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179 In the corporation records of Elizabethan Warwick, the big town just eight miles up the road from Stratford-upon-Avon, the name Richard Brookes is a talismanic sign of subversion and disorder. Brookes’s early career in Warwick did not promise Marlovian rebellion: a well-connected man of some substance, he became a principal burgess in 1565 (BB 7).1 But in 1582, Brookes’s fellow civic leaders expelled him from the borough corporation (BB 367). In a lengthy account of the “speciall causes” for this unusual action, John Fisher, the town clerk, reported that Brookes “spareth no labor nor cost to send for divers unworthy Inhabitants of the said borough perswading alluring & procuring them with swete woordes & dissembling dayntys to put their hands to his develisshe devices . . . [and] to stirre up light & lewde heades to mutynye & uproure against the officers of this borough” (BB 377–78). In early modern England, this sort of rhetoric was typically reserved for witches, Jesuit agents provocateurs, leaders of agrarian riots, and, of course, actors. Brookes, however, wanted the people of Warwick to join him in neither Satanism, popish plots, anti-enclosure risings, nor playing. Brookes’s sins, to be sure, stain dozens of pages in The Black Book ofWarwick: he wore “undecent apparell . . . betokening him rather to be a miller then a magistrate” (BB 371); he violated prohibitions on publicizing the secret transactions and proceedings of corporation meetings (373);2 in 1576, he engaged in a mock epic legal dispute that ended in his violent defense—bows and arrows are mentioned—of a barnful of hay (289–96); and so on and so on for decades. The Battle of the Barn undoubtedly established Brookes as Warwick’s most colorful citizen, but 5 “Worshipful mutineers” From Demos to Electorate in Coriolanus 180 he remained a principal burgess—one of the thirteen men who governed the town—for another six eventful years.3 Brookes became “an open Enemye” of the corporation and the object of Fisher’s nearly hysterical wrath only after he began to encourage the lesser freemen of Warwick to demand increased access to the burgesses’ handling of corporation finances and a greater voice in municipal and parliamentary elections (313).4 The evolution of Warwick’s civic government reveals the complex layering and diffusion of power in early modern England and the role political representation played in containing popular unrest. A dozen Elizabethan and Jacobean town histories tell much the same story, but Warwick commands our special attention because the “mutynye & uproure” Brookes allegedly promoted would have been very, very local history for a Stratford resident, and I believe that Shakespeare knew it well. Henry VIII granted Warwick’s original Charter of Incorporation in 1546 (BB 227), but town government took shape under the provisions of letters patent issued by Philip and Mary in 1554: municipal authority was invested in a bailiff and twelve principal burgesses (89); in the annual election of the bailiff, the inhabitants of the town were granted the right to choose between two candidates nominated by the burgesses; the burgesses alone held the power to create new burgesses to fill vacancies in their own body; and the corporation council was empowered, but not required, to appoint a secondary council of assistants (341). In 1564, the corporation oligarchy decided to create a “common council” of twenty-four assistants (10)—a response, it seems, to the commoners’ complaints that the town’s financial affairs were conducted secretly and, perhaps, not very ethically (12). Creating the common council, however, was clearly an attempt to contain dissent rather than a program of democratization. The burgesses, rather than the commoners , chose the assistants, and the new common council enjoyed only a very limited role in town governance. What little the assistants were to learn of corporation affairs, moreover, was not to be disseminated to their fellow townsmen and women: “such thynges as ye are or shallbe callid to counsell of within the same borough ye shall kepe secret and not reveale the same unto any person out of the counsell house” (11). The secrecy oath reproduced locally one of the great contradictions of national political representation: the same corporation orders that enjoined the assistants never to disclose corporation proceedings to mere commoners also mandated that they “should be as it were the mowth of all the commoners. And what they agree unto shalbe taken as the consent of all the commoners in any election” (16). In Warwick, the containment of...

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