Chartier, Roger. “Jack Cade, the Skin of a Dead Lamb, and the Hatred for Writing.” Shakespeare Studies 34 (2006): 77–89.

  Chartier examines Cade’s vitriolic hatred of all things written in the context of early modern thinking on the merits of oral versus written testimony. By the time the play was written, although “viva vox,” the living voice, was granted superiority over parchment in matters relating to evidentiary testimony, Europe’s legal, judicial, and administrative procedures were moving more systematically toward a preference for written documents “as instruments of proof and authentication.” In constructing Cade’s anti-writing discourse, Shakespeare conflated the 1450 rebellion (which manifested no hostility for the written culture) and the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt (which involved the destruction of legal records and instruments). The conflation of the two events imparts to the Cade scenes “the status of an ‘exemplum,’ ” but with a “profound distortion” of what the rebels of 1381 were protesting; for unlike Cade and his men, the historical rebels had as their targets poll tax receipts, legal records, and the Inns of Court, not books, libraries, and intellectual culture. In Cade’s “impossible restoration of a time liberated from the oppressive power of writing,” we should, perhaps, see “the lasting nostalgia for orality and the anxieties created by the growing power of writing” in the early modern period. Despite his rigid opposition between the spoken word and the printed word, Cade’s anti-writing campaign “paradoxically helps us to refuse the simplifications . . . that have deeded to us a historical narrative according to which rationality and modernity are exclusively identified with the written culture.”

  Harris, Laurie Lanzen, and Mark W. Scott, eds. “Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3.” In Shakespearean Criticism: Excerpts from the Criticism of William Shakespeare’s Plays and Poetry from the First Published Appraisals to Current Evaluations, 3:11–164. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986.

  This volume presents significant passages from published criticism on the three parts of H6. The set of passages is introduced by a brief discussion of the “date,” “text,” and “sources,” followed by a longer discussion of the “critical history” of the plays. Each entry, beginning with Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592) and ending with Marilyn French’s Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (1981), is prefaced with a brief historical overview that places the excerpted document in the context of responses to the play. Of the almost sixty entries, early commentary derives from Thomas Nashe (1592), John Crowne (1681), Gerard Langbaine (1691), and from such eighteenth-century editors as Nicholas Rowe, Lewis Theobald, Edward Capell, Samuel Johnson, and Edmond Malone; nineteenth-century critics are represented by such figures as William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hermann Ulrici, and Georg Gottfried Gervinus; entries from the twentieth century include excerpts from the writings of Carolyn Spurgeon, E. M. W. Tillyard, Hereward Price, Wolfgang Clemen, Muriel C. Bradbrook, Harold Goddard, David Bevington, Irving Ribner, Robert Ornstein, Michael Manheim, John Cox, and Larry Champion. A briefly annotated bibliography of fifty-five additional items concludes the section. A subsequent volume, edited by Michele Lee (2002), updates the criticism through the 1990s under such headings as Character Study, Henry VI as Comedy, Playing with History, and Unity and Design (vol. 63, pp. 113–218).

  Helgerson, Richard. “Staging Exclusion.” In Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, pp. 193–246. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

  In his study of how a single generation of Elizabethan writers spanning the fields of poetry, law, cartography, travel writing, drama, and ecclesiastical policy laid the foundation for England’s development from a dynastic kingdom to the modern nation-state, Helgerson discusses Shakespeare’s history plays as the dramatist’s major contribution to this “generational project” of “writing England.” The focus of the chapter is The Contention, which Helgerson refers to as the text “we now know as [2H6].” What fascinates him is the inclusiveness of 1.1, in which no one onstage is under the rank of an earl and yet much of the talk is about doing well by “the people,” who are made “fundamental to the nation’s identity and to the legitimacy of its governing order” (see, e.g., 1.1.165, 190, 200, 206, 207, 212–14). Although the play was written by a commoner, performed by commoners, and played before an audience of mostly commoners, the italicizing of the popular presence in the opening scene does not conform to Shakespeare’s general practice in the history genre, where he often seems to identify England “exclusively with its kings and nobles.” While the first two-thirds of The Contention are open and univocal in their political ideology, the Cade rebellion in the last third “pushes [the] inclusionist ideal toward its own exclusionist extreme,” the treatment of the rebels exposing popular rule “as inimical to the very existence of the institution by which it and other plays like it were produced.” Abandoning the position with which it began, The Contention violently pits peasants and craftsmen against nobles. For Helgerson, the play’s inclusion-to-exclusion dynamic mirrors what was happening to the theater in the transitional 1590s, when the “institutional setting” of Shakespeare’s history plays, patronized by the Crown and nobility but dependent for its income on a popular audience, “was riven by internal animosities that set . . . university-educated poets against the professional players for whom they wrote.” The exclusive tendencies of the former would eventually prevail in the shift from a players’ theater to an authors’ theater. In their “fixation on monarchic power,” Shakespeare’s history plays “contributed at once to the consolidation of central power, to the cultural division of class from class, and to the emergence of the playwright—Shakespeare himself—as both gentleman and poet.” As Shakespeare continued to write, the less privileged still had a place in his audience, but they lost their place in the dramatist’s representation of England.

  Hodgdon, Barbara. “Enclosing Contention: 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI.” In The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History, pp. 44–99. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

  Combining performance criticism (mostly of RSC productions) with study of the play texts, Hodgdon explores “closural strategies” in the three parts of H6. In the commentary specifically devoted to Part 2 (pp. 59–68), she finds the contrasting title pages of the 1594 Quarto text (The Contention) and the 1623 Folio text (2H6) to be useful guides to understanding the play’s structure and closure. With no mention of the King or Queen Margaret, the lengthy title of the Quarto “maps out . . . its multiple centers of narrative privilege”: Duke Humphrey, Suffolk, Winchester, Cade, and York. The much shorter Folio title “predicts another play, one that centers on the King and his surrogate father-Protector.” The Quarto’s title indicates a “two-part narrative strategy” that involves a division of the kingdom resulting in the deaths of Gloucester and Winchester and then a reopening of the action with two events that close the play: Cade’s insurrection and York’s efforts “to reconstitute the monarchy, with himself as King.” The Folio’s title is equally helpful in the way it signals what might be called 2H6’s “internal close, where power is transferred from Protector to King.” The first half of the play deals with the female misrule of Gloucester’s and Henry’s ambitious wives; the second, with “another form of festival inversion: Cade’s transgressive pseudosocialist commonwealth.” Although both texts look forward to Henry’s future Parliament and to another confrontation that will secure the throne, the Quarto is less hesitant than the “ambiguous ‘Lancastrian’ ” Folio in relocating “true” right in York. Hodgdon claims that “the existence of two versions of a play that duplicates, even reduplicates, kingship constitutes one of the rarest coincidences in the strange, eventful history of Shakespeare’s multiple-text plays.” Later in the chapter (pp. 76–99), the author discusses the play’s stage life as performed in John Barton and Peter Hall’s The Wars of the Roses (RSC, 1963), Terry Hands’s “(relatively) uncut and unadapted” revival of the complete H6 trilogy (RSC, 1977), Michael Bogdanov’s The Wars of the Roses (English Shakespeare Company, 1988), and Adrian Noble’s The Plantagenets (RSC, 1988).

  Hutson, Lorna. “Noises Off: Participatory Justice in 2 Henry VI.” In The Law in Shakespeare, edited by Karen Cunningham and Constance Jordan, pp. 143–66. London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007.

  In her reading of 2H6, Hutson refutes the tradition of identifying early modern legal processes with decisions reached by official figures of the court. She argues instead for an emerging sense of “participatory justice,” which depended on “the collection of evidence rendered to the court by the testimony of witnesses who, expecting to be interrogated, needed to have ‘forensic or detective habits of mind.’ ” Central to the essay is Warwick’s description of Duke Humphrey’s corpse (3.2.164–85), a form of coroner’s inquest in response to the outrage of the people. Prior to the speech, which belongs “to the judicial culture of the pretrial examination of the later sixteenth century,” the intrigues and legal/judicial corruption of the first two acts reveal the law as “nothing but aristocratic power cloaked in procedure.” That image changes with the important stage direction “Noise within” (3.2.125), a powerful signal of the offstage presence of the commons. In keeping with the English criminal justice system, it is the people who first call for an investigation of Duke Humphrey’s death, “and in responding to that call, Warwick enfolds us, the audience, into his response to the commons.” While his simile of an “angry hive of bees” (3.2.129–31) implicitly raises the threat of a mob’s unconstrained violence, it also recalls the traditional image of the res publica as a beehive, common in sixteenth-century political treatises, and thus identifies the noise of the people with “the commonwealth,” i.e., with the public interest. In contrast to the popular rebellion that erupts in the next act, “the appeal to the intelligent judgement and moral passion of the commons implied in Warwick’s forensic inquiry offers a powerfully utopian image of participatory justice as a form of the commons’ political agency.”

  Lee, Patricia-Ann. “Reflections of Power: Margaret of Anjou and the Dark Side of Queenship.” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 183–217.

  Lee compares Shakespeare’s depiction of Margaret of Anjou in 2 and 3H6 and R3 with depictions of the historical Margaret found in letters and other documentary records. The queen who appears in the plays as pitiless and cruel but also determined and vigorous shares much with her historical counterpart, but the theatrical image was “overlaid” with years of cumulative bias and myth that had already made Margaret “the symbol of a particular kind of female ruler and a pattern of negative feminine power.” Shakespeare’s “archetypal villainess”—the product of both his own artistic creativity and a tradition established by generations of propagandists and chroniclers—serves as a commentary on feminine rule. Noting how the playwright was interested in Margaret as both a queen and a woman, Lee observes the character’s strength and ambition from the beginning of 2H6, while also pointing out her “signs of weakness for she lacks the true qualities of royalty”: see, for example, her jealousy of Eleanor, her adultery, and her all-consuming desire for revenge after the death of Suffolk. As the play draws to an end, Margaret grows more malign and evil in her promotion of contention over tranquillity; finally, she perverts the patriarchal order by usurping Henry’s place as both husband and sovereign. To have depicted such a negative view of queenship while a queen occupied the throne of England would seem to have been a risky endeavor on Shakespeare’s part, but because Elizabeth I had successfully “turn[ed] her femininity to positive purposes” in a careful construction of androgynous power, thereby reversing the dark images associated with female rule, Shakespeare’s depiction of Queen Margaret and her illegitimate queenship posed no practical threat to either Elizabeth or the playwright.

  Levine, Nina. Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender, and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998. (Chapter 2 reprints with revisions Levine’s essay “The Case of Eleanor Cobham: Authorizing History in 2 Henry VI,” Shakespeare Studies 22 [1994]: 104–21.)

  While Shakespeare’s early histories (1, 2, and 3H6, R3, and John) rewrite the Tudor chronicle record so as to acknowledge the importance of women in ensuring patrilineal succession, Levine contends that they also “generate a critique of patrilineal inheritance and legitimacy” that speaks to the Elizabethan present in which the plays are “situated.” The author is especially interested in how the H6 trilogy uses political contexts—“both on- and offstage”—to frame and qualify negative stereotypes of women. In chapter 2, “Dangerous Practices: Making History in 2 Henry VI” (pp. 47–67), Levine focuses on Eleanor Cobham to argue that contrary to the stereotypical “virago-witch-traitor,” Shakespeare’s Eleanor is “double-voiced”: she is both the aggressor in thinking treasonous thoughts and consorting with necromancers and the victim of political entrapment. To see her only in the negative terms of Buckingham’s assessment (2.1.178–89) is to miss Shakespeare’s version of her crime, which attends to “the complex politics underwriting” Eleanor’s activities and punishment. Levine attributes Shakespeare’s probative rather than polemical characterization to John Foxe’s account of the episode in the 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments, a book that served as both source and context for Shakespeare’s duchess. Whereas Yorkist writers consistently vilified Eleanor and Tudor chroniclers such as Hall and Holinshed presented contradictory “facts” from which the reader could choose, Foxe defended her, conjecturing that she may have been set up by those out to advance their own agendas against the king. To support the claim that Shakespeare provides a theatrical version of Foxe’s interrogation of the chronicle accounts, Levine notes (1) the use of framing soliloquies by York (1.1.223–71) and Hume (1.2.90–110) that portray Eleanor as an unwitting pawn, and (2) the casting of Eleanor as a passive observer in the actual conjuring scene (1.4). Furthermore, 2H6’s depiction of Eleanor “contests the authority of the patriarchal narrative”: instead of preserving the state, the duchess’s “ ‘containment’ [her trial and punishment] ironically . . . contributes to its ruin”—the “good Duke Humphrey” (1.1.170) is murdered; York advances his own absolutist agenda; and social rebellion ensues with Jack Cade. By creating a “double-voiced” Eleanor, Shakespeare “opens up . . . the political faultlines in this gendered story, inviting consideration of the conflicts and contradictions at work in representations of power, both past and present.”

  In a subsequent chapter, “Ruling Women and the Politics of Gender in 2 and 3 Henry VI” (pp. 68–96), Levine brings Tudor chronicle accounts of Queen Margaret and sixteenth-century debates over female rule to bear on her discussion of the role of Margaret in Part 2 (pp. 79–87). Unlike his chronicle sources, Shakespeare’s depiction of the queen interrogates “gendered attacks on women rulers and calls instead for a political ethos based on the nation’s welfare.” As Levine argues, Shakespeare encourages censure of Margaret not because of her gender but because she, “like York and Cade, abuses the common people and the nation’s laws.” By the end of the play, Shakespeare further qualifies 2H6’s depiction of female misrule by allowing at least a temporary place for women in politics. Fighting to keep the crown in the Lancastrian hands of her husband and son (5.2.73–84), Margaret “emerges as a courageous and pragmatic leader,” her boldness assuming a heroic quality as her politics moves toward the center in contrast to York’s “tyrannical absolutism.” Throughout the dramatic action, the spectacle of her misrule may invoke anxieties about ruling women, but concerns for the commonwealth—a rationale deployed in early defenses of Elizabeth’s monarchy—“supersede . . . gender as the principal criterion for assessing her rule.”

  Patterson, Annabel. “The Peasant’s Toe: Popular Culture and Popular Pressure.” In Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, pp. 32–51. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

  In her study of Shakespeare’s social assumptions and treatment of popular resistance, Patterson contends that a fresh interpretation of 2H6 would start not with Jack Cade but with the “formal act of ventriloquism” performed by Salisbury, who, after the murder of “good Duke Humphrey” (1.1.170), repeatedly uses the phrase “they say” to inform the king of the people’s conviction about Suffolk’s treachery against them (3.2.251–78). In the course of his speech—one of crucial importance for Shakespeare’s conception of the popular voice—Salisbury emerges as the people’s spokesman and their true advocate (as Duke Humphrey had been before him). Patterson finds in the people’s success against their enemy Suffolk “conditional approval” of popular protest—“conditional, that is, on rightful motives, a basic loyalty to the crown, and a proper spokesman.” As for the notorious Jack Cade, he “fails every test for” such a spokesman. Because York’s scheme to use Cade as a surrogate precedes the Salisbury intervention—the order is reversed in the historical sources—Shakespeare’s Cade enters the dramatic action (4.2) as an “impostor aristocrat and a traitor to his class,” everything he says “already suspect.” In Cade’s attack on literacy (4.7.31–46), followed by Lord Saye’s “salaried version of liberal humanism” (4.7.71–76), Patterson finds an example of “double ventriloquism”: “the voice of popular protest speaking through [an insincere Cade] speaking through Shakespeare’s playtext.” As further evidence of Shakespeare’s efforts to dramatize different styles of populism, the author points to the scene involving John Holland and Bevis on Blackheath (4.2.10–21); by introducing the criterion of labor as a test of social values, the two minor characters, “free of . . . cynicism . . . and natural in their echoes of the tropes of popular protest,” demonstrate “beyond a shadow of a doubt that the real popular consciousness, as distinct from the impostor, is capable of penetrating hegemony’s aphorisms.” In contrast to Helgerson and Wilson, Patterson concludes that there is nothing in 2H6 “that can justify its use as the court of last appeal in a claim for Shakespeare’s conservatism.”