a beggar now the play is done.
All is well ended if this suit be won:
That you express content, which we will pay
With strife to please you, day exceeding day.
Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts:
Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts.

The declaration of love for the audience may seem excessive, until we recall the argument of Montaigne:

I have ever blamed those of injustice that refuse good and honest. . . . Players, to enter our good townes, and grudge the common people such publike sports. Politike and wel ordered common-wealths endevor rather carefully to unite and assemble their Citizens together; as in serious offices of devotion, so in honest exercises of recreation. Common societe and loving friendship is thereby cherished and increased.²⁵

The threadbare individuals who for love of the public (and its money) dare to assume the regalia of kingship are the cutpurses of the empire, who from a shelf a precious diadem steal and put it, in the form of receipts for ticket sales, in their pockets. Yet such fake monarchs can be more regal than the real. They can, if the playwright wills, construct an ikon of royalty that could shame the actual incumbent, and then, if the playwright wills, they can betray it and bewray it. He who plays the king can lay the crown aside and prove more kingly without it. And many an apple-wife in the pit could imagine that like Hamlet, she too could have proved right royally, had she been put on.

The Bastard makes the precise point that in the Shakespearean theater the subject finds the monarch for once at his mercy in King John, a play in which the entire cast, with the exception of the characters called "Citizen" and "Hubert," is patrician. Gesturing about him to the offstage mob, the Bastard cries:

. . . these scroyles of Angers flout you, Kings,
And stand securely on their battlements
As in a theatre, whence they gape and point
At your industrious scenes and acts of death.

(2.1.373-76)

Throughout the play of King John the audience is obliged to identify with the citizenry of the besieged town. The kings in King John wage rhetorical war with the audience as the prize: the French king speaks

Our cannons' malice vainly shall be spent
Against th' invulnerable clouds of heaven,
And with a blessèd and un vexed retire,
With unhacked swords and helmets all unbruised
We will bear home that lusty blood again
Which here we came to spout against your town. . . .

(2.1.251-56)

The Citizen answers as the audience might: "we are the King of England's subjects." The Citizen must, as the audience must, await the outcome of the wordy conflict. The Bastard, who is more of a groundling than a baron, despite his royal getting, asks:

Why stand these royal fronts amazèd thus?
Cry havoc, Kings! Back to the stainèd field. . . .

(2.1.357-58)

"Royal fronts" is nearly as peculiar an expression as "borrowed majesty," twice repeated within one minute of curtain up. All the while, behind the stage conflict and the rhetorical debate before the English audience of London, alias Angers, explode harsh images of the reality of war. The ever-present but offstage army in the verse is not only an extension behind the scenes of the mob in front of the stage, it extended into the immediate surroundings of the theater. While on their way to and from the theater the audience would have passed the men mustered for the militia drilling along the riverside²⁶ while along the road men blinded and maimed in foreign wars begged their charity.²⁷ Accord-ing to Philip Gawdy, many men were pressed for the war in the Netherlands in raids on the playhouses in 1602.²⁸ When the Bastard first drew his picture of war as predator, the bowels of many of his auditors must have run cold.

O, now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel;
The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs;
And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men
In undetermined differences of kings.

(2.1.352-55)

In the Bastard's semantics the word men weighs heavier than the word kings. From whom has "borrowed majesty" been borrowed? What lies behind the "royal fronts" and Constance's "counterfeit, resembling majesty"? The kings are masks, but the unseen dead on the fields of France are men. Upon which town does the Bastard advise the kings to make war?

Be friends awhile, and both conjointly bend
Your sharpest deeds of malice on this town.

(2.1.379-80)

Upon this town.

By east and west let France and England mount
Their battering cannon, chargèd to the mouths,
Till their soul-fearing clamours have brawled down
The flinty ribs of this contemptuous city.

(2.1.381-84)

Upon this contemptuous city. The audience knew and continues to know that history is more than brawling and clamours, more than a play, for somewhere out there, offstage, death is still mousing. The Bastard continues:

I'd play incessantly upon these jades,
Even till unfencèd desolation
Leave them as naked as the vulgar air.

(2.1.385-87)

The jades to be played upon are these jades, the profanum vulgus, the victims (being the enforced wagers) of war—that is to say, the audience.

Being wronged as we are by this peevish town,
Turn thou the mouth of thy artillery,
As we will ours, against these saucy walls;
And when that we have dashed them to the ground,
Why, then defy each other. . . .

(2.1.402-6)

What walls can be in question if not the walls of Burbage's theater? It is the Citizen who must produce a rhetoric that will prevent the attack on "this city's bosom," to fend off the raining of a "drift of bullets on this town," and his solution is the comedy one of an unconvincing stage marriage. King John, the player king, knows only too well that he can only function through the mute and passive response of his audience: when he attempts to suborn Hubert he says:

. . . if that thou couldst see me without eyes,
Hear me without thine ears, and make reply
Without a tongue, using conceit alone,
Without eyes, ears, and harmful sound of words;
Then in despite of broad-eyed watchful day
I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts.

(3.3.48-53)

An audience in the theater responds by conceit alone, for it may not itself take part in the action; though its is the bosom into which the stage king pours his thoughts, its also is the judgment that may condemn him. When Constance defends the right of her grandson Arthur, she tells us that his tears are "heaven-moving pearls" and she assures us that "heaven" will take them in nature of a fee,

Ay, with these crystal beads heaven shall be bribed
To do him justice and revenge on you.

(2.1.171-72)

Hubert, a citizen representing the audience, alias heaven, is moved by Arthur's tears. The breath of heaven blows out the coal that should have heated the iron that should have blinded Arthur. Only Hubert and the audience know that Arthur is not dead; nevertheless Hubert reports on behalf of the offstage mob the reaction of the offstage and unseen populace of history to the news that Arthur is dead:

Old men and beldams in the streets
Do prophesy upon it dangerously.
Young Arthur's death is common in their mouths,

I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,
The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,
With open mouth swallowing a tailor's news,
Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,
Standing on slippers which his nimble haste
Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet,
Told of a many thousand warlike French
That were embattailèd and ranked in Kent.
Another lean unwashed artificer
Cuts off his tale, and talks of Arthur's death.

(4.2.186, 194-203)

According to Stephen Gosson, the common people who resorted to theaters in 1582 were these same: "an assemblie of Tailors, Tinkers, Cordwayners, Saylers, Olde Men, yong Men, Women, Boyes, Girles, and such like. . . . "²⁹ The offstage mob in the Theatre in 1590 or so has no option but to recognize itself in the offstage mob of the thirteenth century. The "royal front," King John, then turns upon Hubert and accuses him of having hatched the plot against Arthur. The audience of 1590 (like the audience of 1203) knows that he is lying, and has its finest hour when Hubert accuses him, this time truthfully, "you have slandered nature in my form" (4.2.257). From having been confounded, the historical populace and the immediate audience now grow apart, but the division is painful. The audience is mocked by its own muteness, for it alone sees the manner of Arthur's death and hears Hubert accused again and again, each time prevented from uttering by a wall of words from his betters. Whether patrician or peasant, smith, tailor, or unwashed artificer, each member of that odd collectivity, the audience, shares this perspective and feels this frustration as the rulers of the realm lead it further into futile strife.

The life, the right, and truth of all this realm
Is fled to heaven, and England now is left
To tug and scramble, and to part by th' teeth
The unowed interest of proud swelling state.

(4.3.145-48)

Life, right, and truth have no longer to be found in the stage action but among the spectators, yet "England," those same spectators, will expiate in blind struggle the fault of others. Though one may agree with Steven Greenblatt that Shakespeare's English histories made subjects into citizens,³⁰ one cannot agree that the result was the endorsement of absolutism.

The description of the hordes that throng about Shakespeare's dramatic action and make their own judgment upon it is not complete until are added the legions of the voiceless dead. In the Shakespearean theater of war the dead do not disappear but lie and rot. The stench of massacre pervades his heroic pageant,³¹ bring-ing not only tears to the dryest eye, but revulsion, not so subtly undermining the efficacy of the propaganda. Hotspur's greatest speech flashes athwart the action of Part I of Henry IV like lightning:

When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning on my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin, new-reaped
Showed like a stubble-land at harvest-home.
He was perfumèd like a milliner,
And 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet-box, which ever and anon
He gave his nose and took't away again—
Who therewith angry, when it next came there
Took it in snuff—and still he smiled and talked;
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corpse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility,

(1.3.30-44)

Harry Hotspur here expresses the anger of every foot-soldier for the nobility that deployed him in the field for a reason that he had never heard, let alone understood. These fifteen lines are as a good a piece of tragic satire as anyone has written; the point of view is that of the common cry of curs so despised by Coriolanus, creatures who though noisy have no voice of their own. Our judgment of the lordling is dictated by Hotspur; his anger and contempt are our anger and contempt. There is no single point of view in Henry IV, no above, no below, from which to view Hotspur or what Hotspur says, but in these fifteen lines there is only one way to view the lordling. The harsh light of this speech must reflect upon its context, even upon Hotspur himself. Those untimely dead in martial conflict and yet unburied are invoked so often in Shakespeare's theater as to constitute a leitmotif.³² The ghastly light thus shed upon the field of battle is reflected too upon the faces of men as ghostly as the dead, the starved, sick, and frightened men who are about to die.³³

Each time one of Shakespeare's histories is played, the immediate political relevance of its dramatic action will be different. It matters less to know how the action parallels events in Elizabeth's reign than to register how thrillingly the audience is implicated in a series of daring judgments, being not merely encouraged to judge, but forced to judge, and ultimately to condemn the actions of their betters. Modern commentators are well aware of the importance of Elizabethan participation in religious ritual and spectacle, in the performing and witnessing of public penance. The London crowds of the 1590s were "mutes and audience" to many acts of public significance, from the occasional state funeral to public floggings of naked prostitutes. We are beginning to realize at last the importance of the fact that the primary meaning of the word stage is "scaffold." The importance of carrying out executions in public is that it makes the body politic accomplices to a man, woman, and child in the act of summary judgment. As long as there is no text there can be no dissent; as soon as there is utterance and response there is the possibility, even the duty, of dissent.

As long as the mob is in the theater it is not necessary to put its representative upon the stage in order to bring its preoccupations to the fore. When the unlettered hind walks onto the stage in a private theater or at Whitehall his is a different and disconcerting presence. The forcing of a throng of ladies and gentlemen to attend the maunderings of a ragged clown, after having made them pay their one and sixpence for the privilege, is true subversion of the imagination. Though servants know their masters intimately, masters seldom know their servants, for to feel interest and concern for the kitchen maid or the pot boy might involve considering whether it was just that she or he should sleep under the workbench or on the kitchen table. Most Elizabethans, who had to rely on ragged troops of menials to achieve a degree of comfort we would now regard as Spartan, simply could not afford to take an interest in them. When, some years ago, the Indian government decreed that live-in servants had to have rooms of their own, hundreds of thousands of live-in servants were turned out of their employer's houses and reemployed as dailies. Instead of sleeping on a mat in the kitchen, they now sleep on staircases, park benches, railway platforms, or on the sidewalk, not because their masters are cruel but because they cannot afford a room as well as a servant. Elizabethan London was more like Bombay in this regard than it is like present-day London, bloated as it still is by postcolonial wealth.

Though the editorial board of Hello magazine might decide to run the story of Titus Andronicus much as they have been running the story of the Brando family murder, they would never countenance the appearance of the Clown in 4.3 and 4; these scenes might be the fossil remains of a comic scene with lots of interpolated business and ad-libbing by a well-known comic performer, or not. I think not, for the whole point about the clown in Titus Andronicus is that he has no business there. Like Zachary in the temple, he carries a pair of pigeons. When Titus says "Jupiter," he hears, not a name for God, but merely "gibbet-maker," emphasizing the play's rarefied Roman-ness. Like a figure of Saint Francis bobbing through the landscape inside his mandorla, the Clown, enclosed within a Christian context of heaven and grace, moves through the black world of Senecan Rome as alien to it as his prose is from the rest of the play's verse. After he greets Saturninus in a trebly Christian way—"God and St. Stephen give you godden"—the Senecan action engulfs him and his pigeons and booms on, unjolted out of its own bombastic medium, but placed and distanced by his mild appearance and summary disappearance.

To the best of my knowledge no scholar has ever considered the point of this extraordinary split in the Senecan fabric. The laboring poor, despite the best efforts of Brecht, still do not interest us much. An irrelevant clown wandering around the stage with two pigeons is typical of what we find awkward and super-erogated about Shakespeare. It is not Shakespeare who leaves out the unlettered poor but we who ignore them, because we cannot cope with their inexplicable irruptions into affairs that have nothing to do with them. No discussion of Titus Andronicus that I have ever read has given any attention to the clown scene, though no one has ever suggested that it is anything but authentic. If during a production of Titus Andronicus, as M. C. Bradbrook describes it,³⁴ with its "horrors all clas-sical and all unfelt, cool and cultured in its effect," as it moves in its stately fashion to classical catastrophe, Frankie Howerd were to pop up with two pigeons in a basket, make a valiant attempt to understand what is going on, fail, and be liquidated, that one horror would not be unfelt. The snuffing out of the Clown has the true absurdity that afflicts the unheroic deaths of the poor, under the hooves of any or all of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The intrusion in single scenes of humble characters who play no part in the plot and do not reappear, involving the doubling of parts by the actors already playing nobles, must constitute an implied commentary on the main action. Act 2, scene 1 of 1 Henry IV presents us with apparently inconsequential information, how the first carrier's horse is treated by the ostler and that "this house is turned upside down since Robin Ostler died." What of Robin Ostler? "Poor fellow never joyed since the price of oats rose; it was the death of him." I learn from A. R. Humphreys's note in my Arden edition that the price of oats trebled in three years and that the queen had to forbid extortion in Proclamation for the Dearth of Corne in July 1596. I learn from Roger Manning that there were thirty-five outbreaks of disorder in London between 1581 and 1602.³⁵ Could it be that Shakespeare is placing institutional crime against the poor in the balance with Prince Hal's activities? If I share the knowledge of the rise in the price of oats, I know myself to be kittle-cattle with Robin Ostler. The stage is the same world as the world I live in, even if I would not pee in the fireplace, as the carriers do.

In this same supererogatory scene Gadshill tries to trick the carriers, who see through his ancient ruse and leave him to conspire with the chamberlain to rob the franklin of Kent. Gadshill tells us that he is "joined with no foot-landrakers, no long-staff sixpenny strikers, none of these made mustachio purple-hued maltworms, but with nobility and tranquillity, burgonmasters and great 'oyez'-ers. . . . [who] pray continually to their saint the commonwealth; or rather, not pray to her, but prey on her; for they ride up and down on her, and make her their boots." After an odd and incontrovertible tag from Lily and Colet's Latin grammar, "homo is a common name to all men," Gadshill bids the chamberlain farewell, dubbing him as if from a lofty height of superior intelligence and rank, not "man" but "muddy knave." So 2.1 of 7 Henry IV ends, without having advanced the action one doit. The action is no further advanced by the tormenting of Francis the drawer, who may not refuse to do the bidding of any man, being bred to service. Though Dr. Taylor may find that Francis is seen from above, I cannot agree. The joke that is played on him is so pointless, so unkind, and his reaction so guileless and yet so understandable, that the audience will only be made to laugh at him if the actor guys him in some fashion. Why the Prince should remind us of our mutual ancestor "goodman Adam" at this point, if Francis's servile position is merely to be laughed at, cannot easily be understood. The subtext, of reference to common humanity, is invoked time and again, Francis is "the son of a woman," Falstaff wails that "manhood, manhood is forgot on the face of the earth" and is, as usual, lying.

The intrusion of lower-class characters into the play of the nobles also makes the subliminal point that as these characters are irrelevant to the action so is the action irrelevant to them. Shakespeare lets it be understood that the concerns of theater are irrelevant to the laboring poor time and again, in play after play, by giving their representatives cameo appearances on the stage, bewildered, quizzical, or unconvinced. When Launce and his dog, the ikon of real attachment, wander about the stage of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we shall miss the point entirely if we imagine that we are to despise them or dismiss them or, in Taylor's phrase, to view them from above.

Costard may seem an unchallenging member of the lower orders, tranquilly viewed from above in Love's Labour's Lost, but in this case the Clown will be in charge of the dismantling of the play of his betters. Costard suffers the most and the most immediately as a consequence of the King of Navarre's vainglorious policy. His struggles to understand the accusation in Armado's absurd language is a burlesque of the real helplessness of the masses faced with a body of law expressed in a language that they cannot understand and are not meant to understand:

Thou hast appointed justices of the 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 . . .

(2 Henry VI 4.7.38-42)

It may be that we are directed to laugh at Costard's suffering by his malapropisms, but Costard says many a true thing in his contradictory manner. He is so poor that prison for him is only loss of liberty: "Oh, let me not be pent up, sir. I will fast, being loose." He has "as little patience as another man, and therefore can be quiet." However successfully the play of the lords and ladies may lure us to disregard Costard, the member of the commonwealth, he endures until the end, when he is suddenly interpreting the discomfiture of Sir Nathaniel as Alexander:

There, an't shall please you, a foolish mild man, an honest man, look you, and soon dashed. He is a marvellous good neighbour, faith, and a very good bowler, but for Alisander—alas, you see how 'tis—a little o'erparted.

(Love's Labour's Lost 5.2.576-80)

The lords do not take his point and continue to deride and interrupt the entertainment, but Costard's character is growing and changing as the play moves out of a French park and the lords dwindle into an audience rather than actors. As they become unreal and transparent, he becomes more solid. It is Costard who wrecks the pageant of the (un)worthies by attacking Armado and gives news of a real outcome to sham passion, Jaquenetta's pregnancy. His assumption of anger and the right to judge his superiors is the dramatic equivalent of Marcade's fateful announcement of a death. The play of the patricians is by now completely undone. The ladies force the lords to abandon their wooing and share the lot of the masses: "frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds." The play's own genre now not so much abandoned as obliterated, the players in their own person perform the debate of the owl and the cuckoo, a peasant theme of peasant life, Costard's poetry.

There is no lack on the Shakespearean stage of lower-class characters who are shown to be more constant, more tolerant, more generous than the nobility who treat them with discourtesy. It might be objected that this is a version of what used to be called nigger nobility, another example of the fundamentally condescending argument about the noble savage, based in sentimentality about the lowborn, but this is not Taylor's argument. Taylor is quite confident that Shakespeare's lower-class characters are viewed from above, though the patrician characters are often shamed by the contrast. In the end the effectiveness of these simple characters is a matter of taste. If they were to be left on stage being simple and noble for scene after scene, we would find them cloying and unconvincing. Characteristically, these sane, ordinary, humble characters do not presume upon our attention. Indeed they often predict our inattentiveness to them, our casual cruelty and disregard. Costard has no lack of blood brothers from Adam and William in As You Like It, to the tender-hearted Clown of The Winter's Tale, who is corrupted by discovering himself near allied to a crown, to Timon's Steward and to Christopher Sly.

The Induction to The Taming of the Shrew is an integral part of the play but, though scholars rack their brains about why there is not more of it, they do not give the same attention to the question of why what they have is there. Sly seems to have been a real person, an actor called William Sly, who appeared in several plays, not all of them by Shakespeare, as a clown figure under his own name.³⁶ The aim of the deception practiced on Sly in The Taming of the Shrew is to induce him to take himself for a lord. To deny one's origins on the Shakespearean stage is to invoke a delusion which can undo a character in a way that even sudden metamorphic change cannot. Joan of Arc dissolves in corruption before our eyes when she denies her father, the shepherd standing before her. Jack Cade, who has had much right on his side and made moving representations on behalf of the poor, becomes merely counterfeit when he denies his own condition and invents a kingly family tree for himself. The attempt to seduce Sly goes far beyond anything required as a mere frame for a play. Sly defends himself:

I am Christophero Sly. Call not me 'honour' nor 'lordship'. I ne'er drank sack in my life, and if you give me any conserves, give me conserves of beef. Ne'er ask me what raiment I'll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet—nay, sometime more feet than shoes, or such shoes as my toes look through the over-leather.

(Induction 2, 5-11)

This presumably is the sort of thing that Taylor describes as seen from above, but the stage direction says "aloft." The Sly scenes are not played below but above the main action. The lord and his servants kow-tow to Sly and he stares at them amazed.

What, would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly—old Sly's son of Burton Heath, by birth a pedlar, by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bearherd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot, if she know me not. If she say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lying'st knave in Christendom.

(Induction 2, 16-23)

Barton-on-the-Heath and Wincot are real places; the original actor was using his own name and the real name of another person before the tinsel array of theatrical nobility. Sly is anchored in the same earth that the groundlings, if there were any, stood upon. His only riches is that he is English, though he come from the poorest of the poor, landless artisans gleaning a meager living in embryonic service industry. The brainwashing works, insofar as Sly begins to speak blank verse in the same strain that Bottom might:

Am I a lord, and have I such a lady?
Or do I dream? Or have I dreamed till now?
I do not sleep. I see, I hear, I speak.
I smell sweet savours, and I feel soft things.

(Induction 2, 67-70)

Sly's words should remind us that there are folk who live and die without ever smelling sweet savours or feeling soft things. They also imply that those same people in different circumstances would, if they had the chance, bear themselves as nobly as the people whose luck has placed them amid silks and scents. The brainwashing of Sly follows the same pattern as twentieth-century brainwashing. The people clearing his head tell Sly that the people he knows, Cicely Hacket, Stephen Sly, old John Naps, Peter Turph, and Henry Pimpernell, do not exist and never did. Scholars have found originals for all of them, but have not asked themselves what point mentioning real people in the theater only to claim that they do not exist could possibly have. If a modern production were to present a contemporary Sly, a real person under his own name who named real people as familiar to the audience as the alewives of Shakespeare's Warwickshire, we might find out. There are two kinds of tension at work here; one kind stems from the fragility of identity, which raises the question of whether Sly can hold fast to his real world, and the other from the possibility that Sly and his companions might find little to envy in the lords' lifestyle. The crux comes hard upon, for Sly simply cannot understand the relationship he is meant to have with his wife.

Sly. Are you my wife, and will not call me husband?
My men should call me lord, I am your goodman.

. . . What must I call her?

Lord. Madam.
Sly. Al'ce Madam, or Joan Madam?
Lord. Madam and nothing else. So lords call ladies.

(Induction 2, 102-3, 106-8)

"Madam wife," says Sly, incapable of learning this frigid decorum, though he is quick to see what comfort may be had from a spouse. Like many of the laboring poor, Sly, it seems, has never enjoyed the pleasures of the marriage bed but he knows how he would treat a wife if he had one, and it would not be the way that a lord would treat his lady. When he is told that he is to see a comedy Sly asks:

Sly. Is not a comonty
A Christmas gambol, or a tumbling trick?
Bartholomew. No, my good lord, it is more pleasing stuff.
Sly. What, household stuff?
Bartholomew. It is a kind of history.
Sly. Well, we'll see't. Come, madam wife, sit by my side
And let the world slip. We shall ne'er be younger.

(Induction 2, 133-38)

The comedy bores Sly, and Shakespeare takes the rather unusual course of telling us so, though Sly himself politely denies it, and only murmurs in an aside, "Would 'twere done." The play goes on without him. It is neither about him nor for him, as most theater is not about or for the laboring poor. It is not often in a sophisticated play that an unsophisticated character is to be allowed to come on stage and reject it. Some might wish to argue that this rejection implies Shakespeare's rejection of his play as well in an attempt to absolve him of the antifeminist notions thought to be expressed in it. I think rather that Shakespeare continues to use Sly's perspective in the imagery of relationships rather than through plot structure or event. Petruchio woos Kate with a therapeutic version of the brainwashing that is practiced on Sly, but he makes of her not the lord's white wife, cold, manipulative, and distant, but a countryman's brown wife, as useful, energetic, straight, and willing as his horse and his hawk.

Though Shakespeare is not a government, even if Dr. Taylor sees him as an adjunct of the Ministry for Culture or a stooge of the Ministry for Information, and does not need to be absolved from Taylor's charge, the accusation is so wrong-headed that a protest must be entered. We have only to consider the European division of theater into upper-class literary exercise on the one hand and professional entertainment on the other, to think of the preoccupations of Corneille and Racine and the arbitrary power exercised by the Académie Française, to realize that Shakespeare is not a patrician artist. Though he might choose to portray the plight of patricians he does so from a point of view and in terms that are themselves not patrician or even would-be patrician. The French accusation of grotesquerie and indecorum of which Shakespeare is clearly guilty should indicate to us that all is not as it seems in the Shakespearean drama of the three estates, where the unapplauded king is no king at all.

Notes

¹ Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 395.

² James M. Freeman, Untouchable: An Indian Life History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1979).

³ For example, Richard III 2.2.124. The Oxford Shake-speare citation is under "Additional Passages," p. 250.

⁴ The history of this important idea is beyond the scope of this discussion, but see for example Heywood, The Apology for Actors: "Jehove doth as spectator sit, and chiefe determiner to applaud the best" (A4r) and Dekker, in Warres, Warres, Warres (1628, sig. Blv). E. R. Curtius, Europäisches Literatur und Lateinisches Mittlealter, 2d ed. (Bern: A. Francke, 1954), identifies John of Salisbury as the source for the introduction of God and the saints in heaven as spectators of the human action into the classic trope of the world as theater (149-50).

⁵ The couplet comes from the poem beginning "What is our Life . . . ," first printed in 1612, in The First Set of Madrigals and Mottets by Orlando Gibbons, where it is unattributed. Agnes M. C. Latham accepts the poem as an authentic work of Sir Walter Ralegh in The Poems (London, 1929) and gives a full listing of the twenty-four contemporary manuscript sources in which it can be found, together with a sample of the many variants, of which there are most for this couplet.

⁶ George Whetstone, "To his worshipfull friende, and Kinseman, William Fleetewoode Esquier, Recorder of London," Promos and Cassandra (London, 1578), Aiiv.

⁷ Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in five actions (London, 1582), sig. D1r.

⁸ John Lyly, Campaspe, in The Complete Works, ed. R. Warwick Bond (Oxford, 1902), 2:315.

⁹ Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 22.

¹⁰ Francis Beaumont, "To my friend Maister John Fletcher upon his Faithfull Shepheardesse," The DramaticWorks in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. F. Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 3:490.

¹¹ Ben Jonson, "To the worthy Author M. John Fletcher" in Dramatic Works, ed. Bowers, 3:492.

¹² Thomas Middleton, Father Hubburd's Tale (Lon-don, 1604), sig. B4.

¹³ Michael Drayton, "The Sacrifice to Apollo," in Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), 2:358.

¹⁴ John Marston, Sophonisba (London, 1606), Prologue.

¹⁵ Anne Barton, "He That Plays the King: Ford's Perkin Warbeck and the Stuart History Play," in Forms and Development, ed. Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 69.

¹⁶ John Northbrooke, A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine Playes or Enterluds . . . are reproved . . . (London, 1577), 82.

¹⁷ Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum II (London, 1597), Liber 1, Satire 3.

¹⁸ Henry Crosse, Vertues Commonwealth (London, 1603), sig. P3r.

¹⁹ Cf. Richard III 1.3 and 3.4.

²⁰ Whetstone, "To his worshipfull friende," Aiiv.

²¹ Ann Jennalie Cook, "The Audience of Shakespeare's Plays: A Reconsideration," Shakespeare Studies 1 (1974): 283-305.

²² John Florio, First Fruites (London, 1578), sig. A1r.

²³ Thomas Nashe, Pierce Pendesse his Supplication to the Diuell (London, 1592), sig. Dlv.

²⁴ Thomas Dekker, The Ravens Almanacke (London, 1609), in Non-dramatic Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, 5 vols. (London, 1884), 4:194.

²⁵ Michel Montaigne, "Of the Institution and Educa-tion of Children," in Essays, trans. John Florio, 3 vols. (London, 1603).

²⁶ Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia, 1558-1638 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 90-125.

²⁷ See, for example, Philip Gawdy, in A. V. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld: A Collection of Tudor and Early Stuart Tracts and Ballads (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), xvii-xviii, and A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 93.

²⁸Letters of Philip Gawdy of West Harling, Norfolk, and of London, to Various Members of His Family, 1579-1610, ed. I. H. Jeayes (London, 1906), 121.

²⁹ Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions, sig. D4r.

³⁰ Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 65.

³¹ E.g., Henry V 4.3. 99-108.

³²Two Noble Kinsmen 5.1.51; Hamlet 4.4.50-57 (Q2).

³³ E.g., the Chorus to act 3 of Henry V and 1 Henry VI 1.2.7-12.

³⁴Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 98-99.

³⁵ Roger Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 187.

³⁶ Scott McMillin, "Casting for Pembroke's Men: The Henry VI Quartos and The Taming of the Shrew," Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (Spring 1973): 156-57.