Abstract
Theatre-going Elizabethan Londoners might not have found the dramatic representation of class conflict quite as alien as we imagine. Well-read members of theatre audiences might have recognised some of William Shakespeare’s borrowings from the printed Chronicles edited under the name of William Holinshed.1 Purporting to cover the whole history of the British Isles, the Chronicles were laced with lurid accounts of popular rebellion, sedition and riot. The Chronicles’ emphasis upon the levelling nature of popular politics might easily have persuaded an uncritical reader that the peasants were always revolting. Albeit for different reasons, the poorer groundlings who paid for standing room within Elizabethan theatres might also have been familiar with the language of rebellion. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part II, written around 1590, the character of Jack Cade was defined by his vindictive and bloodthirsty social critique. This depiction differed sharply from what is known of the real-life Jack Cade, who had led a rebellion in 1450 in which notions of legality and order had been prominent.2 In contrast, the sanguine fantasies of Shakespeare’s Cade, who seeks to slaughter the gentry, seemed closer to some of the seditious talk in English alehouses during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign.3
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Notes
See H. Ellis (ed.), Holinshed’s chronicles, 6 vols (London, 1807).
For a useful introduction to the Chronicles, see A. Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s chronicles (Chicago, 1994).
For Shakespeare’s use of Holinshed, see E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s history plays (London, 1944), 56–60.
I. M. W. Harvey, Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450 (Oxford, 1991).
For that speech, see J. Samaha, ‘Gleanings from local criminal-court records: sedition amongst the “inarticulate” in Elizabethan Essex’, Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), 61–79;
J. A. Sharpe, ‘Social strain and social dislocation, 1585–1603’, in J. Guy (ed.), The reign of Elizabeth I: court and culture in the last decade (Cambridge, 1995);
J. Walter ‘“A rising of the people”? The Oxfordshire rising of 1596’ PEEP, 107 (1985), 90–143.
See preceding reference. For my own attempt, see A. Wood, ‘Poore men woll speke one daye’: plebeian languages of deference and defiance in England, c. 1520–1640’, in T. Harris (ed.), The politics of the excluded, c. 1500–1850. (Basingstoke, 2001), 67–98.
For an evocative account of proverbial culture, see D. Rollison, The local origins of modern society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (London, 1992), ch. 3.
M. Hattaway, ‘Rebellion, class consciousness, and Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI’, Cahiers Elisabethans, 33 (1988), 13–22;
T. Cartelli, ‘Jack Cade in the garden: class consciousness and class conflict in 2 Henry VI’, in R. Burt and J. M. Archer (eds), Enclosure Acts: sexuality, property and culture in early modern England (Ithaca, 1994), 48–67;
A. Patterson, Shakespeare and the popular voice (Oxford, 1989), chs 1–3.
On these subjects see, respectively, J. A. Sharpe, Crime in seventeenth-century England: a county study (Cambridge, 1983);
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P. Slack, The impact of plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985);
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For especially important syntheses, see K. E. Wrightson, English society 1580–1680 (London, 1982);
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For a summary, see R. C. Richardson The debate on the English revolution (1977; 3rd edn, Manchester, 1999).
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For that assumption, see for instance M. A. Kishlansky, Parliamentary selection: social and political choice in early modern England (Cambridge, 1986), preface and chs 1–2;
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See especially R. Cust and A. Hughes (eds), Conflict in early Stuart England: studies in religion and politics (London, 1989);
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Arguments over the popular impact of the Reformation had always made religious historians sensitive to the social context of politics. See for instance E. Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992).
For changing views of the Tudor polity, see the encouraging signs in S. Alford, ‘Politics and political history in the Tudor century’, HJ, 42, 2 (1999), 535–48.
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For a very different view of Hanoverian England, see J. C. D. Clark, English society, 1688–1832: ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancien regime (Cambridge, 1985).
F. McGlynn and A. Tuden, ‘Introduction’, in F. McGlynn and A. Tuden (eds), Anthropological approaches to political behaviour (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1991), 3, 17, 24–5.
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C. Geertz, The interpretation of cultures (London, 1975), esp. ch. 1.
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M. A. Ackelsberg and M. L. Shanley, ‘Privacy, publicity and power: a feminist rethinking of the public-private distinction’, in N. J. Hirschmann and C. Di Stefano (eds), Revisioning the political: feminist reconstructions of traditional concepts in western political theory (Oxford, 1996), 213, 220. For three outstanding works of feminist historiography, all of which pay close attention to the public/private distinction, see
L. Roper, The holy household: women and morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989);
L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850 (London, 1987);
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A. Fox, ‘Rumour, news and popular political opinion in Elizabethan and early Stuart England’, HJ, 40, 3 (1997), 597–620;
Fox, ‘Ballads, libels and popular ridicule in Jacobean England’, PEEP, 145 (1994), 47–83; Wood, ‘Poore men woll speke one daye’.
P. D. Griffiths, ‘Secrecy and authority in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London’, HJ, 40, 4 (1997), 925–51.
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On the middling sort, see especially K. E. Wrightson: ‘Estates, degrees and sorts: changing perceptions of society in Tudor and Stuart England’ in P. Corfield (ed.), Language, history and class (Oxford, 1991), 30–52;
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On parish vestries, see especially S. Hindle, The state and social change in early modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), chs 6–9;
Hindle, ‘Power, poor relief and social relations in Holland fen, c. 1600–1800’, HJ, 41, 1 (1998), 67–96.
Most recently in T. Harris, ‘Problematising popular culture’, in T. Harris (ed.), Popular culture in England, 1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 1995), 1–27.
For book-length studies, see Rollison, Local origins of modern society; A. Wood, The politics of social conflict: the Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999).
J. W. Scott, Gender and the politics of history (New York, 1988), 41.
S. Hindle, ‘The shaming of Margaret Knowsley: gossip, gender and the experience of authority in early modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9 (1994), 391–419;
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J. Simons, Foucault and the political (London, 1995), 82–3.
As in, for instance, the accounts of ritual offered in M. E. James, Society, politics and culture; studies in early modern England (Cambridge, 1986), ch. 1; and C. Phythian Adams, ‘Ceremony and the citizen: the communal year at Coventry, 1450–1550’, in Clark and Slack (eds), Crisis and order, 57–85.
K. Sharpe, Criticism and compliment: the politics of literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge, 1987), 205–7.
J. C. Scott, Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 21–2, xi, 15, 16, 20.
Thompson’s interpretation owes much to D. Hay, ‘Property, authority and the criminal law’, in D. Hay et al. (eds), Albion’s fatal tree: crime and society in eighteenth-century England (London, 1975), 17–63.
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Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (eds), Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London, 1971), 244.
C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the worms: the cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller (London, 1980);
E. D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, roll: the world the slaves made (London, 1975) and In red and black: Marxian explorations of southern and Afro-American history (New York, 1971);
P. Joyce, Work, society and politics: the culture of the factory in later Victorian England (London, 1980)
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© 2002 Andy Wood
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Wood, A. (2002). Introduction. In: Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4038-4_1
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