"Your captain is brave and vows reformation": Jack Cade, the Hacket rising, and Shakespeare's vision of popular rebellion in 2 Henry VI.

"And do not stand on quillets how to slay him ..."

(3.1.261)

   Thus died the most dangerous firebrand of sedition, most detestable
   traitor, most hypocriticall seducer, and most execrable blasphemous
   helhound, that many ages ever sawe, or heard of, in this lande. (1)

THESE WELL-TURNED THUNDERCLAPS roll to a formulaic horror. This is the familiar rhetoric for impeachment of a rebel against the state, its piously nauseated hyperbole fusing arraignments of religious offense, moral sophistry, and treason. Found commonly where Tudor governments seek to anathematize declared opponents, the discourse in this instance takes on particular suggestiveness for scholars of Shakespeare, given the dates concerned. These superlatives of Richard Cosin's Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation, vilifying the leader of the Hacket rising of July 1591, and emerging from the presses in late 1592, may bring to mind another hyperbolized "helhound" of treachery, Jack Cade, "dangerous firebrand of sedition" of 2 Henry VI--for it appears that Shakespeare wrote that play, and fashioned his highly peculiar Cade, somewhere between just those two points in time. (2) Indeed, the two "helhounds," William Hacket, the "detestable traitor" of the 1591 rebellion, and the notorious Jack Cade, here become kindred figures, as the inflationary generic categories of official propaganda elevate Hacket (risibly) into a kind of towering demonic equivalence with the worst rebels of English history. Tudor accounts of riot and rebellion characteristically conflated rebels past and present, so that, in the official imagination at least, in a kind of ghastly inversion of eucharistic divine co-presence, archdemons of 1381 and 1450 merged with contemporary firebrands of sedition. Summing up at Hacket's trial, in July 1591, the Solicitor-General himself explicitly compared Hacket with, inter alia, Jack Cade. (3)

But just as the figure of Cade, for the public prosecutor, loomed darkly into the essential significance of Hacket, so the "meaning" of Shakespeare's Jack Cade, as construed by commons audiences of 1591-92, must have come redolent of the recent and sensational experience of William Hacket. For the Hacket insurgency remained lurid in memory and controversial in interpretation for both Londoners and authorities for years afterward: hundreds had witnessed the bizarre Cheapside rising and thousands the freakishly horrible circumstances of Hacket's execution. Given immediate government attempts to associate the rising with a Puritan leadership it was seeking to destroy, the rebellion was kept alive and topical in a stream of publications indicting and defending prominent Puritan divines that continued into 1596. (4) Catholic pamphleteers, such as Verstegan, Parsons, and Southwell, likewise took up the event, in attacks on religion in England in general. (5) References to the Hacket affair also recurred in the writings of Francis Bacon, and in Nashe's assays against Gabriel Harvey, in pamphlets published in 1592 and 1596. (6) Hacket's fanatical followers were remembered well into the seventeenth century, when they were compared with Antinomian sectarians. (7)

Remarkably, however, criticism of 2 Henry VI has never connected the two risings. In consequence, if popular memory of Hacket's recent rebellion figured, inescapably, among primary reception conditions disposing Shakespeare's audience, then proper historical reconstruction of just what Shakespeare was doing with and through the figure of his Jack Cade requires that we exhume, from long oblivion, the grotesque and haunting tragicomedy of William Hacket and his followers. This essay, following a preliminary outline of the critical debate over the politics of the Shakespearean Cade, will accordingly sketch the Hacket revolt and its popular reception, and demonstrate the playwright's suggestive remodelings of Cade as Hacket. Paradoxically, the major effects of superimposing the Elizabethan charlatan upon the Lancastrian rebel turn out to project a surprisingly substantial sympathy for underclass sufferings and popular rebellion. This Shakespearean populism, nuanced and ultimately ambivalent, will be scrutinized, and demonstrated again in that further play of topical allusion, and remarkable stagecraft stratagem, that craft the death of this most complex and protean Jack Cade.

"Why, rude companion, whatsoe'er thou be, / I know thee not"

(4.9.28-29)

Long central to political interpretations of the Shakespearean Cade have been the playwright's deviations from the Chroniclers' Cade. These divergences have been frequently interpreted in baldly negative terms, as the antipopulist animus of an allegedly conservative bard. Richard Helgerson, for instance, construing the play's representation of common people as both straightforwardly hostile and lamentably brief, concludes that "It is as though Shakespeare set out to cancel the popular ideology with which his cycle of history plays began, as though he wanted to efface, alienate, even demonize all signs of commoner participation in the political nation." The reason lay in the "infatuation with royal power" of Shakespeare the ambitious social climber, seeking refined personal distance from the tainting plebeian energies of his theater. (8) Judging the politics of the play as "not qualitatively different" from that of the "unambiguously monarchical" Jack Strawe, Walter Cohen declares that Shakespeare "present[s] the rebels' position in the serene confidence that it will be contemptuously dismissed." Even the more complex verdict of David Bevington concedes that the ridicule of Cade and egalitarian ideas "reinforces the point that 'justice' administered by private citizens will soon lead to anarchy," and that "the topical force of Shakespeare's political portraiture is non-progressive." The "potentially subversive" rebellion scenes "seem finally designed to justify oppression," concludes Phyllis Rackin. "Dissident sentiments are first evoked, then discredited and demonized as sources of anxiety, and finally defused in comic ridicule and brutal comic violence." (9) Widely quoted is the dictum of Richard Wilson: Cade is "metamorphosed into a cruel, barbaric lout, whose slogan is 'kill and knock down,' and whose story, as 'the architect of disorder,' is one long orgy of scatological clowning, arson and homicide, fuelled by an infantile hatred of literacy and law." Shakespeare, insists Wilson, "used his professional debut to signal scorn for popular culture and identification with an urban elite ... The ideological function of the 'wooden O' was less to give voice to the alien, outcast and dispossessed, than to allow their representatives the rope to hang." (10)

Such voices have not gone unopposed. Christopher Hill (11) has saluted the juridical accuracy, and authentic popular anger, concentrated in Cade's accusation, "because they could not read, thou hast hanged them" (4.7.37-38); (12) and Thomas Cartelli, demonstrating the play's fidelity to the reciprocal class angers of 1590s England, has argued that Cade's war against literacy, far from projecting a demonized fanaticism, was brusquely cogent in branding literacy as nexus of resented privilege, scarcely definable by other criteria. "Although the attendant scorn directed at literacy itself may constitute a displaced (and arguably self-defeating) symptom of political dispossession, the indictment of its beneficiaries could not be more apt." (13) In a further acknowledgment of the shrewdness of insurgent popular reasonings, Annabel Patterson redirects attention to the play's earlier and "morally authoritative" popular rising, which successfully protected the king from Suffolk by enforcing his exile. "What Shakespeare provided in 1592 was an opportunity to discriminate: between contrasting attitudes toward the popular voice protesting; and between socially useful or abusive styles of its mediation." (14) Even the second popular rising of the play, it is argued by Stephen Longstaffe, may not have generated the unequivocal revulsion against Cade and rebellion that critics like Wilson have argued, as we recognize when we attend to the drama's performance values at that point. The modulation of the Cade sequence into knockabout, carnivalesque mode, not to mention the likely impersonation of clowning Cade by hilarious Will Kemp, would have unloosed a "dialogic" of complex effects, establishing "not simply parody, but metaparody." Nor, Longstaffe speculates, would the rowdy audience appetite thereby inflamed be necessarily dissolved by the burgeoning violence. (15) Ellen C. Caldwell has sketched historical analogues between popular distress in 1450 and the 1590s, concluding a considerable sympathy for Cade (although her determination to find only political seriousness in Cade's carnivalesque proposals that the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops and the pissing-conduit run claret for a year, suggests limited ear for dramatic tone). (16) Jean Howard has emphasized the foundational principle of aristocratic culpability in this play, wherein, indisputably, Shakespeare lays the primary blame for war and suffering at the door not of Jack Cade, manifest tool of megalomaniac York, but of the "unspeakable selfishness of the English nobles." (17) In similar vein, Paola Pugliatti, tracing the systematic "degradation" and "levelling to the lowest plane" of all the play's main characters, high and low, that Shakespeare imposes in his deviations from the Chronicles, concludes that, although Cade and his followers are "grotesque and almost subhuman," "it was the abasement and disfiguring of the high sphere that determined a parallel and reflected process of degradation in the low sphere ... The political lesson is there for those who want to see it." (18) As Victor Kiernan, in an unjustly neglected work, elaborates such perspective, "A certain miasma of the insane, of violence out of control, pervades all the earlier Histories, as the spiral of crime goes on mounting. Amid it all the old political order shows itself irretrievably bad, incapable of regeneration. Its animating spirit is an unreasoning, insatiable thirst for power." (19)

Where critics agree is the fact that Shakespeare's Cade is historically inauthentic: a complex and composite figure. The narrative outline of his major actions does broadly conform to the events of the historical Cade rebellion of 1450, (20) as taken by Shakespeare from Hall and Holinshed. The killing of the Stafford brothers by the rebel army camping on Blackheath, their incursion into Southwark and release of prisoners from its jails, the flight of the King, and subsequent triumphal entry of Cade and rebels into London ("Now is Mortimer lord of this city"), (21) all derive from the Chronicles; as do the arraignment and execution of Lord Say and Sir James Cromer, the placing of their heads on poles, whence they are made to "kiss," the death of Matthew Goffe in battle, and the abrupt dispersal of the rebel army when offered a pardon, thereby abandoning Cade to his later fate on the sword of one Alexander Iden of Kent.

Yet into this dizzy course of events Shakespeare infuses yet a headier brew. Cade and his followers had been motivated by limited political aims, essentially seeking deliverance from crushing taxation, and expressing themselves in a formal "Complaint," articulating "the general grudge of the people for the universal smart that, through misgovernment, everywhere they suffered, who thus forwearied with the peise [weight] of burdens too heavy for them any longer to bear." (22) By contrast, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 had fought for a fundamental transformation of the entire sociopolitical system. Aiming to relieve themselves and their families from injurious economic exploitation forever, Wat Tyler's rebels undertook the widespread burning of financial records, the execution of lawyers and justices, attack on the Inns of Court, and even the swearing of grammar school teachers to forbear instruction in literacy. Further, John Bali's sermons had urged the logic of full-scale egalitarian revolution. "They might destroy first the great lords of the realm, and after the judges and lawyers, questmongers, and all other whom they undertook to be against the commons; for so they might procure peace and surety to themselves in time to come, if, despatching out of the way the great men, there should be an equality in liberty, no difference in degrees of nobility, but a like dignity and equal authority in all things brought in among them." (23) As scholars have long recognized, Shakespeare pours this radical spirit of 1381 into his nominal account of 1450 at several points. "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" is the cry that stimulates Cade's meditation on the lamentable guilt of parchment, and precipitates the slaying of the Clerk of Chartham (4.2.68-98); while, "all the realm shall be in common" (4.2.60), and the address of his followers as "fellow kings" (4.2.148) are patent echoes of the egalitarian thematic. "We will not leave one lord, one gentleman--/ Spare none but such as go in clouted shoon" (4.2.167-68) is the headlong war cry of a committed class warfare distinctly at odds with the agenda and events of 1450.

The Shakespearean purpose behind such revisionism is variously explained. For some critics, this may be no more than that habit of Tudor authorities, already noted, of conflating popular historical rebellions: "What more odious smell to all true English hearts than the unhappy memory of Cade, Straw, Ket, Perry, and others of like deserts?" (24) Yet such essentialization of rebellion is itself ideologically loaded, impatiently effacing the particularities of commons suffering and rebel grievance, for an absolutized reflex of malediction. The commons, as it were, are always (and utterly) revolting. "The people," gestured Archbishop Whitgift, "are commonly bent to novelties and to factions and most ready to receive that doctrine that seemeth to be contrary to the present state and that inclineth to liberty." (25) Even the chroniclers concede much to this patrician damnatory haze. The Kentish rebels of 1450, shrugs Hall, in a tautology betraying abrupt recoil from mental attention, were "ever desirous of new chaung [sic], and new fangelnes" (219-20). Similarly, literary critics "convinced of the majority view that Shakespeare was always a law-and-order playwright" (Patterson 36), will construe the syncretistic drive here as evidence of a propertied dramatist's eagerness to tar all popular insurgency with the same, "extremist" brush. Yet quite the opposite construction is possible. Introduction of the 1381 material, with its conveniently radicalized Cade, permits Shakespeare to establish, I suggest, in the face of censorship, an at least fleeting critique of the social order at its most fundamental. After all, as Patterson notes, the Elizabethan collation of popular risings, past and present, implies a continuing "cultural tradition of popular protest," stubbornly egalitarian across the centuries. (26) More specifically, as James Holstun has recently suggested, Shakespeare may be smuggling surreptitious echoes of Kett's rebellion into his play, activating subversive memories of that reforming, class-based rebellion of 1549 that haunted the later sixteenth century, and whose ending in "a gentleman's riot" of exterminatory savagery ensured a legacy of gentry paranoia and biding underclass bitterness. (27) If Shakespeare is allusively reviving the traumatized popular feelings left by Kett's rebellion (and historians have long recognized that "Memories of Kett's rebellion--the 'camping time'--still lingered at the end of Elizabeth's reign in Norfolk and other eastern counties"), (28) then he is indeed generating, in a phrase of Annabel Patterson's, "ethical and pathetic claims whose force may linger beyond [detraction's] powers of persuasion" (42).

To judge, however, among such polarized perspectives on Shakespearean intention, we must establish the fuller picture of his modeling of Cade; for Shakespeare's divergences from the Chronicles extend well beyond the radicalizing ahistorical supplement of the Peasants' Revolt. The core character of Jack Cade is transformed: indeed demonized, as critics like Wilson see it. For Hall, Cade had been "A certayn yong man of a goodely stature, and pregnaunt wit" (Hall 220), just as for Holinshed, lords had found him "sober in talk, wise in reasoning" (Holinshed 3:224). And though Holinshed records that the same lords also (and inevitably) thought him, on demanding direct negotiation with the King, "arrogant in heart, and stiff in opinion," the impression remains not only of persuasive intelligence, but of a guiding restraint, tactical at the least, within rebellion. In Southwark, Cade "prohibited to all his retinue murder, rape, and robbery, by which colour of well meaning he the more allured to him the hearts of the common people." Hall even notes that Cade's discourse was so extraordinarily convincing to the commons that the King, "doubtyng as much his familiar servauntes, as his unknowen subjectes (which spared not to speake, that the capitaynes cause was profitable for the common wealth) departed in all haste to the castell of Kylyngworthe in Warwyckeshyre" (Holinshed 3:224). By contrast with Cade the model of a cool reasonableness that could compel the King's familiars from his side, the Cade of 2 Henry VI revels in bloody cluster-bombs of anarchy. His followers a rabble rather than clear co-reasoners, his maxim is ebullient disorder: "then are we in order when we are / Most out of order" (4.2.172-73).

Yet this, too, may transpire to be something quite other than demonization. (29) Through this second pattern of divergence from the Chronicles, to the composite rebel of 1450 and 1381 is added a further dimension, which guarantees much popular appeal: in this rowdiest incarnation, Jack Cade becomes that ancient delight, the carnival tradition's Lord of Misrule. From the very outset of the Cade sequence, with its lath swords and idled, wise-cracking laborers, Shakespeare transposes the fundamental mode of the drama, dislocating it at a snap from sharp and somber realism, political and psychological, into a festive disruption of illusionism, and a fireworks of punning and pillorying. From the explosive release of energy in this medium, Cade billows into a crude giantism, gains the primal force of archetype; and through the carnivalesque collapse of Chronicle realism, his philosophic contradictions become ludic, rather than ludicrous, naturalized into familiar shows of hilarity.

   There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny,
   the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it a
   felony to drink small beer. (4.2.58-60)

Francois Laroque is unquestionably right to recognize in Cade "the vein of parodic eloquence that a Lord of Misrule would favour ... a Carnival king whose reign ushers in the era of a world set upside down." (30)

Yet Laroque curiously neglects the political effects. As the violence so terrible in a realist mode turns here into festal stage knockabout, the killings into Punch-and-Judy slapstick, the very medium, I suggest, becomes an accomplice of Cade. As on Shrove Tuesday, uproar, vice, and anti-authoritarian energies are licensed, appropriate, and welcomed. With moral norms inverted, and comic whim the driving dramatic principle, dealing out whacks is just hilarious stage feigning.

Cade. And now henceforward it shall be treason for any that calls me otherwise than Lord Mortimer. Enter a soldier running

Soldier. Jack Cade! Jack Cade!

Cade. Zounds, knock him down there! They kill him

Butcher. If this fellow be wise, he'll never call ye Jack Cade more; I think he hath a very fair warning. (4.6.4-8)

To interpret this Cade sequence solemnly as a political essay dispraising popular insurgency is to miss--as surely the Elizabethan censor was intended to miss--these crucial performance values, the gratification offered a commons audience by the outbreak of "playing" in a "playhouse." Bonding through asides, sharing jubilant mischief against spluttering high seriousness, Cade revels with the commons in Saturnalian flouting.

Stafford. And will ye credit this base drudge's words That speaks he knows not what?

All. Ay, marry, will we therefore get ye gone.

Stafford's Brother. Jack Cade, the Duke of York hath taught you this.

Cade. (Aside): He lies, for I invented it myself. (4.2.136-40)

As Lord of Misrule in the carnival world, what Cade conquers is audience hearts.

Only at a later point in the rebellion sequence will come the gradual return from playing to acting, from liberative stage topsy-turvy to morally serious illusionism--as reinstatement of historical portrayal necessitated--with the execution of Lord Saye, and in time for the slaying of Jack Cade: that crucial coda with which this essay must close.

Neither should we miss, I suggest, the further force of joyous liberation here, that ensued when the underground language of class defiance suddenly dared speak itself publically. Successive parliamentary extensions of treason laws from 1534 to indict speech against state policies and personnel had built a higher wall of fear around political outspokenness, and established an intensive monitoring of popular speech. As a Suffolk commoner complained in 1537, "Wee are so used howe a days at Bungay as was nev[er] sene affore this; for if ii or iii gud felows be walkyng togedr, the constables come to theyme and wolle knowe what communycacon they have or ellys they shalbe stokkyd." In 1597, two laborers strolling on a country road, chatting of the failings of the aristocracy, found themselves forced before the Privy Council, reported by a servant hidden below a hedge as they had passed. (31) Consequently, as historian of popular ideology Andy Wood puts it, "There was something liberating about those moments when poor men and women spoke publicly against authority ... To speak of politics became a moment of transgressive freedom." (32) That bursting free from discursive restraints, launched with the opening of the Cade sequence--"Well, I say it was never merry world in England since gentlemen came up" (4.2.6-7)--was clearly just such a liberative experience, I suggest; and its extended gratification, in the intense publicity of public, playhouse utterance, must have reached the dizzying maximum.

Excavation of this third and festal layer to Cade, exposing the reign of a Lord of Misrule, has hitherto completed literary critical stratigraphy of Shakespeare's composite Cade. History itself, however, took a hand in Shakespearean creativity with the announcement in Cheapside, at market time one busy summer morning, of the arrival of the Messiah.

"Our enemies shall fall before us, inspired with the spirit of putting down kings and princes"

(4.2.30-31)

At approximately eight o'clock on the morning of Friday, July 16, 1591, the Angel of Mercy and the Angel of Judgment, mad with the mania of the Holy Spirit, met as planned, to launch the apocalypse, in the lodgings of the Messiah, near Broken Wharf, London. They found him still in bed. The Angel of Mercy, one Edmund Coppinger, a Suffolk gentleman and minor servant of the Queen, and the Angel of Judgment, Henry Arthington, a Yorkshire gentleman, fell to their knees and burst into prayer. Coppinger, thanking God for his mission despite his own unworthiness, joyously acknowledged the universal supremacy of William Hacket as King of Europe, whereupon Hacket, Northamptonshire yeoman and reincarnation of John the Baptist, dressed only in his shirt, leapt from the bed. He prayed fervently that the honor of Jesus Christ might be advanced, then climbed back under the bedclothes.

Coppinger resuming his former line of prayer, Hacket once more arose and pointedly prayed that God's prophets might fully honor Christ, thereafter returning to bed, whereon Arthington recognized the need to anoint the King of Europe. Both Angels now fell flat before the bed, the Angel of Mercy kissing three times the boards of the floor that had been touched by the King's feet. When Mercy then rose and moved toward the King, Hacket clasped hands with him and cried, "You shall not neede to annoynt mee, for I have bene alreadie annoynted in heaven by the holy Ghost himselfe." "Goe your ways both," he instructed them, "and tell them in the Citie, that Christ Iesus is comme with his Fanne in his hand to judge the earth. And if any man aske you where he is, tell them he lies at Walker's house by Broken Wharfe: & if they will not believe it, let them come & kill me, if they can: for as truely as Christ Iesus is in Heaven, so truely is he come to judge the world." (33) The Angel of Mercy then rushed from the chamber so swiftly that the Angel of Judgment had no time to put his gloves on. Nonetheless, he followed at once, and the two commenced crying out in the streets below, as startled crowds began to gather, that Christ Jesus was come.

The account is from Richard Cosin's work of government propaganda, and its details thus probably fictitious. Although it is closely matched in Arthington's own, subsequent testimonial in Seduction of Arthington by Hacket (1592), the latter pamphlet, written in prison to appease the authorities and appeal for release, doubtless sought to conciliate the government by endorsing its every position. Nonetheless, the accent in the government account here, upon hilarity and fraudulent transparency, was a crucial feature of the entire event as presented by almost all commentators, and one we must bear in mind in consideration of Shakespeare's Cade.

What ensued was probably far better grounded in fact, for as Curtis Breight argues, "Most of the events were witnessed by hundreds of people, and so an official account filled with lies would have been liable to refutation" by those challenging the long-controversial conclusions to which the government put this case. (34) Coppinger and Arthington proceeded along Watling Street and Old Change to Cheapside--a route, suggests Breight ("Duelling ceremonies" 52), imitating that of official ceremonies such as the Lord Mayor's Pageant--all the while crying "Repent, England, repent," and announcing the advent of the Messiah. By the time they were close to their destination, Cheapside Cross, there had gathered such a "mightie concourse of the common multitude" that "the throng and preasse of people" prevented both further movement and proper audibility. They therefore mounted a convenient empty cart close by,

   and out of that choise pulpit ... made their lewde and trayterous
   preachment unto the people: wherein they stoode not onely upon the
   wordes of their former crye, but (so neere as I could learne from
   so common an Auditorie, and in so confused an action) they reading
   something out of a paper, went more particularly over the office
   and calling of Hacket: how he represented Christ, by partaking a
   part of his glorified body ... and by the office of severing the
   good from the bad with the fanne in his hands, and of establishing
   the Gospell in Europe ... and of bringing in that Discipline which
   they so often bable of, and which they meane by the terme of
   Reformation. (Cosin 56)

Coppinger, as Angel of Mercy, promised great comfort and unspeakable joys to all who repented, while Arthington, as Angel of Judgment, pronounced terrible punishments to engulf London, and all who repented not.

   This judgement against London ... was that, men should (there) kill
   and massacre one another (as Butchers do kill swyne) all the day
   long, and no man shoulde take compassion of them. There was then and
   there delivered by them, or by the one of them, that Hacket was King
   of Europe, and so ought to be obeyed and taken: and that all Kings
   must holde of him, and that the Queenes Maiestie had forfeited her
   Crowne, and was worthie to be deprived ... Lastly, in very
   unmannerly and sawcy tearmes they prayed to God, to confound two
   great Lordes of her Maiesties Counsell: for these two (together with
   a certayne Knight) they then and there openly and most lewdely
   accused in generall tearmes of treason. (Cosin 56-57)

Alas, the crowds responded to these apocalyptic prospects in likewise unmannerly and saucy terms, mobbing the Angels with cat-calling merriment. This embarrassment, combined with the increasing "preasse ... of common people to gaze and woonder at them," obliged the pair at length to seek refuge in the Mermaid tavern. Coppinger finally sought to flee continuing uproar by returning home, and Arthington, who appears to have kept up his "trayterous" preachments somewhat longer than Coppinger, was followed as he fled Cheapside "by a great multitude of lads and young persons of the meaner sort" (58).

Seeking the Messiah at his Broken Wharfe lodgings, Arthington found him gone, but became forcibly detained there himself. When Hacket returned, finding all in hubbub, the Angel of Judgment cried out in relief "There cometh the king of the earth!" Hacket, however, told him grimly to shut up. But a number of alarmed citizens were now searching both men, and the chamber, and they found upon Arthington a letter to the Queen depriving her of office. "This strange accident," meanwhile, "being quickely blowen through the citie, all was in a buzz, and in a kinde of astonishment, what to thinke of the matter" (59). Word of it swiftly reaching the Queen at Greenwich, she dispatched two Privy Councillors to investigate, who at once arraigned the "trayterous" trio at the Lord Mayor's house. The rising was over.

The buzz and astonishment continued to feed, however, upon certain writings, put into circulation by the conspirators shortly before their annunciation of Hacket to the masses. A bundle of about a thousand pamphlets had been printed, for distribution to brethren in Northamptonshire, Essex, and Hertfordshire, to explain "the reason for this course taken in reformation," and to urge assistance in this predestinate project. Some of these pamphlets, it was alleged at Hacket's trial, were "already abroad" before the rising. (35) Further, copies of some two hundred letters had been dispersed to certain brethren on 13 July, three days before the rising, again requesting assistance in the "reformation" about to executed. These may or may not be the "certaine seditious letters" mentioned by Cosin, "that were purposely scattered five or sixe nights afore in many of the streetes of London, by some of the actors, or by their complices and favourers" (32). Also produced by the conspirators was another pamphlet, called The Fool's Bolt, this one aimed at the laity. Taking the form of a rhyming ballad, it contained the following:

   Yf you in youthe will learne
   A courtier for to be,
   Then must thou first come knowe
   Thy lessen true of me:
   A christian trew, althoughe he be a cloune,
   Shall teache a prince to wear his scepter and his crowne.

(Kenyon MS, 609)

Finally, according to the Attorney-General at Hacket's arraignment in Newgate, an order to the Privy Council had also been printed, in which the councillors were ordered not to leave their houses during the tumult until Hacket and his followers had taken possession of the city. (The printer of these materials died in prison--"for sorrow"--two days after his arrest [Kenyon MS, 609]). Throughout the week before the rising, Arthington had been working feverishly upon a final and culminating pamphlet, A Prophecie of Judgements against England, which explained the "extraordinary calling" of the three prophets, and the need to punish the city of London, the law courts, and the Privy Council, for their failure "to bring in Reformation" (Cosin 38-41). To this Coppinger had supplied an appendix, Hacket's History, sketching the persecution and physical torments suffered by Hacket in his preachings over previous years, as proofs of his Messianic status. Since, however, the Prophecie and the History were not completed until the night before the uprising, copies of these works presumably could not have been in circulation at the time: although it seems likely that it was from his History that Coppinger read aloud to the crowd on the nature of Hacket's calling (Cosin 56), as he testified, giddy and exalted, among the heckling masses upon his empty cart.

All three were imprisoned and tortured. In Bridewell prison, and then on trial at Newgate on the twenty-sixth, Hacket pleaded guilty to the charge that he had denied the Queen's sovereignty, as well as to having defaced the royal arms in a lodgings house. He admitted that he had sought to displace certain members of the Privy Council, for their wickedness, and that he had claimed to be the anointed King of Europe, but he denied that he had ever wished to kill Elizabeth (Cosin 61-62, 64-69). Sentenced to death, this strange, eventful history was now to end where it had begun, at Cheapside Cross.

The execution hour being set for "betwixt x and xi of the clock, when the market time is," (36) Hacket was dragged forth on a hurdle from Newgate, on the morning of Wednesday, July 28. He was at once lapped by an "incredible multitude (then in the streetes) but especially in Chepside from one end thereof unto the other (the like whereof at no assemblie in memorie hath bene seene)." The officers experienced great difficulty in making headway against the gigantic crowds, a task made no easier by Hacket's crying aloud, throughout, that the heavens were opening and Jehovah about to deliver him. Arrived at the gibbet, he "fell to rayling and cursing of the Queenes Maiestie," and prayed angrily to God to "send some miracle out of a cloude to convert the Infidels" and deliver him. "If not," he warned the Almighty, "I will fire the heavens, and teare thee from thy throne with my handes." As the executioner approached, he cried, "Ah thou bastards childe, wilt thou hange William Hacket thy king?" The officers "had much a doe" to get him up the ladder, and Hacket fought fiercely to avoid the encircling noose, jerking head and shoulders wildly from side to side. He was finally snared as he broke off the struggle to fire a final imprecation at the officers: "Have I this for my kingdome bestowed upon thee? I come to revenge thee, and plague thee." The crowd screaming with gratified fury at his blasphemies, Hacket was finally forced off the ladder, to swing high and violently above the sea of heads in Cheapside. When he was cut down, his heart was sliced out, and "shewed out openly to the people."

   Thus died the most dangerous firebrand of sedition, most detestable
   traitor, most hypocriticall seducer, and most execrable blasphemous
   helhound, that many ages ever sawe, or heard of, in this lande.
   (Cosin 71-72)

As to Hacket's imprisoned fellow prophets, Coppinger apparently lost his mind under torture. Arthington, however, remained convinced that none could harm Hacket, as the Messiah. When the news came that Hacket had been successfully executed, Arthington finally broke down. Coppinger, who had refused food and drink, died. These spirits being melted into thin air, the baseless fabric of their vision quite dissolved, there was left but the rack behind.

They had been, however, such stuff as conspiracy theories are made on. The government publicized the contacts (overwhelmingly spurned) made by Hacket and his followers with the Puritan leadership in the months before their rising, and sought to associate both the Hacket affair and Puritanism with the infamous egalitarianism of Protestant Munster. (37) Catholic writers seized on the rising to discredit religion in England. But most people, it seems, just laughed. Hacket, noted Francis Bacon, "must needs be thought a very dangerous heretic, that could never get but two disciples; and those, as it should seem, perished in their brain ... those two fellows the people rather laughed at as a may-game, than took any heed of what they said: so as it was very true that an honest poor woman said when she saw Hacket out of a window pass to his execution, 'It was foretold that in the latter days there should come those that have deceived many; but in faith thou hast deceived but few'" (Bacon 1.383).

To exactly such a reception of self-pleasuring popular scoffing arrived soon another pretender-king, around the spring of 1592, who at once announced himself "inspired with the spirit of putting down kings and princes." To a jockeying crowd of heckling bystanders, "Jack Cade" pointedly declared: "Your captain is brave, and vows reformation" (2 Henry VI, 4.1.30-31, 57).

"This devil here shall be my substitute"

(3.1.371)

The Cade of the Chronicles had been so formidably compelling in rational argument that, according to Hall, his "perswasions" boded seduction of even the royal household servants (Hall 220). Shakespeare, however, takes the extraordinary step of presenting Cade in terms of zero credibility as Mortimer, and as engulfed in boisterous popular ridicule. Referring to him from the outset as "Jack Cade the clothier" (Bevis 4.2.4), (38) Shakespeare is at pains to emphasize that not only are the commons permanently undeceived as to Cade's real identity, but that his listeners are thrown into merriment by the manifest absurdity of his perswasions.

   Cade. We, John Cade, so termed of our supposed father--
   Butcher [to his fellows]. Or rather of stealing a cade of herrings.
   Cade. For our enemies shall fall down before us, inspired with the
     spirit of putting down kings and princes--command silence!
   Butcher. Silence!
   Cade. My father was a Mortimer--
   Butcher [to his fellows]. He was an honest man, and a good
     bricklayer.
   Cade. My mother a Plantagenet--
   Butcher [to his fellows]. I knew her well, she was a midwife.
   Cade. My wife descended of the Lacys--
   Butcher [to his fellows]. She was indeed a pedlar's daughter and
     sold many laces.
   Weaver [to his fellows]. But now of late, not able to travel
     with her furred pack, she washes bucks here at home.
   Cade. Therefore am I of an honourable house.
   Butcher [to his fellows]. Ay, by my faith, the field is
     honourable, and there he was born, under a hedge; for his
     father had never a house but the cage.

(4.2.28-46)

In flat contradiction of Bevis's statement that the rebels "have been up these two days" (2.4.2), Shakespeare chooses, for his introduction of Cade, not to introduce the rebel in medias res, accompanied by believing followers, but instead to present him at a vulnerable originary moment, crafted as a laughable self-annunciation. The entire model of presentation here, with its hilariously transparent impostor structure, the abrupt announcement of grand claims (" We, Jack Cade") to a heckling lower-class crowd, the raucous laughter as the vulgar identity is skewered beneath the swelling pretensions, and the commoners who choose to stay with the uproar despite disbelief in the declamatory nonsense, surely recalls in unmistakable terms the scene in Cheapside, only months previously, when Hacket's "Angels" fulsomely proclaimed, to mirthful crowd reactions. The tone of uproarious comedy and hyperbolical excess is thus due not only, on a general plane, to Carnival's Lord of Misrule, more specifically to July's Hacket rising and its farcically naive apocalyptic grandstanding. All commentators on the rebellion recorded the risibility of the pretenders (Cosin uses words like absurd, childish, ridiculous [6, 46]), and the resultant hilarity of the crowds; many of whom, recorded Cosin (58), could not tear themselves away from these revels of the preposterous ("All the way that Arthington went, hee was followed by a great multitude of lads and young persons of the meaner sort"). Cosin relates how an alleged "Gentleman in a white doublet," so "plucked at Coppinger whiles hee was in the Carte, and rebuked him for his strange and lewde demeanour and speeches" that the badgered prophets were eventually forced to flee catcalling disparagements for shelter in the Mermaid tavern. (39) Bacon, we have seen, was appropriately reminded of carnival behavior ("those two fellows the people rather laughed at as a may game, than took any heed what was said"); and Nashe, lacerating Gabriel Harvey in the same year as the play, picks up the tonality: "The tickling and stirring invective vaine, the puffing and swelling Satiricall spirit came upon him, as it came on Coppinger and Arthington, when they mounted into the pease-cart in Cheape-side and preacht" (Nashe 1:295). A letter, possibly by Phelippes, in the Calendar of State Papers confides that most people thought the Hacket trio mere fanatics, "which is very likely," and that the Queen was "more troubled with it than it is worth." (40) Even the Attorney-General at the Newgate arraignment conceded that "in all appearancie Hacket was franticke" (Kenyon 608): an antic disposition feigned, somewhat Hamlet-like, to escape prosecution, as the government purported to believe. Vastly amused, the desire of the mob in 2 Henry VI to move with Cade is due not to deceit, but to gloating in the outrageous, to political anger, and to the possibility of gain:

   2 Messenger.
   The rascal people, thirsting after prey,
   Join with the traitor; and they jointly swear
   To spoil the city and your royal court.
   (4.4.50-53)

This "hilariously transparent impostor structure" is perhaps the most obvious of a set of five major parallels through which Shakespeare grafts Hacket onto Cade. The second is the projection upon Cade of religious idiom and context. Given, like Hacket, to a reflex religious or even Puritan diction, the Shakespearean Cade affects to see himself as a champion embroiled in cosmic battle, warring against demons and passionately accountable to the heavens. The chroniclers' Cade, by contrast, had been entirely free of religious concern or phrase. Shakespeare's Cade thus introduces himself as one whose enemies will fall down because he is "inspired with the spirit of putting down kings and princes" (emphasis added). Echoing Isaiah 14:23 ("and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction"), (41) he promises his followers, "I am the besom that must sweep the court clean of such filth" (4.7.26-27). Condemning Lord Saye, he declares "he has a familiar under his tongue; he speaks not a [in] God's name" (4.2.30-31;4.7.98-99). Abandoned by his followers, he cries, with paranoid grandeur, "In despite of the devils and hell, have through the very middest of you! And heavens and honour be my witness" (4.7.201-2). Slain by Iden, he swears, "Let ten thousand devils come against me, and give me but the ten meals I have lost, and I'd defy them all" (4.9.59-60). Above all, in his opening self-revelation, he promises the crowd: "Your captain is brave, and vows reformation" (4.2.57; emphasis added).

"Reformation" was the supercharged term, constantly bandied about by Hacket and his followers, and derided by the government prosecutors, that summed up that sublime project of ecclesiastical transformation sought by the Hacket rebels, as by more sane Puritan opposition to the Anglican via media. Only when spelled with a capital "R," records OED, did its sixteenth-century meaning narrow to the purely religious referent. Spoken aloud on the stage, however, its spelling would be conjectural, and its signified will thus have embraced both secular and religious possibilities. Arthington's pamphlet, A Prophecie of Iudgement against England, had been peppered with excited promise of "Reformation"; Cosin's counterblast suspends the term in disdainful revulsion between finger and thumb at innumerable points. His very title took aim at the seditious potentiality of the word: Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation. Moreover, Reformation radicalism had insisted, from the beginnings in the 1520s, that "Reformation meant much more than changes in devotional practices and ecclesiastical institutions; public life as a whole was urgently in need of Christianization." (42) In Kett's Rebellion of 1549, captured gentlemen, according to the Sotherton account, were led by the rebels to judgment at their 'Tree of Reformacion.' (43) As late as the 1590s, in London the term was clearly shading the religious with political meaning, as when Richard Bancroft, in a pamphlet of 1593, written to exculpate himself of subversive association with Hacket's followers, recorded that Hacket had declared in early July "that if the Magistrates did not governe well, the people might draw themselves together and see a reformation." (44) In "vowing Reformation," Shakespeare's Cade reeked of Hacket and of radical Puritan insurgency.

But there is more to this "Cade" than a generally reforming, religious character. Crucially, "Reformation," for Hacket, Coppinger, and Arthington, was entwined with the idea of revengeful "Judgment," happily anticipating the prospect of punishing opposed magistrates and councillors in the potentially violent transformation of government needful for true theocracy. The third parallel between Hacket and the Shakespearean Cade lies in just this pronounced and megalomaniac arrogation of Judgment claims-something from which the Puritan opposition was desperate to dissociate itself. Arthington's Iudgement against England had declared that "the fearefull Judgements of God shall be sure to fall on the reprobate: being already prepared, and put into the handes of the Mightie Messenger of the Almightie God, William Hacket, to be powred out upon this great Citie of London, and upon all places, where repentance followeth not this publication." (45) Arthington and Coppinger, we have seen, had been designated by Hacket, and introduced themselves to the doubting vulgar of Cheapside, as God's Angels of Judgment and Mercy, respectively: "ordained to separate the Lambes from the Goates" (Cosin 47, 56). Cade, confronted with the unfortunate Clerk of Chartham, thus solemnly enunciates his prerogative of mercy or condemnation: "The man is a proper man, of my honour. Unless I find him guilty, he shall not die. Come hither, sirrah, I must examine thee" (4.2.83-85). Like Hacket, oracular apostle of vengeance, Cade will command the kingdom: "My mouth shall be the Parliament of England" (4.7.12). Lord Saye is loftily condemned on grounds of religious authority: "he speaks not a [in] God's name. Go, take him away" (4.7.99). The Jack Cade of the Chronicles, though he ordered the same executions as Shakespeare's character, had exercised mere ad hoc authority by force of arms: he had never insinuated religious mandate.

The Shakespearean Cade, moreover, pretends to kingship. Introducing the claim from his first word ("We, John Cade.... " 4.2.28), its iteration is one of his delights: "It is to you, good people, that I speak, / Over whom, in time to come, I hope to reign--/ For I am rightful heir unto the crown" (4.2.116-18). Shakespeare has fun with a Cade bumblingly incorrigible in his regal prerogatives: "What canst thou answer to my Majesty?" he demands of Saye (4.7.23). "There shall not a maid be married but she shall pay to me her maidenhead" (4.7.111-12). Contradictorily, faced with Sir Humphrey Stafford, Cade makes good his own claim that Stafford will be encountered with as good a man as himself by exercising a little impromptu ennoblement:

Cade. To equal him, I will make myself a knight presently.

[He kneels and knights himself]

Rise up, Sir John Mortimer.

[He rises]

Now have at him!

(4.2.106-8)

Once again, any such claims are foreign to the Chronicler's Cade, who had never gone beyond the high water mark of "Lord of this city"; predictably, however, they everywhere adorn the epical delirium of Hacket. Anointed by the Almighty, Hacket would "not onely establish the Gospell in all kingdomes, but all Kings and Princes should also yeelde their scepters unto him, and hee shoulde bee established chiefe king over all Europe" (Cosin 22).

Unfortunately, since Mr. Hacket was, as of 16 July, King of Europe and "above all the princes in the world" (Cosin 36), a certain delicate ambiguity ensued as to proper relations with Her Majesty. One can well imagine that this unsubtle constitutional point was not lost on the interested citizens of Cheapside. The same solution to the dilemma is thus found in both the Hacket declamations and in 2 Henry VI: by gracious permission, the national monarch will be allowed to retain the crown, but will rule henceforth under the true king as their Protector. "Shee may not raigne as Soveraigne," adjudged Hacket, as Cosin narrates his conversation with Arthington, "and yet shee shall live better than ever shee did, albeit shee must bee governed by another, thereby also meaning Hacket" (Cosin 37). Kings of the earth would henceforth "holde their scepters of him, and be governed by such lawes and orders, as he should appoynt" (Cosin, 99). "Go to, sirrah--tell the king from me," commands the Cade unknown to history, "that for his father's sake, Henry the Fifth, in whose time boys went to span-counter for French crowns, I am content he shall reign; but I'll be Protector over him" (4.2.141-44).

Finally, there is one last twist with which Shakespeare tugs the antic cloak of Hacket firmly down over the quasi-historical torso of Cade. In the opening boasts of his grand self-annunciation, Cade's only argument for his fitness to rule (following his caricatured dynastic claim) is curiously framed by Shakespeare, through both Cade and his auditors, in terms of a proven capacity for suffering.

Cade. Valiant I am--...

Cade. I am able to endure much--

Butcher [to his fellows]. No question of that, for I have seen him whipped three market days together.

Cade. I fear neither sword not fire.

Weaver. [to his fellows] He need not fear the sword, for his coat is of proof.

Butcher. [to his fellows] But methinks he should stand in fear of fire, being burned i'th' hand for stealing of sheep.

Cade. Be brave then, for your captain is brave and vows reformation."

(4.2.47, 49-58)

Coppinger had advanced for Hacket just such an endurance qualification. In his appendix, Hackets Historie, to Arthington's pamphlet, Coppinger had recounted Hacket's gruesome torments and Many humiliating public punishments as proof of Hacket's "extraordinary calling"; and it appears that he recapitulated these in Cheapside, going, as Cosin records, "more particularly over the office and calling of Hacket." Ejected from York and driven out of Lincoln, imprisoned for twenty days in Hampshire, bastinadoed, chained in Hertfordshire "in a sincke hole of a seller," where he was beaten, and "his eies were fallen downe, and his tongue thrust out of his head, so as he could not pull it in againe one Barley cornes breadth," thrown into Northampton jail for seventeen weeks, Hacket had doggedly persevered in apocalyptic preachings, sustained throughout by heavenly visions. (46) For Coppinger and Arthington, monied gentlemen, protected by their class against whipping and branding, the survival of so savage a saga testified irrefutably to soaring prophetic status. For the common multitudes on market streets, however, the story of Hacket's accumulated stripes, breathlessly announced by the Angels from the cart, allowed, as Shakespeare shows us, of more jovial interpretation.

Reformation radicals, too, subscribed to a doctrine of preparatory suffering. Hans Hut, for example, who escaped the slaughter of the Peasants' War to continue preaching radical ideas until his arrest at Augsburg in 1527, and whose tracts circulated in manuscript over a wide area, taught that through sustained suffering "authentic faith will be revealed" and "a person [will be] consoled again in the holy spirit. Then he will ready for the Lord and useful for every good work. It cannot happen to a person otherwise." (47) As Michael Baylor notes, "Hut's view, that the authentic message of the gospel is one of suffering, offered consolation in the aftermath of the Peasants' War" (xxiii). Persecution was naturally to nurture such a doctrine.

Further parallels between 'Cade' and Hacket can perhaps be adduced. The egalitarian motif may derive not only from the 1381 Peasant's Revolt, but from the Hacket insurgence, and its tradition of Reformation radicalism, though there is some uncertainty here. The rhyming ballad that Hacket's followers had printed, with its refrain

   A Christian trew, althoughe he be a cloune,
   Shall teache a prince to wear his scepter and his crown

was quoted at his prosecution in evidence against Hacket; and Cosin makes clear the authorities' fear of "popular tumult" when "so many soldiers were about the Citie" (Cosin 35, 57). Behind Hacket's religious fervor lay, at a now unspecifiable distance, the original Reformation 'exaltation of the common man,' a perspective so central to the Reformation in Germany that some historians have reentitled "the Peasants' War" of 1525, "the Revolution of the Common Man." Within such reforming perspectives, the commoner, simple, hard-working, and pious, was better able to expound the scriptures than pedantic and gluttonous monks or priests; and it is perhaps such self-righteous anticlericalism, rather than just the antiliteracy efforts of Wat Tylers's fourteenth century rebels, that is being parodied in the arraignment of the Clerk of Chartham. ("Hast thou a mark to thyself like an honest plain-dealing man?" 4.2.90.) Although in reality, Hacket and his Angels seem to have been more concerned with aggrandizing themselves than with transvaluating the masses, the Solicitor-General insisted at Newgate that Hacket's company sought Munster-like egalitarian revolution. "Yf a nobleman rebell, his meaninge ys onlie to usurpe the Crowne, not impayringe the governmente; but ther can be no means to these peasants to accomplishe ther purpose, excepte by the absolute extirpation of all governmente, magistracy, nobility and gentrye" (Kenyon 609). This line of reasoning, resumed enthusiastically by Cosin in the last twenty pages of his own work, seems tendentious, however. The authorities' concern was here less to explore the intentions of the Hacket trio than to accommodate their opportune nonsense to the government case that Puritan enthusiasm, left unchecked, could but follow a short road to Munster.

Shakespeare's two references to Cheapside in the Cade section might also be enlisted as reminders of the beloved Hacket fiasco. Since Cheapside was the place where the King of Europe had been proclaimed, "In Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass" (4.2.61) may have elicited knowing groundling cheers. The butcher's question, "My lord, when shall we go to Cheapside and take up commodities upon our bills?" (4.7.132-33) appears, for no particular reason, to have selected Cheapside for its chuckling venal agenda, from among the variety of main commercial thoroughfares of central London. This argument is unquestionably weakened by the facts that Cheapside was also the location, as the Chronicles tell us, of the execution of Lord Saye by the historical Cade, of rebel executions by Wat Tyler, and of many royal executions and proclamations. Nonetheless, Shakespeare's two references to Cheapside make no such historical connection, failing to mention it, for instance, in relation to Cade's execution of Saye. Rather, both references have an abruptness, a contextual gratuitousness, and both form part of an instant and obvious appeal to mirth: characteristics that leave Hacketian connotation a real possibility.

In reviewing the entire body of evidence, (48) we can see that at numerous textual points, Shakespeare lassoes his Cade to the Cheapside captain of reformation, whom the authorities feared enough (or so they pretended) to execute briskly and incriminate voluminously in 102 pages of nervous derision and determined inflation. Shakespeare "Hacketizes" Cade through a number of otherwise bizarre features of his presentation: his introduction through the hilariously transparent impostor structure; his reflex and somewhat paranoid religiosity; his self-advertised arrogation of Judgment function; his claim to kingship, carelessly mitigated by permitting the reigning monarch to retain the crown under his Protectorate; and his leadership qualification by proven endurance of sufferings. It is important, moreover, to recall that these parallels drew not on privy particulars available only with Cosin's account in September 1592, but were rather the stuff of common knowledge, disseminated to the London multitudes on the day of the rising. Indeed, Cosin himself (56) professed reliance on public knowledge in narrating the events of that day ("so neere as I could learne from so common an Auditorie, and in so confused an action"). It is hard to believe, therefore, that their significance would not have been instantly apparent to the early audiences of 2 Henry VI. Thanks to the art of William Shakespeare, William Hacket, religious megalomaniac, achieved immortality after all.

To contemporary audiences, fully as visible as William Hacket in the Shakespearean "Cade" was the pious countenance of radical Puritanism: a reforming tradition the values of which Hacket and his prophets largely shared, and within which government prosecutors were at pains to contextualize and execute him, despite his self-evident lunacy. "Cade," as we have seen, comes crafted in a kind of burlesque halo of key motifs--preparatory suffering, egalitarianism, anticlericalism, and (through his Judgment function) apocalypticism, not to mention the very term "reformation"--each of which ties him clearly to the reforming radicals. Imprisoned now in the Fleet, and facing Star Chamber trial by day, Thomas Cart wright must have encountered such creatures of caricature coursing through his nightmares. (49)

"And will you credit this base drudge's words?"

(4.2.136)

To what purpose, precisely, does Shakespeare so liberally douse the historical actions of Jack Cade in the comedic gasoline of the Hacket rising? A conservative response might be that Shakespeare, qua law-and-order dramatist, vilifies Cade and rebellion all the more thoroughly through association with the craziest of a long line of turbulent maniacs. Such a view runs into trouble, however, with that dramatic endearment of Cade that we have noted, generated alike by the carnivalesque mode, and the ambivalent fondness for Hacket the buffooon. It conflicts, too, with much in the play that appears to establish sympathy for the rebel's views of the state: a consideration to which I shall return. Why, moreover, would a dramatist demonizing rebellion to a London audience so alter the chronicles as not only to suppress history's pitched battle between Londoners and rebels, but actually to claim their joining forces (4.4.48-52)? And why would a conservative Shakespeare present as ethical and successful the play's first armed rising by the commons?

What follows, then, from the Shakespearean morphing of Cade into Hacket is not heightened denigration of rebellion, but four rather more complex, contrasting effects.

First, the consequence of these substitution effects, graphically remodeling Cade as William Hacket, lunatic Puritan radical, is to mount a merely ad hominem repudiation, rather than a condemnation of popular insurgency per se. To "anomalize" Cade as Hacket is immediately to invalidate this Cade's credentials as an authentic representative of popular political consciousness at all. The more obviously he becomes Hacket, or the voice of religious Reformation, the less he is to be taken seriously as the stuff of genuine leadership of an oppressed and mutinous commons. Hilariously delegitimated, "Cade" warps into a figure of opportune farce and fun on the margins of hard political grievance. The last thing he can stand for, as Shakespeare is at pains to show us, is the authentic vision of the masses, who revel, rather, in his expose.

An authentic populist rebel leader, persuasive to the commons like the historical Cade, could not, of course, have been objectively presented under the gaze of Elizabethan censorship, which demanded demonization of state rebels as the condition of their presentation. Consequently, where Shakespeare has been compelled to demonize, he has artfully nullified the force of indictment, demonstrating the target never to have been the genuine article at all. What roasts, by command, in the government bonfire is not the serious embodiment of popular revolutionary consciousness, but a mannequin, smuggled in to trick the eye. It is last year's buffoon, the Messiah of Cheapside, London's favorite political idiot.

Second, we must accordingly recognize the ensuing differential class construction of the Cade figure that Shakespeare has contrived here. Cade's demonization would have been entirely pleasing to the censor, and the government ideology he subserved. Not only did the Cade sequence appear to ridicule rebellion as product of a preposterous megalomania, and to illustrate the doctrine of the Homily Against Disobedience (226) that rebellions contained within themselves all seven deadly sins; in its adumbration of Hacket it also promised apparent popular support to the ongoing Star Chamber prosecution of the Puritan leadership for sedition. Indeed, one might say that in the shameless hypocritical capering of the Shakespearean Jack Cade, the savagely parodic spirit of Martin Marprelate was flipped back against the godly. This, I suggest, may well explain why the presentation of rebellious demagoguery and initially successful popular uprising were here permitted on the public stage, in sharp contrast to the censor's suppression of the uprising passage in Sir Thomas More, composed not long afterward (probably 1592-94). (50)

But this "Cade," as we have seen, was as false in his pretension to credible radicalism as he was in his claim to the throne. To the eyes of the commoners in the public amphitheater, Cade was manifestly pseudopopulist. Though certain of his declarations--"because they could not read, thou hast hanged them" (4.7.37-38)--were keen shafts piercing hated institutions, this Cade will have been essentially delegitimated as a representative of popular consciousness as far as the commons themselves were concerned, on at least three grounds. In the London of the 1590s, a greatly higher percentage of commoners than in 1381 were literate; and the acquisition of literacy appears to have been esteemed and desired rather than denigrated by the commons. (51) Kett's rebels, for instance, called for beneficed clerics to "teche pore mens chyldren of ther paryshe the boke called the cathakysme and the prymer." (52) Yet the economic crises of the 1590s must have impacted the costs of schooling, almost certainly producing a decline in school attendance and dwindling literacy levels (Cressy 157-70). In such conditions, Cade's antiliteracy crusade actively contradicted the popular will: particularly, one assumes, that of commoners paying to savor the sophistications of literate language in a professional theater. Moreover, since Puritans were traditional enemies of theatre and the carnivalesque, the bloodshot eyes of Hacket protruding through Cade, and his rasp of apocalyptic Puritan self-righteousness, disclosed a fool and a foe for mockery. (The spectacle of a Puritan plunging into carnivalesque behavior figured just that laughable compromise of ostensible high principle by transparently naive egoism that would wreak further damage in Malvolio.) Finally, Cade was clearly accountable to goals and constituencies other than the commoners he incited: to the Duke of York, within the plot, and to continental Reform, as Puritan reformer. In sum, that Shakespeare demonized in this Cade a rising that was at key points adversarial to popular aspiration rather than embodying authentic radical populism, was a fact that could hardly have been lost upon a contemporary common audience. By contrast, modern literary critics who deny Shakespeare's populism, for associating the commons with such a Cade, miss this dissociation of Cade. The mind-set, however, of the Elizabethan governing classes that we noted earlier--contemptuously, even hysterically indiscriminating in its fury toward all revolt53will have prevented the registering of any such distinction.

Disqualification of this Cade as ideological spokesman of popular radicalism must displace the play's assessment of rebellion onto the commons as a whole, and onto the conditions that had motivated them. The third effect of "Hacketizing" Cade is thus to relocate agency and analysis in the play. Such deflection becomes theatrically graphic in the spectacle of a Cade paradoxically directed by his followers. Spark, not spokesman of commons revolt, a fantasist commandeered by focused discontent, Shakespeare's Cade is a man more instrumentalized than instrumentalizing. When Cade effuses doggerel daydreams (seven halfpenny loaves for a penny, himself as king and everyone in livery, his palfrey going to grass in Cheapside), the Butcher injects strategy: "The first thing we do let's kill all the lawyers." "Nay, that I mean to do," concurs Cade (4.2.57-69), as though he had already thought of it. When the Clerk of Chartham, still under examination by Cade, is condemned by the mob ("All Cade's followers": 4.2.94), Cade, who has just laid it down that "Unless I find him guilty, he shall not die," instantly complies, and tries to make it sound like his own decision: "Away with him, I say" (4.2.84, 96: emphasis added). Confronting Stafford and his forces, Cade again babbles happy megalomania (himself as king, but the sovereign may retain nominal rule), and it is the Butcher who intervenes to proclaim the intended execution of Lord Saye, for selling the dukedom of Maine. "And good reason," adds Cade (4.2.141-47). When the Staffords are slain in battle, Cade gives himself to appareling himself in their armor and ordering self-aggrandizing ceremony; and it is once more the Butcher who breaks in with practicality: "If we mean to thrive and do good, break open the jails and let out the prisoners." "Fear not that, I warrant thee," acquiesces the nominal leader (4.3.10-15). Victorious in London, Cade executes Saye as promised, then plunges again into tyrannical self-exaltation (all peers must pay him tribute, all brides their maidenhead), when a rebel interrupts: "My Lord, when shall we go to Cheapside and take up commodities upon our bills?" "Marry, presently," indulges Cade (4.7.110-15,133-35). With so ductile a leader, it is little wonder that the Butcher, justified in a rape (4.7.121-31), requests Cade that "the laws of England may come out of your mouth" (4.7.5). Lost without the commons' cues, Cade customarily has difficulty not only in maintaining any dignity, surrounded by hecklers as he is--the Butcher himself enjoys ridiculing him in asides (4.2.29, 33, 39, 44, 50, 55)--but even in making himself heard: he has to call for silence in his first speech; and this is achieved only when the butcher commands it (4.2.32). Interrupted or jostled when interrogating the Clerk of Chartham, he is reduced to calling out weakly "Let me alone" (4.2.89). The stage direction opening act 4, scene 3 suggests that Cade is likewise no crucial agent in battle: "Alarums ... wherein both the Staffords are slain. Enter Jack Cade, and the rest." Cade, it is clear, is not the killer of Stratford; and it is the Butcher who is immediately praised for deeds of arms (4.3.3-7). Thus, deft though he may prove in rhetorical elaboration of clues supplied by others (lawyers and parchment at 4.2.67-73, the indictment of Saye at 4.7.17-24), Cade is repeatedly reduced to a directionless zany pirouetting in the footsteps of his nominal followers. Puppet or tool, not leader or thinker, he is a figurehead whom Shakespeare divorces from, and renders inferior to, authentic popular consciousness. (54)

If, therefore, we seek Shakespeare's real assessment of the character and morality of popular rebellion, we must seek it in his sketch of the words and deeds of the body of the commons itself, not in the travesty of a topical lunatic himself a travesty. And here we find, surely, a nuanced and complex vision. Sympathy with popular grievances, and some limited endorsement of armed resistance, mix with the recoil from anarchy of a larger political pessimism.

Scattered past the censor's hand, several lucid fragments of glimpsed critique suggest Shakespeare's sympathy for the rebels' complaints. Protest of the legal double standard implicit in "neck-verses," and the complaint to Lord Saye that his very horse is dressed better than many commoners (55) (4.7.34-42), expressed standing class resentments escalating throughout the 1590s: a decade described by one historian as "what may well have been the low point of in the living standards of the mass of the European population, at any rate since the Black Death." (56) In Cade's curse of his deserting followers-"Let them break your backs with burdens, take your houses over your heads, ravish your wives and daughters before your faces" (4.7.170-72)--Shakespeare lends cogency to such class critique, for Cade's words echo an earlier petition for redress by a poor man whose wife and land had, indeed, been illegally taken from him by a nobleman's retainer: a petition torn brusquely in pieces by the Queen (1.3.18-20, 43). "It is worth remembering the useful generalization of Yves-Marie Berce," note recent historians of Tudor revolt: "The trigger of revolt is not destitution, but injustice--and not objective injustice, but the conviction of it." (57) Thomas Cartelli seems therefore correct to note "a politically astute reckoning with a long list of social grievances whose inarticulate and violent expression does not invalidate their demand for resolution." (58) Christopher Hill draws similar conclusions:

   "Kill all the lawyers." "Burn all the records of the realm." "The
   King's Council are no good workers." "Let the magistrates be
   labouring men." "There shall be no money." "It was never merry world
   since gentlemen came up." Yet many of these apparently extreme
   sentiments were to be considered seriously by legal reformers in the
   sixteen-forties, and others were lower class complaints of long
   standing ... When Cade said of Lord Saye and Sele, "he can speak
   French, and therefore he is a traitor," he was drawing on the
   popular myth of the Norman Yoke ... It is difficult to think that
   Shakespeare was not conscious of what he was doing when he so
   frequently opened up questions which were to lead to revolutionary
   actions thirty years after his death. (59)

As to Shakespeare's endorsement of popular revolt, the commons, we recall, had risen already in the play, long before the appearance of Cade, when, outraged by the murder of Gloucester, it compelled the king to exile the Duke of Suffolk. Since Shakespeare represented the insurgency as morally motivated, politically astute, and swiftly successful, it is hard not to infer some endorsement of popular rising, pace the Elizabethan Homily against Disobedience. Shakespeare indeed takes pains to show us rebels pardoned: those of the second rising (like those of the first) go unpunished for their actions. In a departure from Hall (where the King [225] had "punished the stubburne heddes," when he "delivered" some five hundred others), the dramatist shows penitent rebels, "with halters about their necks," receive a universal pardon (4.8.15-21). Dressing oneself in a nightshirt or wearing a halter was a traditional appeasement tactic of the commons, a language of visible deference eagerly sought by the ruling class, who often felt that public repentance better served their hegemony than physical punishment. (60) (In 1525, Henry VIII had pardoned, with great ceremony, some four hundred convicted rioters paraded before him in halters.) The tactic certainly worked; and this unhistorical scene would scarcely serve to terrify commoners from future revolt. Shakespeare will likewise pen play after play, from Titus Andronicus and Richard III through Hamlet to Macbeth, in which regicide itself offers satisfying rough justice, as a goal the audience is manipulated to desire. In King Lear, indeed, as Richard Strier has shown, Shakespeare pushes Renaissance resistance theory to its most radical, in heroizing a nameless servant who draws his sword on the Duke of Cornwall to defend the bound and tortured Gloucester. (61) Thus 2 Henry VI appears to exhibit that conditional endorsement of armed revolt which would be reaffirmed throughout his career.

Yet the prevailing tones of the revolt--liberating carnivalesque slapstick mingled with cogent political barbs--change emphatically with the watershed execution of Lord Saye, whose visible fear restores a moving psychological realism that renders the rebels sadistic.

Butcher. Why dost thou quiver, man?

Saye. The palsy, and not fear, provokes me.

Cade. Nay, he nods at us as who should say "I'll be even with you." I'll see if his head will stand steadier on a pole.

(4.7.83-86)

Saye's superbly articulate innocence prompts guilt from even Cade ("I feel remorse in myself with his words" [4.7.96]). The ensuing waving of freshly severed heads on poles then consolidates this alienating reestablishment of the realist mode: not only through the doubtlessly gory special effects made possible here to a theater of few props, but because such sights were an empirical Tudor reality, glimpsed even en route to Southwark theaters atop poles on London Bridge. Thereafter ensues unqualified degeneration into mob frenzy, with its significantly mirthless crudity in "Kill and knock down! Throw them into the Thames!" (4.7.145-56). Shakespeare's strategic use of London patriotism drives home the point. When the rebels had first invaded London, Shakespeare carefully omitted that prolonged battle between the rebels and London citizens that featured large in the chronicles; but following the pivotal slaying of Saye, he newly foregrounds a brutal opposition of rebel and citizen: "Up Fish Street! Down Saint Magnus Corner! Kill and knock down!" (4.7.145).

This downturn into simplified denunciation of rebellion is very short: it lasts, to be precise, just fifty lines, after which the rebels relent, to "follow the King and Clifford!" (line 196). The brevity of this dark final phase in the play's extended representation of rebellion is itself highly suggestive. Telling, too, is that the same pattern holds true of the play's Quarto variant, The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (1594), in which a far shorter text (the Folio version is one-third longer), probably cut for performance acceleration on tour in the provinces, produces a simplified, more brutal Cade, (62) largely apparent however only from the Saye trial onward. (The Quarto omits Cade's twinge of remorse in condemning Saye, and his act five soliloquy on hunger; it also adds Cade's horrific "punishment" of the sergeant whose wife had been raped [4.7.116-31], and makes the rebels all the more ignorant in misrecognizing Saye's Latin as Dutch, French or Italian at 4.7.49-51.) Nothing in the variants disturbs the attractive exuberance of the Punch-and-Judy slapstick of the preceding actions, which form the majority of the rebellion section; and the only pre-Saye cut that "downwardly" revises Cade, York's lines on Cade as fighting bravely in Ireland (3.1.360-73), can be attributed to the revisions' concern for a faster-paced production.

Nonetheless, terminating as it does in barbarity and an abrupt desertion of Cade and the cause, this failed rebellion clearly underlines Shakespearean pessimism about the possibilities of popular political revolt when moving beyond such limited interventions as the play's first rising. That the breakdown of public order, whether due to commons rebellion or patrician ambition, may escalate into sprees of murderous anarchy, as here and in Julius Caesar, is an obvious and widely drawn cautionary conclusion. The directionless violence of the rebel commons in 2 Henry VI, however, deserves closer inspection and some historicization.

We have seen that the Shakespearean Cade, doused in Hacket, was no authentic representative of the discontented commons, but offered a mere leadership of convenience, swiftly and superficially taken, then swiftly and superficially dropped. The fourth conclusion to be drawn from the "Hacketization" of Cade is precisely the leaderless populism of the 1590s.

The Tudor period had seen four successful rebellions, but all had taken place in the first half of the century. (63) Despite the deepening of poverty and underclass desperation in the 1590s, the three attempted rebellions of the decade--Hacket's in 1591, the Oxford Rising of 1596, and the Essex revolt of 1601--all failed miserably, through the striking absence of popular support. This absence was due, however, not to the sustained campaign by nervous authorities throughout the 1590s and beyond to demonize popular revolt as the most evil imaginable ("of all other seditions and rebellions none doth bring such infinite waste and desolation upon a kingdom or state as these popular insurrections"). (64) Rather, as Fletcher and MacCulloch recognize, the powerful support underlying the success of the earlier rebellions had derived from a former alliance of "high" and "low" politics: the combination of aristocratic disaffection with a commons rising mobilized by what loosely can be termed the "middling sort." Through the later sixteenth century, by contrast, the lifestyle of the middling "came closer to that of their gentry superiors," in terms of wealth, literacy, and culture, so that their grievances became channeled through lawsuits and parliamentary interests rather than leadership of popular rebellion. (65) Thus, in simplified terms, the natural leadership of popular Tudor rebellions now turned to alternative arenas of conflict. It is precisely this tragically leaderless condition to contemporary popular discontent that Shakespeare presents, in the spectacle of a citizenry whose simmering anger against pervasive injustice can find no organized outlet, no organic commons leadership. (66)

This objective historical reality of English political life in the 1590s helps explain that degeneration of the rebels into an apparently fickle mob, which is so often construed as a timeless wisdom with which to admonish Progressives. (67) For the political consciousness (68) of Cade's rebels in 2 Henry VI is not "fickle," I would argue, so much as manipulable through this circumstantial volatility. Given the lack of leadership and of institutions that could give durable, synthesized, and overt form to the insurgent instincts and perceptions of the commons, rebel consciousness was perforce ideologically labile and disunitary. The systemic ideological coherence lacking in the 1590s would emerge in the very different circumstances of the mid-seventeenth century, in the writings of Gerard Winstanley, for instance, just as cross-class alliances would resume in the anti-Buckingham organizing of the 1620s, and the early 1640s emergence of alliance between the Parliamentary anti-absolutist faction and the London crowds. (69) In the late sixteenth century, however, tightening censorship, fear of local informers, espionage networks, the gallows, increased use of torture, and ultimately royal armies, along with the "defection" of the commons' natural managerial class, prevented the emergence of any stable discursive formation to cohere a mutinous commons. Torn, thus, between explosive levels of dissidence, and customary, pragmatic quietism, (70) as well as between conflicting internal elements within lower-class ideology (hatred of the aristocracy and Privy Council, versus patriotism, and even royalism), a disaffected "low politics" was now chronically open to divisiveness: a liability ably exploited by the rhetoric of Buckingham and Old Clifford, whose calculated appeals to pragmatism (promise of pardon), patriotism (the French threat), and monarchical greatness (Henry V) rapidly seduce the rebels from Cade's side (4.7.154-95).

As a posturing puppet rather than organic leader, Cade had been able neither to direct the commons fruitfully, nor to lift them above a passing mood of vengeful anger and transcend the volatile status of a mob. Misleading justified protest into mania and mayhem, Hacketized Cade was a "spoiler" figure, terminal emblem of that politically paralyzed conjuncture. To read Shakespeare historically is thus not to impute to him a damnation, sub specie aeternitatis, of democratic-populist sentiments, fated forever to gullibility and misdirection. It is rather to recognize a master dramatist's acute reading of the dilemma of a contemporary political ideology, accurately pinpointing the volatile contradictions within populist attitudes in the leaderless 1590s: a cocktail that could lead to a bang, as authorities feared, or more likely a whimper, as in the Hacket and the Oxford Risings. What pessimism resides here mirrors contingent impasse.

The tragic betrayal of a rising by its leadership becomes a theme, in fact, suggestively pervasive in Shakespeare. At precisely the moment in Hamlet that he wins political control through popular force of arms, Laertes, agonizingly, is sweet-talked into gross misdirection by the murderer, Claudius. The risen commons in Julius Caesar is at once dispossessed of its legacy by a tyrannical Octavius and Mark Anthony. The tribunes established through a people's revolt in Coriolanus promptly become nearly as corrupt as the patricians. The Lear restored by armed invasion (though not in this case by specifically popular forces), having repented the dereliction of his people's needs ("Oh, I have ta'en / Too little heed of this! Take physic, pomp!" 3.4.33-34) merely subsides into domestic calamity, at Cordelia's death. Malcolm's Machiavellian dialogue with MacDuff at 4.3.14-140 suggests that the successor to a Macbeth driven from his throne by invasion and the mass desertion of his people may prove scant improvement. Even Caliban, giddily insurgent against insult, stripes, and servitude, is ridiculously betrayed by his supposed betters and deliverers, Trinculo and Stephano ("What a thrice-double ass / Was I," 5.1.299-300). 2 Henry VI inaugurates, it would seem, popular insurrection's tragic pattern: a recurrent configuration whose indictment is not the phenomenon of the commons in arms, but its betrayal by self-interested leadership when once empowered. Shakespeare's complex and often generous vision of popular rebellion, though touched by sympathy and some conditional endorsement, thus terminates repeatedly in a final pessimism centering on the ineluctable treachery of power. It may have been, I suggest, the hard tenacity of that outlook, the reflex despair over rebellions stillborn, that elicited the repellent refusal of an "ungentle Shakespeare" to assist bloodied popular opposition to William Combe's enclosures at Stratford in the last years of the playwright's life. (71) Old Clifford's words on Cade, "Nor knows he how to live but by the spoil--/ Unless by robbing of your friends and us" (4.7.181-82), seemed to William Shakespeare but the way of all rulers: bitterly close to immitigable.

"Such quiet walks as these"

(4.9.15)

Closing the rebellion sequence, there appears a Cade who has ceased to be Hacket. Clinching the argument for a populist Shakespeare sympathetically alive to commons sufferings, act 4, scene 9 garbs Cade in a flesh persona, and later supports him with some remarkably innovative stagecraft invoking further class injustice.

In a reprise of carnival clowning to be extinguished by genteel butchery, Cade bobs back up, starved but unconquerably merry, to bond with the audience through witty soliloquy.

   I think this word "sallet" was born to do me good; for many a time,
   but for a sallet, my brain-pan had been cleft with a brown bill; and
   many a time, when I have been dry, and bravely marching, it hath
   served me instead of a quart pot to drink in; and now the word
   "sallet" must serve me to feed on. (4.9.8-13)

The Cade here is no erstwhile rebel leader (nothing beyond "Fie on ambition!" glances at this past), but an apparently rank-and-file ex-soldier, hungry and on the run. The accent on mundane particulars of foot-soldiering experience would bond Cade to many in his commons audience; and the accumulating subtle overtones of a veteran status ("many a time ... and many a time") that produced only hunger, must have struck a note of shared grievance for many, given the long-standing complaints over lack of pay that had stimulated a march on London in 1589 by unpaid troops who had survived the Armada and the disastrous Portugal expedition. So many soldiers had gone unpaid that two royal proclamations had to be issued, unsuccessfully, to forbid their "disordered and undutiful" approach to London; (72) whereafter in London itself, riots broke out. "We must eat. Having no money, how can we pay and content our hosts?" (73) Denounced by proclamations, suppressed by trained bands, and intimidated by summary executions under declaration of martial law, such hungry veteran soldiers, reviled and slain by gentlemanly (74) forces, may well, I suggest, be glanced at in this scene. When Shakespeare's play opened, probably in the spring of 1592, such events would scarcely have been lost to memory for the London underclasses. (75) "We shall never know how many ex-soldiers and poor civilians were summarily hanged by provost marshals in quiet areas of the countryside ... If one imagines them [provost marshals and their men] mounted and well armed with pistols, sweeping up and down the countryside and looking for anyone on the move, their coercive power becomes ... even more terrifying from the vagabond's perspective." (76) Moreover, throughout 1591-93 English soldiers were deserting in considerable numbers from the calamitous French expeditions supporting Henri IV in Brittany and Normandy. (77) Hiding out and hungry in the English and French countryside, hundreds of such men knew miserably well what it was to fear sudden death, yet yearn for a sallet.

   These five days have I hid me in these woods and durst not peep out,
   for all the country is laid for me. But now am I so hungry that if I
   might have a lease of my life for a thousand years, I could stay no
   longer.
   (4.9.2-5)

Nothing in the Chronicles had suggested a Cade famished at his death: the condition is pure Shakespearean invention. There is, moreover, almost nothing of William Hackett here; for it is now, at precisely the moment that he becomes, through fear and starvation, a true member of a suffering commons, finally established at his death as the genuine representative that he had never been during his revolt, that Cade is given sympathy by Shakespeare. Politically, nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it--a paradox Shakespeare will transfer onto another rebel, to trouble another king, in Macbeth (1.4.7-8). It is, I think, the Jack Cade of this final incarnation--"unaccommodated" Cade--who will ratify Thomas Cartelli's judgment of him as "the most realized example in Shakespeare's works of a character who is able to transform his political subjection into something amounting to our modern sense of class-based resistance"; and who will give the lie to Phyllis Rackin's conviction that in the first tetralogy, the plebeian characters "can rebel against their oppression, but can never finally transcend the conventions of comic representation that keep them in their social place and mark their separation from the serious historical world of their betters." (78)

As Cade fails to the ground, where he lies eating grass (perhaps literally provided for him on the rush-strewn stage floor), Alexander Iden strolls the stage perimeter with a soliloquy of his own. Stage directions in the Quarto make it clear that the two had entered, by different doors, simultaneously; and that Iden is accompanied by no fewer than five followers. This simultaneity works, I think, not only to generate fear for a hopelessly outnumbered fugitive, but to undermine Iden from the moment he begins speaking.

   Lord, who would live turmoiled in the court
   And may enjoy such quiet walks as these?

becomes laughable, since the Iden extolling peaceable immunity fails to see the state's arch demon, just feet away from him. If the groundlings lapping the stage are in any way audible at this point-calling out in warning to Cade, perhaps, or hissing the complacent gentleman and his henchmen (and at whom are these five looking? What does their body language consist in?)--then Iden's words on "such quiet walks as these" become a pratfall, hilariously rendering him at once an "outsider," decisively estranged from audience mood and consciousness.

Such stagecraft-generated satiric effects escalate, I suggest, in his next speech, as he reproaches Cade for trespass:

   Is't not enough to break into my garden,
   And, like a thief, to come to rob my grounds,
   Climbing my walls in spite of me, the owner,
   But thou will brave me with these saucy terms?

(4.9.30-33)

A properly righteous indignation here swells swiftly into an alienatingly pompous self-importance, established by the obsessive reiteration of personal pronoun and self-reference: my garden, my grounds, my walls, me the owner, brave me: a landed-gentlemanly arrogance that perfectly fulfills Cade's shrewdly sarcastic "here's the lord of the soil" (22). Further, by building deixis into these lines, as he surely is doing, Shakespeare hoists Iden skyward with a petard hidden to censorship. For as Iden gesticulates largely about him--my gardens, my grounds, my walls--his possessive gestures almost inescapably indicate the theatre walls, the theatre's ground, along with its "rude companion[s]" whom he "knows not" (28-29). Thus the heavy-handed proprietorial aggression enacts an un ***** witting arrogation of all around, its abrupt exclusionism backfiring into a comic and devastating deictic "targeting" of this blindly possessive country gentleman.

In these moments of ingenious Shakespearean stagecraft, then, Iden, by sweepingly claiming the surroundings for his own even as he ignores the commoners in "true" possession of them, performs in live theatrical space that very process of arrogant dispossession so widely detested in contemporary landowners by the less affluent commons. For as Cartelli has perceived, the Quarto makes it clear that the original had enveloped Iden in the hated tones of an encloser: "Thou hast broke my hedges." (79) Both the illegal enclosure of common lands, and the new legal doctrine of possessive, "quiritary" ownership, by which a landlord might legally, in the teeth of all traditional usage, moral obligations to tenants, and customary rent levels, do whatever he fancied with inherited estate, were generating intense levels of class anger in the countryside throughout the early modern period. Crowley, like other "Commonwealth Men," had protested to Parliament that the poor suffered because the principle of the rich was "It is mine own: who shall warn me to do with mine as myself listeth?" (80) He scorns a gentleman who, having tripled tenant rents, declared to accusers "That wyth his own he myghte alwayes do as he lyste." (81) Belief that "man's relation to his property was one of temporary stewardship rather than absolute ownership" was, indeed, one of "a common fund of ideas ... which approached the status of moral orthodoxy" among not only the poor, but the parish officers of town and village under Elizabeth. (82) The new, antipaternalist approach to ownership made a mockery of the poetic fashion for Penshurst-style encomium of just and contented rural retreat: (83) just as Shakespeare does here, exposing the hypocrisies of an Iden who had claimed to "send the poor well pleased from [his] gate" (21). (84) For Iden, despite his professions, will precisely "wax great by others' waning" (18): on slaying Cade, he promptly forswears his boasted rustic contentment and hastens to court rewards. There, he will gladly accept knighthood and the king's offer of courtiership (4.9.80; 5.1.77-82).

The Chronicles had supplied no information on Iden beyond his identity as a gentleman of Kent, who (in Hall, not Holinshed) slew Cade in self-defense in a garden. Shakespeare's representation of Iden has thus been entirely his own creation; and he concludes it with a bully's taunt, and slaughter.

   Set limb to limb, and thou art far the lesser--
   Thy hand is but a finger to my fist,
   Thy leg a stick compared with this truncheon.
   My fist shall fight with all the strength thou hast,
   And if mine arm be heaved in the air,
   Thy grave is digged already in the earth.

(4.9.44-49)

Cade's responses have themselves been impudently threatening. Yet they continue to be leavened by humor, as he holds up his sword and direly threatens it with remolding into hobnails should it fail to sliver the "burly-boned clown" (54-57). Dramatic sympathy thus appears still strongly weighted in his favor as, a small, starved, undaunted man, he is done to death by a huge, unpitying, well-fed one, visibly reinforced by the menacing encirclement of no less than five henchmen. In his dying words, Cade, despite undiminished vanity ("Tell Kent from me she hath lost her best man") is not discourteous--"Iden, farewell, and be proud of thy victory" (69-70)--it is the gentleman slayer who turns to savagery. Repeatedly, he stabs Cade's bleeding corpse, before dragging it to decapitation and, in contradiction of the Chronicles, to a dunghill. (85)

   And as I thrust thy body in with my sword,
   So wish I I might thrust thy soul to hell.

(75-76)

Closing the Cade sequence in 2 Henry VI is thus the unmistakable image of a gentlemanly class hatred turned mutilatory: a reflex still bloodily at work in the post-Kett world, as 1590s England sinks deeper into polarization and paranoia.

Pace volumes of criticism claiming Shakespeare for conservatism, close examination of the entire Cade sequence, restitutive of contemporary contexts, alert to shifts both in mode and tone, discloses a quite contrary political creature. Dextrous already in strategic skills to free an art made tongue-tied art by authority--sly allusiveness in topicality, selective reconstruction of chronicle materials, controlled suspension of sober stage illusionism--Shakespeare makes his debut, audacious and committed, as a nuanced and powerful protest playwright.

Notes

(1.) Richard Cosin, Conspiracie for Pretended Reformation, September 1592, p.72.

(2.) Geoffrey Bullough believed it to date from late 1591 (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960, vol. 3, p. 89); and, though the exact date of the play, and its place in the compositional sequence of the Henry VI trilogy, remain unproven, most modern scholars, following Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor in the Oxford. Shakespeare (1988) and Michael Hattaway in the Cambridge edition (1991), likewise date the drama between 1591 and 1592. Henslowe's "Harey the vj, ne" is dated 3 March 1592; Nashe's reference to Talbot (of Part One) dates from August 1592; and Green's "Tiger's heart" allusion to Part Three dates from September 1592. See Hattaway, The Second Part of Henry VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 60-68.

(3.) "Mr. Sollicitor" compared Hacket's rising with the rebellions of "Cade, Taylor [i.e., Wat Tyler], and them of Norfolke" [i.e., Kett's Rebellion of 1549]. "Memorandum of the arraignment, at Newgate, of William Hacket, of Northamptonshire, for high treason," in The Manuscripts of Lord Kenyon, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 14th Report, Appendix, pt. 4,609.

(4.) Henry Arthington's contritional pamphlet, Seduction of Arthington by Hacket, was also published in 1592; Throckmorton's Defence of Job Throckmorton, detailing his blameless association with the conspirators, came out in 1594, and was replied to by Matthew Sutcliffe's Answere unto a certain caluminous letter published by M. Job Throckmorton in 1595; and Thomas Cartwright's account of his guiltlessly peripheral association with the conspirators appeared in his Rriefe apologie of 1596, to be contested by Sutcliffe's Examination of M. Thomas Cartwight's late apologie of the same year. Richard Bancroft spent the last forty of his 180 pages in Daungerous Positions and Proceedings ... under Pretense of Reformation in 1593 dramatizing the sedition of the Hacket affair. For these and fuller references, see Curtis C. Breight, "Duelling Ceremonies: The Strange Case of William Hacket, Elizabethan Messiah," in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19.1 (1989): 35-67; and John Booty, "Tumult in Cheapside: the Hacket conspiracy," in Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church [Austin, Texas], 42 (1973): 293-317.

(5.) Richard Verstegan, A declaration of the true causes of the great troubles, presupposed to be intended against the realm of England (1592), 39-42; Robert Parsons, Elizabethae Angliae Reginae haeresis Calvinianam propugnatis (1592), 39-40; Robert Southwell, An humble supplication to her Maiestie, ed. R. C. Bald (1953), 26-27, 41.

(6.) The Works of Lord Bacon (London: William Ball, 1837), 1:383; The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 1:295 and 3:99.

(7.) Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971; repr. Harmondsworth, Peregrine: 1978), 159. Compare likewise Samuel Rowland's verse history of the rise and fall of Munster, Hell's Broke Loose (1605), which numbered Hacket with Jack Straw and Wat Tyler among Anabaptist 'commonwealths men.'

(8.) Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 214, 240, 235.

(9.) Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 219.

(10.) Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 227-28; David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 239, 241; Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 27, 29, 30.

(11.) Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in 17th Century England (1974; repr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 185; Liberty Against the Law: Some 17th century Controversies (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 1996), 258.

(12.) All Shakespeare quotation is from The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: Norton, 1997).

(13.) Thomas Cartelli, "Jack Cade in the Garden," in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 61.

(14.) Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 48, 51.

(15.) Stephen Longstaffe, "'A Short Report and Not Otherwise': Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI" in Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin, ed. Ronald Knowles (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 13-35, quotation from 26.

(16.) Ellen C. Caldwell, "Jack Cade and Shakespeare's Henry VIPart Two" in Studies in Philology 92.1 (1995): 18-79; misprisions of the carnivalesque, 52-54.

(17.) Jean Howard, introduction to "The First Part of the Contention" in The Norton Shakespeare, 210.

(18.) Paolo Pugliatti, "'More than history can pattern': The Jack Cade rebellion in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI," in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22.3 (Fall 1992): 456, 458, 477.

(19.) Victor Kiernan, Shakespeare Poet and Citizen (London: Verso, 1993), 36-37. Shakespeare, "like any other sensible person, disliked the thought of anarchic disorder. It is about the causes of disorder that he must have differed from many others." "He may fairly be called a 'progressive' ... [though] only with due caution" (11-12).

(20.) For the most recent and authoritative account of the historical revolt, see I. M. W. Harvey, Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

(21.) Edward Hall, Chronicle: Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1542, 1548, repr. 1809), 221.

(22.) Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (2nd ed., 1587, repr. 1808), 3:218.

(23.) Holinshed, Chronicles (this vol. repr. 1807), 2:739.

(24.) Brents Stirling, in 'Shakespeare's Mob Scenes: A Reinterpretation' in The Huntingdon Library Quarterly 3 (May 1945): 213-40, enumerates many examples, 228-39. The quotation is from Caesar's Dialogue (1601): 52, cited from Stirling, 232.

(25.) Cited from Tudor Rebellions, fourth edition, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 5. See Christopher Hill's classic essay on the politics of fearful patrician contempt of the people, "The Many-Headed Monster" in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), 181-204.

(26.) Patterson, Popular Voice, 38. On this tradition, see Patterson, ibid., 32-51; Charles Hobday, "Clouted Sheen and Leather Aprons: Shakespeare and the Egalitarian Tradition" in Renaissance and Modern Studies 23 (1979): 63-78; Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (1958; repr. Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1986), 58-61, Change and Continuity, 183-85, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 202-3; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957; repr. London: Paladin, 1970), 187-330; William H. Te Brake, A Plague of Insurrection: Popular Politics and Peasant revolt in Flanders 1323-28 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).

(27.) James Holstun, "Damned Commotion" in A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003), 199-206.

(28.) David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 48.

(29.) Indeed, the quotation itself proves slippery on inspection, and may contradict the simple construal of mere reveling in anarchy. As the reply to news that the Staffords and their army "are all in order, and march toward us," the basic meaning of Cade's words here may be that the rebels achieve a certain order (cohesion, solidarity), in the approaching act of resistance that puts them outside state law. Compare "even your hurly / Cannot proceed but by obedience" in Shakespeare's addition to Sir Thomas More, Addition 2 D, lines 123-24 (Norton 2017-18).

(30.) Francois Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1991), 251.

(31.) Public Record Office SP12/263/86 (I); SP1/120, fols 100r-4v; cit. Andy Wood, "'Poore men woll speke one day': Plebeian languages of deference and defiance in England, c.1520-1640" in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500-1850, ed. Tim Harris (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 84-85.

(32.) Wood, ibid., 87. Wood echoes here the arguments of James C. Scott, on the exhilarating "saturnalia of power" that results from "public declaration of the hidden transcript" (i.e., underclass oppositional ideology). See Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Yale University Press: 1990), 202-27.

(33.) Cosin, Conspiracie, 55.

(34.) Breight, "Duelling ceremonies," 49. I base my account here upon the accounts of Cosin, Conspiracie, Booty, "Tumult in Cheapside," and Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse.

(35.) For slightly contradictory accounts of these various writings, see Cosin, 32, 38-42; Booty, 307-8; Kenyon MS, 608-9.

(36.) Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, ed. J. R. Dasent, 21 (1906): 325-26; cited from Booty, "Tumult," 313.

(37.) On the Lambeth circle's exploitation of the Hacket rising to discredit Cartwright and other eminent Puritans, see Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Appleford, Oxfordshire, Sutton Courtenay Press: 1979), 191-207; also Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press: 1967), 424-25. For the 1590s and early Jacobean campaign by the authorities to associate popular rebellion with Anabaptist levelling, see Brents Stirling, "Shakespeare's Mob Scenes: A Reinterpretation" in The Huntingdon Library Quarterly 3 (1945): 213-40.

(38.) I follow the Folio, and the Arden and New Cambridge editions, in calling the character Bevis, rather than "Second Rebel" as in the Norton.

(39.) Cosin, 57-58. This incident of humiliating recognition is perhaps apocryphal, particularly since a related motif occurs in Hall concerning the historical Cade, who put to death in London "divers persons ... of his olde acquayntance, lest they should blase & declare his base byrthe": Chronicle, 4.7. Cosin, present at Newgate when the Solicitor-General compared Hacket with Cade, would presumably have been familiar with the Cade of the Chronicles.

(40.) Calendar of State Papers, 1591-94, 75-76.

(41.) "Besom" (brush) is from the Geneva Bible's version of Isaiah. The Geneva Bible, cheaply available from 1576, and the most popular version in England until the King James version appeared in 1611, is the one Shakespeare normally echoes, and probably possessed, although he sometimes shows familiarity with the Bishops' Bible, the official version read in church. Though the Douay-Rheims Old Testament also chooses "besom," it did not appear until 1609-10. See Naseeb Shaheen's Biblical References in Shakespeare's History Plays (Newark: University Delaware Press, 1989), 17-20, 23, 42-61: which, however, does not note this allusion. The Genevan provenance of the edition echoed is distinctly appropriate to Cade the Puritan.

(42.) Michael G. Baylor, editor and translator, The Radical Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xii.

(43.) Excerpt from Nicholas Sotherton, B.L. Harleian MS, 1576, fols 252-53, reproduced in Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid McCullough, Tudor Rebellions, 4th edition (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 147.

(44.) Richard Bancroft, Daungerous Positions and Proceedings (1593), 164.

(45.) Reproduced in Cosin, 40; italics in the original.

(46.) Cosin recounting Coppinger, 41-46, 56; Booty, 300.

(47.) Hans Hut, On the Mystery of Baptism, in Baylor, Radical Reformation, 165. See likewise 156-58, 164-65,169-70.

(48.) Perusal of the Hacket materials suggests four further parallels with 2 Henry VI that turn out, however, to be nonevidentiary. Like Arthington on Hacket ("We two are messengers from heaven, who have a good Captaine to guide us"[Cosin, 42; see also 47,58]), Shakespeare styles Cade "captain" ("your captain is brave and vows reformation: 4.2.57): but the term is common Elizabethan vernacular, and is much used of Cade in Halls's Chronicle. Cosin calls Hacket illiterate and opposed to books (21, 22, 46), but this is unproven, a possible government slur, and a fact that Hacket's Angels were not likely to have made public. The accusation of lechery and intended commonality of wives in Cosin, 43, "echoed" in the play at 4.7.111-15, seems likewise formulaic libel, and conveniently links Hacket explicitly with John of Leiden's Munster (Cosin, 91). That the followers of both Hacket and Cade's massacre like butchers (Cosin, 57; 2 Henry VI, 4.3.1-5) merely draws on cliche.

(49.) In the months before the rising, Coppinger had made contact, mainly by letter, with a large number of Puritan leaders, including Thomas Cartwight, Walter Travers, Stephen Egerton, Job Throckmorton, Nicholas Fuller, Peter Wentworth, Edward Phillips, John Penry, John Udall, and William Charke--most of whom cautioned or rebuffed him, some of them doubting his mental stability. See Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 192-94.

(50.) Critical consensus dates Munday's original of Sir Thomas More to circa 1592-94 (as reflecting anti-alien tensions in London in that period), and Tilney's veto on its performance, certain diplomatic additions notwithstanding, to shortly afterwards (see Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori, editors of the Revels edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990, 11-12, 26-29). Controversy persists, however, as to when the additions widely ascribed to Shakespeare (Addition II, Hand D) were written: prior to Tilney's prohibition, according to Gabrieli and Melchiori, ibid., and also to Scott McMillan ('The Book of Sir Thomas More: dates and acting companies' in Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and its Shakespearian Interest, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill, Cambridge University Press, 1989, 57-76); after it, for an attempted revival of the play circa 1603-4, according to Gary Taylor's "colloquialism-in-verse" stylometric tests (Taylor, "The date and auspices of the additions to Sir Thomas More," in Howard-Hill, Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More, 120-22. See also Taylor, 'The canon and chronology of Shakespeare's plays' in Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 124-25).

(51.) See David Cressy, Literacy and the Social order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980): the effects of the 'education revolution' of the earlier sixteenth century meant that "The reign of Elizabeth saw a solid improvement in literacy among tradesmen and craftsmen in all parts of England," 153.

(52.) Article 20 of "Kett's Demands being in Rebellion," 1549, reproduced in Fletcher and MacCullough, Tudor Rebels, document 17, 145.

(53.) See Greenblatt's illustrations of such depoliticizing hysteria in Sidney, Spenser and others, "Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion" in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 1-29.

(54.) This aspect of Cade perhaps becomes readily appreciable in performance. Apparently the 1957 production at the Old Vic in London, combining Parts One and Two, saw "many minor members of the crowd ... turn in hugely comic performances," such that "Cade himself was obliterated in the hurly-burly." Mary Clarke, Shakespeare at the Old Vic (London: 1958), cited from Knowles, Third Arden ed., 9.

(55.) The complaint is found elsewhere in Shakespeare: in Orlando's accusation against his parsimonious elder brother, for instance, that "His horses are bred better" than himself, and that he receives no more from his brother than "his animals on his dunghills" (As You Like It, 1.1.9,12-13). Likewise the Lord in the Induction to Shrew treats his hounds with an affection and close concern he denies fellow human beings: insulting his servants, brutally tricking Sly, and forgetting people's names, even as he refers to five hounds by name, and orders them "tendered well" (Induction, 12-32, 82). In Utopia, Hythlodaeus had similarly complained that the sufferings of the lower classes from the system run by the rich were so unjust "that they'd be almost better off if they were cart-horses" (Thomas More, Utopia, Penguin ed., trans. Paul Turner, Harmondsworth: 1965, 129).

(56.) C. S. L. Davies, "Popular Disorder" in The European Crisis of the 1590s, ed. Peter Clark (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 244.

(57.) Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 119, quoting Yves-Marie Berce, trans. J. Bergin, Revolt and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: An Essay on the History of Political Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 221.

(58.) "Jack Cade in the Garden," 58.

(59.) Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 394-95.

(60.) Andy Wood, "Poore men woll speke," 78-80, 86.

(61.) Richard Strier, "Faithful Servants: Shakespeare's Praise of Disobedience" in The Historical Renaissance ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), 119-20.

(62.) Kathleen O. Irace (Reforming the "Bad" Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions, Newark: University Delaware Press, 1994) notes the "more conventional" Cade, more vicious and corrupt, 60, 62-63; and endorses, 160,163-65,168-72, the view of Madeleine Doran ("Henry VI Parts Two and Three": Their Relation to the "Contention" and the "True Tragedy," Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1928, 51-53, 75-83) that the Quartos represent a memorial reconstruction abridged, perhaps for touring. All fifteen of the longest passages unique to the Folio, argues Irace, 146, "can be defended as reasonable performance cuts." For recent overviews of the complex question of Quarto-Folio relations see the excellent textual discussions by recent editors Ronald Knowles (Third Arden, 1999, 106-41) and Roger Warren (Oxford, 2002, 75-100).

(63.) Henry VII's seizure of power from Richard III, the defeat of the Amicable Grant in 1525, Northumberland's coup against Protector Somerset in 1549, and the overthrow of Lady Jane Grey by Mary Tudor in 1553.

(64.) Proclamation of 24 July 1607. On this campaign, see Stirling, "Shakespeare's Mob Scenes," passim; proclamation referred to on 225. Compare the words of the Solicitor-General at Hacket's trial, which I quote above.

(65.) Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 115-18,123-28. On the character, and late Tudor secession from a leadership role in rebellion, of the middling sort, see also J. Barry, ed., The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1994); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, circa 1550-1640 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 231-38; Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 72, 77-79.

(66.) One consequence of the upward redirection of allegiance and ambition by the prosperous "middling sort" was the new inclusion, in lower-class language of the later sixteenth century, of wealthy farmers, "cornmongers," and "merchants" among the hated "rich men": Andy Wood, "Poore men woll speke," 72, 83.

(67.) A tradition already extant in the Homily Against Disobedience, preaching that rebels, per se, are "unmeete ministers" offering "unwholsome medicine to refourme" (214), notwithstanding their early promises of "reformation" and appeals to the poor (232,234): an official dogma Shakespeare's narrative, once again, outwardly supports.

(68.) It is only in recent decades that historians have begun to prove and explore the long-contested reality of a "politics of the excluded," active down centuries long before emergence of official representative institutions. For a current survey of such analyses, see Tim Harris, The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500-1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), and Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics.

(69.) On the development of radical anti-hegemonic consciousness and programmes in a number of oppositional groups and individuals during the mid-seventeenth century, see James Holstun, Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London and New York: Verso, 2000).

(70.) For a contemporary instance of conscious revolutionary thought in peasant culture as constrained only provisionally by tactical pragmatism, see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance, particularly chapter 7.

(71.) The title of the biography, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life, by Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Arden, 2001); see particularly 262.

(72.) Proclamations 715 and 716 in Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 3: 44-48.

(73.) See Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 85-86, 182-83, quotation from 182.

(74.) Trained bands were carefully composed of more prosperous citizens ("enroll none but such as are gentlemen, yeomen, and yeomen's sons, and artificers of some haviour") than the armies of commoners sent overseas. See Breight, Surveillance, 57-59.

(75.) The problem of hungry veterans would persist, despite legislation in 1593 and 1597 ordering their support through parish rates (A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: the Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640, London: Methuen, 1985, 95), if Pistol's words in Henry V (1599) are any guide: "To England I will steal, and there I'll steal" (5.1.78).

(76.) Breight, Surveillance, 86.

(77.) Henri converted to Catholicism in July 1593, following which Elizabeth pulled all English forces out of Normandy. Prior to that, the Williams expedition in Normandy (landing April 1591) and Norris forces in Brittany (landing April 1591, escalating operations into the failed siege of Rouen October 1591 through April 1592, and lingering on, frequently abandoned by the French, to rust uselessly), both saw exceptional levels of hardship for the English troops. Norris's men, 3,600 strong in May 1591, had dwindled through sickness and desertion to less than 1700 by February 1592, of whom fully half then perished in April's disastrous siege of Craon. In Normandy, by May 1592, only six hundred of the original number of some four thousand strong of Essex's and Williams's men, now remained able-bodied, and, weary of war, camped near Dieppe. See Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588-1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1992), 137-95.

(78.) Thomas Cartelli, "Jack Cade in the Garden," 53; Stages of History, 221.

(79.) Thomas Cartelli, "Jack Cade in the Garden" in Enclosure Acts, 43. Compare Greenblatt's recognition that the Cade / Iden confrontation is framed less in terms of class than of property relations: "Murdering Peasants," 23-25. Phyllis Rackin recognizes that the unpopular new suum cuique doctrine of ownership is being raised here, yet regards Iden, nonetheless, as "unequivocally virtuous" in Shakespeare's eyes, and she interprets Cade, conventionally, as here being "reduced to a mechanism for ideological containment" (Stages of History, 215-20).

(80.) Robert Crowley, An Information and Petition against the Oppressors of the Poor Commons of this Realm, protesting to parliament in 1548; cit. G. R. Elton, "Reform and the Commonwealth Men of Edward VI's reign" in The English Commonwealth 1547-1640 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), 32. For a fuller appraisal of the Commonwealth Men, lacking Elton's hostility, see Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 155-90.

(81.) Crowley, Select Works, ed. J. M. Cowper (London: Kegan Paul, Early English Text Society, 1872), 46-47; cited from Wood, 175.

(82.) Steve Hindle, "The Political Culture of the Middling Sort in English Rural Communities c. 1550-1700" in Harris, The Politics of the Excluded, 141.

(83.) On the political realities of English Renaissance verse of happy rural retreat, see James Turner, The Politics of Landscape (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 85-185; and Chris Fitter, Poetry, Space, Landscape: toward a New Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 235-66, 292-315.

(84.) C. S. Lewis shrewdly suggested back in 1954 that "we have an uneasy suspicion that [Iden's] 'small inheritance' includes a ruined abbey and that the very conditions he lives in may have helped to create the poor whom he relieves. The prosperity of his class depended, after all, on rising rents." English Literature & the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 59.

(85.) In Hall (224), Iden takes the "ded body" to London, rather than slinging it on a dunghill.