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SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 42.2 (2002) 259-274



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Jack Cade's Legal Carnival

Craig A. Bernthal


C. L. Barber was one of the first critics to recognize that Shakespeare portrays the Cade Rebellion of Henry VI Part II as carnival: "an astonishingly consistent expression of anarchy by clowning: the popular rising is presented throughout as a saturnalia, ignorantly undertaken in earnest; Cade's motto is 'then are we in order when we are most out of order.'" 1 Scholars who have recently examined the Cade Rebellion of Henry VI Part II, among them Michael D. Bristol, Ellen C. Caldwell, Alexander Leggatt, and Phyllis Rackin, 2 tend to agree that Cade is not only a carnivalesque inverter of rank and privilege, but also, as Leggatt puts it, "one of the most articulate social critics in Shakespeare." 3 Though Cade and his rebels display faulty reasoning and prejudice, they articulate legitimate abuses, many of which concern the English legal system. 4

Despite the seriousness of Cade's complaints, or perhaps because of their continuing force in Elizabethan England, Cade's message is continually subverted throughout act IV of the play. Cade's Rebellion is, as Robert Weimann notes, "a case of the mocker mocked, the inversion of the inverter." 5 For a while, Cade and his crew turn the prevailing concepts of law and rank upside down. They set forth genuine grievances, but the contradictions in Cade's program of reformation are comically obvious. The rebellion is shown to disintegrate from within. It becomes, on the one hand, a comic "antimasque" of the irresponsible and selfish behavior of the nobles who are vying for power, 6 and on the other, a send up of the crude political comprehension of the English mob; yet even this second judgment is undercut, since several of the rebels (Dicke the Butcher, John, and Smith) are very sophisticated [End Page 259] about Cade's pretensions and mock him through heavy-handed asides. 7 They see through Cade, but support him anyway, undermining both Cade's authority with the audience and the idea that Cade's followers are merely stupid. At the same time, they put into question why they are following Cade at all. Are they just out for a good time and a little bloodshed? How are readers and audiences to know when to laugh with Cade and the rebels and when to laugh at them? The Cade Rebellion gives audience members no simple picture of the motivations or justifications for rebellion, but a chaotic and contradictory one, appropriate to the empirical messiness of revolution.

In the Cade Rebellion we see Shakespeare at the beginning of his career developing a modus operandi for the future: the dramatic generation of interpretative conundrums that modern audiences and critics can revel in, or meditate upon, but not resolve. This, of course, is an aesthetic which professors of English, especially those of a modernist bent, have come to love; but, from Shakespeare's point of view, safety and profitability may have had as much to do with the open-endedness of his plays as aesthetics. 8 Part of the melange that is the Cade Rebellion certainly results from trying to keep on the good side of the censor, but for Shakespeare, exercising "negative capability" also may have been the best way to attract and retain a mixed audience. Douglas Bruster persuasively argues in Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare:

London's playhouses can best be understood in terms of commerce, as centers for the production and consumption of an aesthetic product. During the Renaissance, the cornucopian plays which even today appear to offer almost everything to almost everyone delivered many myths in different voices to audiences which seem to have been themselves extremely heterogeneous. What Norman Rabkin calls the "common understanding"—the tendency or ability of Shakespeare's plays to offer (even affirm) simultaneously, without contradiction, contradictory themes, messages, and ideological stances—was, I would argue, ultimately a product of early modern market forces which shaped dramatic commodities to answer the various...

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