Damned Commotion: Riot and Rebellion in Shakespeare's Histories

Popular politics in 2 Henry VI: Everyday forms of resistance and hidden transcripts

“…[Reads] ''Against the Duke of Suffolk, for enclosing the commons of Melford''' (1.3. [19][20]. Encountering Suffolk's indignation, the petitioner says sheepishly, 'Alas, Sir, I am but a poor petitioner of our whole township' (1.3.21-2).…”

“…Before Cade appears on the stage, the play presents two more 'thoroughly populist scenes'. 20 One is Act 3 Scene 2 in which the townspeople of Bury St. Edmunds launch mass protest, demanding Suffolk's banishment, and the other is Act 4 Scene 1 where Kentish pirates execute Suffolk. In these two scenes, the people's actions are contrasted with those in Act 1 Scene 3.…”

“…This remark reminds us of the petitioner's grumbling about Suffolk's enclosure (1.3. [19][20]. Furthermore, out of Cade's mouth issues a radical critique of contemporary social inequality.…”

Shakespeare, Easter 1916, and the Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain

“…Shakespeare's history plays, staged at a time when England was asserting its independence from Rome and resistance to the Catholic powers of France and Spain, at war in Ireland, and watchful of Scottish inroads upon its sovereignty, are a useful source for understanding the relationship between history and drama that goes beyond the emphasis on theatricality as spectacle, performance, and ‘play’ in the most trivial sense. James Holstun has argued that Shakespeare's drama offers a way of examining how a writer engages with contemporary politics through history and allegory: ‘Shakespeare never portrays plebeian revolt without considerable sympathy, though his sympathies tend to be oblique, interspersed with antipathies, fragmented, lying athwart the main plot lines’ (Holstun :199).…”

“Mock not Flesh and Blood/With Solemn Reverence”: Recovering Radical Shakespeare

“…It is, then, with some chagrin that I now argue that, on the issue of poverty and homelessness Shakespeare, in King Lear at least, stood head and shoulders above his culture and was centuries ahead of his time – and perhaps ahead of ours... King Lear is, I will argue, politically and socially radical” (206, 205). James Holstun construes Shakespeare as “a despairing, late Tudor Commonwealthman”, whose preoccupation with popular insurgence produced in his plays “a virtual encyclopaedia of the various forms of riot and rebellion in early modern England”, though his “profound sympathy for exploited English commoners” was offset by “an upwardly mobile anxiety about what their revolutionary liberation might entail for him” (195–98). Debora Shuger has suggested that “precisely those moments in Shakespeare identified by modern critics as radical derive (however indirectly) from traditions of Christian radicalism... characteristic of the Church Fathers.”“Although conservative cosmological tendencies exist in Christian thought from Eusebius through the Homily against Disobedience , they never dislodge earlier suspicions regarding the moral bases of the socio‐political order” (47).…”