Ruthless Power and Ambivalent Glory: The Rebel-Labourer in 2 Henry VI

"If the feet knew their strength as well as we know their oppression, they would not bear as they do."

—Fulke Greville to the House of Commons, 1596

Some of the "feet" did know their strength in the tumultuous late sixteenth century, and, as Greville's comment implies, the privileged classes were not only aware of the oppression of the lower classes but also of their strength, and of the potential volatility of such a combination. The drama of the period is one place where fear of commoner rebellion is registered, and in many of the early modern plays that staged rebellion—2 Henry VI, Sir Thomas More, The Life and Death of Jack Straw—the physical strength of lowborn bodies is a particular focus of anxiety. Of these plays, 2 Henry VI provides the most chilling representation of the breakdown of unity among social groups and stages the most notable and gruesome reign of lower-class terror. The play makes clear its awareness of both the oppression and the strength of the "feet" of the commonwealth. The lower class rebels are particularly frightening because of the source of their power—their weapons are the common tools of artisan shops, and their skill and strength the natural result of their familiar routines of work in shops and fields. And their anger, as well, is familiar—Cade and his fellow rebels protest enclosure and food prices; their discontent was the well- known, and to many minds justified, discontent of contemporary food and enclosure rioters in England. Through its representation of the Cade rebellion, the play articulates the potential power, as well as the motives, of late sixteenth-century labourers to wreak bloody havoc on the social body.

At the same time, these rebels are often remarkably appealing characters. Many critics see the rebels' brutality as functioning solely to discredit their cause, and rarely take note of the rebels' physical prowess;¹ I'd like to suggest, on the other hand, that dangerous bodies, mediated by a representational distance, can be aesthetically appealing and exciting to watch. 2 Henry VI suggests that fear does not entirely dispel admiration and may even help to create it. Furthermore, bellicose masculinity as embodied by Cade was valued in Renaissance England as a quintessentially English trait. The ethos of the warrior was generally associated with the aristocratic classes, but in 2 Henry VI the spotlight on the rebels calls attention to a powerful masculinity located in the world of work. And, while in Cade and his fellow rebels English puissance is a threat that needs to be controlled, its lack is also detrimental to the realm; Cade's strength and resolve, his masculine body, underscores the failure of the king himself to embody masculinity.² The ineffectual, passive king does not command the audience's attention and thus creates a void on the stage that must be filled—Cade and the rebels fill that void.

The attention of the audience is kept on the rebels through their exciting duality—their frightening monstrousness and their admirable bellicosity. Additionally, the performative skill of the rebels' jesting fills the stage with appealing play: the rebels are funny and festive, and through their self-referential, sometimes self-parodic humour they control a great deal of the political rhetoric of the play.³ They do not, however, fit seamlessly into the paradigm of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, a paradigm most modern discussions of the early modern working body have relied on and which, with its dependence upon a high/low, closed/open polarity, provides, I want to argue, a restricted picture of the ways working bodies enter into discourse on the early modern stage.⁴ Embodied in the festivities and rituals of the "people," the Bakhtinian carnivalesque emphasizes the lower bodily stratum—the belly, anus, and genitals—and its functions—digestion, elimination, and reproduction—in order to subversively...