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Article Excerpt
"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...
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