Abstract
Thomas Hobbes was no Bakhtinian. In Leviathan he asserts that ‘during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre’, as ‘the nature of war, consisteth not in actuall fighting’. In terms strangely reminiscent in places of Bakhtin’s carnival, he defines this liminal time thus:
when men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall … there is no place for Industry and consequently no Culture of the Earth, no Navigation … no commodious Building … no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.1
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Notes
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. K. Minogue ( London: Dent, 1973 ), p. 64.
Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 ), p. 90.
Graham Pechey, ‘On the Borders of Bakhtin: dialogisation, decolonisatiori’, in Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (eds.), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 60, 61.
Ilkka Joki, Mamet, Bakhtin and the Dramatic: The Demotic as a Variable of Addressivity ( Abo: Abo University Press, 1993 ), p. 64.
These terms are from Thomas Whitaker’s Fields of Play in Modern Drama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977) as quoted in
T.G. Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ), p. 178.
Manfred Pfister, ‘Comic Subversion: A Bakhtinian view of the comic in Shakespeare’, Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (1987), pp. 27, 35.
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression ( Methuen: London, 1986 ), p. 19; Sergei Averintsev, ‘Bakhtin and the Russian Attitude to Laughter’, in David Shepherd (ed.), Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects, p. 17.
Michael Gardiner, ‘Bakhtin’s Carnival: Utopia as critique’, in David Shepherd (ed.) Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects, p. 22. The term ‘critical Utopia’ is from Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination ( London: Methuen, 1986 ).
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991 ), p. 85.
The festive elements were briefly noted by C.L. Barber in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959 ), p. 13, and more thoroughly in
François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), pp. 250–1.
See also Peter Stallybrass, ‘“Drunk with the cup of liberty”: Robin Hood, the carnivalesque, and the rhetoric of violence in early modern England’, in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London: Routledge, 1989 ).
The disorder/order binary opposition, Michael Bristol points out, is based on the unspoken assumption that ‘the nation-state is the natural and necessary political form emerging from some kind of archaic disorder and consolidating itself against marginal forms of residual feudal anarchy or popular resistance’. See his Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 199. A representative example of the common ‘pre-Bakhtinian’ position is Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare III ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960 ), pp. 95–7.
For a discussion of the agenda of earlier criticism, see Richard Wilson, Will Power ( London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993 ), pp. 22–7. A notable exception to the tendency to assume Shakespeare hated commoners is provided by J. Palmer, who remarks that it is ‘strange that those who find in Cade’s barbarity an indication of Shakespeare’s horror of the mob should neglect to find in the barbarity of Queen Margaret or of my lords Clifford and York an indication of his horror of the nobility’, in Comic Characters of Shakespeare (1945), reprinted in Political and Comic Characters of Shakespeare ( London: Macmillan, 1961 ), pp. 318–19.
E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944, reprinted London: Pelican, 1988), p. 189.
Gary Saul Morson, ‘Parody, History, and Metaparody’, in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1989 ), p. 67.
Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989 ), p. 42.
Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History ( London: Routledge, 1990 ), p. 214.
Wilson, p. 28; see also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood ( Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992 ), p. 213.
Helgerson, p. 212. See also Wilson, p. 29, and Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture ( London: Routledge, 1990 ), p. 123.
Manfred Pfister sees this shift as linked to the ‘fundamental contradiction’ that in the promised Utopia, ‘Jack Cade shall be king… and even aims at dynastic legitimacy!’ in ‘Comic subversion’, p. 36. See also Ellen Caldwell, ‘Jack Cade and Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2’, Studies in Philology XCII: 1 (1995), p. 50.
Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian ( London: Macmillan, 1996 ), p. 170.
Caldwell, pp. 54, 59, and Ronald Knowles, ‘The Farce of History: Miracle, combat, and rebellion in 2 Henry VI’, The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991), p. 185.
Michael Hattaway (ed.), The Second Part of King Henry VI ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), p. 40. All quotations are from this edition.
Thomas Cartelli, ‘Jack Cade in the garden: Class consciousness and class conflict in 2 Henry VI’, in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1994 ), p. 58.
Antony Munday et al., Sir Thomas More, ed. Vittorio Gabrieli and Georgio Melchiori (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990 ), p. 17.
Louis Montrose points out, as have many others, that London’s city fathers, in their letters to Burghley or the Privy Council, ‘claim that theatrical images of vice always compel imitation, never aversion’, in The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre ( London: University of Chicago Press, 1996 ), p. 49.
David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and text in the Elizabethan playhouse ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 ), pp. 24–8. Richard Helgerson emphasizes much more the way Kemp’s progress departs from recognized customary and holiday traditions, p. 229.
For discussion of Deloney and the Elizabethan cloth industry, see Laura Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 ). Richard Wilson discusses the disruptiveness of London clothworkers and the implications for Shakespeare’s Cade, pp. 31–44. Ronald Knowles offers the counter-Deloney example of John of Leiden, a tailor (p. 176).
John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair ( London: Vintage, 1992 ) p. 22.
J. Nichols (ed.), The Progresses, and Public Processions, of Queen Elizabeth, Vol. II (London: J. Nichols, 1788 ), pp. 204–6.
CSP Venetian 8, p. 92; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet ( London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991 ), p. 250.
The Autobiographical Tracts of Dr John Dee, in Remains Historical and Literary Connected with the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and Chester (Manchester: Charles Simms, for the Chetham Society, 1851), p. 29; Nicholas Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion ( London: Routledge, 1988 ), pp. 197–9.
John Ferne, Lacyes Nobilitie, in The Blazon of Gentrie ( London: John Windet, 1586 ), p. 129.
For definitions of different kinds of asides, see Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe 1599–1609 ( New York: Macmillan, 1962 ), pp. 186–92.
Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991 ), p. 259.
Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre ( Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986 ), p. 33.
Frank Albers, ‘Utopia, Reality and Representation: the case of Jack Cade’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 127 (1991), p. 78;
see also William Hawley, Critical Hermeneutics and Shakespeare’s History Plays ( New York: Peter Lang, 1992 ), p. 41.
Michael Hattaway, ‘Rebellion, Class Consciousness, and Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 33 (1988), p. 18; see also Pugliatti, p. 170.
For one of the most extreme formulations of this position, see Derek Cohen, The Politics of Shakespeare ( London: Macmillan, 1993 ), p. 60.
See especially David Riggs, Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press ), 1971, pp. 124–5.
Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum II, Liber 1, Satire 3, quoted in Christopher Sutcliffe, ‘Kempe and Armin: the management of change’, Theatre Notebook 50: 3 (1996), p. 126.
Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience ( Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1991 ), p. 51.
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Longstaffe, S. (1998). ‘A short report and not otherwise’: Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI. In: Knowles, R. (eds) Shakespeare and Carnival. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000810_2
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