FROM the early 1590's, toward the beginning of his career, all the way through to its end, Shakespeare grappled again and again with a deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?
“A king rules over willing subjects,” wrote the influential sixteenth-century Scottish scholar George Buchanan, “a tyrant over unwilling.” The institutions of a free society are designed to ward off those who would govern, as Buchanan put it, “not for their country but for themselves, who take account not of the public interest but of their own pleasure.”' Under what circumstances, Shakespeare asked himself, do such cherished institutions, seemingly deep-tooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to? How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne?
Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth?
Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness, or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting peole submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?
Shakespeare repeatedly depicted the tragic cost of this submission- the moral corruption, the massive waste of treasure, the loss of life- and the desperate, painful, heroic measures required to return a damaged nation to some modicum of of health. Is there, the plays ask, any way to stop the slide towards lawless and arbitrary rule before it is too late, any effective means to prevent the civil catastrophe that tyranny invariably provokes?
The playwright was not accusing England’s current ruler, Elizabeth I. of being a tyrant. Quite apart from whatever Shakespeare privately thought, it would have been suicidal to float: such a suggestion onstage. Dating back to 1534. during the reign of the queen’s father, Henry VIII legal statutes made it treason to refer to the ruler as a tyrant. The penalty for such a crime was death. .
There was no freedom of expression in Shakespeare's England, on the stage or anywhere else. The 1597 performances of an allegedly seditious play "The Isle of Dogs" led to the arrest and Imprisonment of the playwright Ben Jonson and to a government order-fortunately not enforced- to demolish all the playhouses in London. Informants attended the theater, eager to claim a reward for denouncing to the authorities anything that could be construed as subversive. Attempts to reflect critically on contemporary events or on leading figures were particularly risky.
As with modem totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing what most mattered to them at one or more removes. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare's penchant for displacement. He seems to have grasped that he thought more clearly about the issues that preoccupied his world when he confronted them not directly but from an oblique angle. His plays suggest that he could acknowledge truth-to possess it fully and not perish of it-through the artifice of fiction or through historical distance. Hence the fascination he found in the legendary Roman leader Caius Martius Coriolanus or in the historical Julius Caesar. hence the appeal of such figures from the English and Scottish chronicles as York Jack Cade. Lear, and above all, the quintessential tyrants Richard III and Macbeth. And hence, too, the lure of entirely imaginary figures: the sadistic emperor Saturninus in Titus Adronicus; the corrupt deputy Angelo in Measure for Measure; the paranoid King Leontes in The Winter's Tale. Shakespeare's popular success suggests that many of his contemporaries felt the same thing.
and
“I will stir up in England some black storm,” he broods to himself, a storm that will not cease to rage until the crown he plans to seize-"the golden circuit on my head”-shines like the sun and calms the fury. And he has, he reveals, found the perfect person to be his agent: “I have seduced a headstrong Kentishman/john Cade" (2 Henry VI, 3.1.349-57).
John (or Jack) Cade was an actual person-a lowerclass rebel about whom few personal details are known who led a bloody popular revolt that flared up against the English government in 1450 and was quickly and violently suppressed. To fashion his character, Shakespeare cobbled together materials he gathered from the historical chronicles (including the speculation that Cade was secretly funded by York), combined them with the traces of other peasant uprisings, and added details drawn from his own vivid imagination. Shakespeare’s grand Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, does not care in the slightest about the ultimate fate of the base man he has seduced into furthering his designs, and he cares still less about the ragged mob he intends to stir up into rebellion. But he has observed Cade carefully and seen qualities that may make him useful, including an uncanny indifference to pain and, therefore, an ability to keep hidden their secret bond:
Say he be taken, racked, and tortured,
Will make him say I moved him to those arms.
Secrecy is important: it would not do for the powerful aristocrat to be revealed as the instigator of a vicious popular uprising.
The uprising turns out to be an even greater storm than York could have wished. The mob, gathering just outside London in Blackheath, is rallied by Cade, who proves himself to be an effective demagogue, the master of voodoo economics:
There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common. . . . There shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord. (4.2.61-70)
When the crowd roars its approval, Cade sounds exactly like a modern stump speaker: “I thank you, good people” (4.2.167).
The absurdity of these campaign promises is not an impediment to their effectiveness. On the contrary: Cade keeps producing demonstrable falsehoods about his origins and making wild claims about the great things he will do, and the crowds eagerly swallow them. To be sure, his neighbors know that Cade is a congenital liar:
w.
Cade: My mother a Plantagenet-
Butcher:. (Aside) I knew her well; she was a midWIfc.
Cade: My wife descended of the Lacys-
BUTCHER: [Aside] She was indeed a peddler’s
daughter and sold laces. (4239-43)
Cade’s absurd assertions of aristocratic lineage should make him seem merely a buffoon. Far from a wealthy, high-born magnate, he is little more than a vagabond: “I have seen him whipped three market days together,” whispers one of his supporters (4.2.53-54). But, strangely enough, this knowledge does not diminish the mob’s faith.
Cade himself, for all we know, may think that what he is so obviously making up as he goes along will actually come to pass. Drawing on an indifference to the truth, shamelessness, and hyperinflated self-confidence, the loudmouthed demagogue is entering a fantasyland-“When I am king, as king I will be”-and he invites his listeners to enter the same magical space with him. In that space, facts do not count (4.2.65). Two and two do not have to equal four, and the most recent assertion need not remember the contradictory assertion that was made a few seconds earlier.
In ordinary times, when a public figure is caught in a lie or simply reveals blatant ignorance of the truth, his standing is diminished. But these are not ordinary times. If a dispassionate bystander were to point out all of Cade’s grotesque distortions, mistakes, and downright lies, the crowd’s anger would light on the skeptic and not on Cade. Famously, it is at the end of one of Cade‘s speeches that someone in the crowd shouts, "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” (4.2.71).
Shakespeare knew that the line would get laughs, as it has done for the last four centuries. It releases the current of aggression that swirls around the whole enterprise of the law-directed not merely at venal attorneys but at all the agents of the vast social apparatus that compels the honoring of contracts, the payment of debts, the fulfillment of obligations. We blithely imagine that the crowd wants such responsible qualities in its leaders, but the scene suggests otherwise. What it wants instead is permission to ignore commitments, to violate promises, and to break the rules.
Cade begins by talking vaguely about “reformation,” but his actual appeal is wholesale destruction. He urges the mob to pull down London’s law schools, the Inns of Court, but that is only the beginning. “I have a suit unto your lordship,” entreats one of his chief followers, “that the laws of England may come out of your mouth” (4.7.3-7). “I have thought upon it,” Cade replies, “it shall be so. Away! Burn all the records of the realm; my month shall be the Parliament of England ” (4.7.11-13).
That in this destruction the common people would lose even the very limited power they possess-the power expressed when they voted in parliamentary elections--does not matter. For Cade’s ardent supporters, the time-honored institutional system of representation is worthless. It has, they feel, never represented them. Their inchoate wish is to tear up all the agreements, cancel all the debts, and wreck all the existing institutions. Better to have the law come from the mouth of the dictator. who may claim to be a Plantagenet but whom they recognize as one of their own. The masses 3ft perfectly aware that he is a liar, but---venal, cruel, and self‘ Serving though he is-he succeeds in articulating their dream; “Henceforward all things shall be in common” (4.7.16).
Cade’s rant stands in for any transparency about his own past and any serious commitment to make good on this or that particular promise. Far from demanding that he keep his word, his followers are gratified When he rails against all contracts: “Is not this a lamentable thing, that the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment; that patchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man?” (4.2.7275). The remark about the “scribbled-over” parchment is at once ridiculous-how else should legal documents look?and canny. The poor whose passions Cade is arousing feel excluded, despised, and vaguely ashamed. They have been left out of an economy that increasingly demands possession of a once-esoteric technology: literacy. They do not imagine that they can master this new skill, nor does their leader propose that they undertake any education. It would hardly suit his purposes if they did so. What he does instead is manipulate their resentment of the educated.
The mob quickly apprehends a clerk and levels an accusav [ion against him: “he can write and read.” Indeed, his accus
report, “We took him setting of boys’ copies”--that is.
cparing writing exercises for schoolboys (4.2.81). Cade undertakes to conduct the interrogation: “Dost thou use to write thy name," he asks. “Or hast thou a mark to thyself, like a honest plain-dealing man?" (4.2.92-93). If the clerk knew what was good for him, he would insist that he was illiterate and signed his name only with a mark. Instead he proudly proclaims his accomplishment: “Sir, I thank God I have been so well brought up that I can write my name.” “He hath confessed!” the mob shouts. “Away with him! He’s a villain and a traitor.” “Away with him, I say!” orders Cade, echoing the crowd’s demand. “Hang him with his pen and ink-horn about his neck” (4.2.94-99).
Jack Cade longs for the time when, as he puts it, boys played games of toss “for French crowns,” a time before the country was “maimed and fain to go with a staff” (4.2.14550). Until weaklings led it astray, he suggests, England compelled its enemies to tremble before its power, and that glorious swaggering must now be recovered. He promises to make England great again. How will he do that? He shows the crowd at once: he attacks education. The educated elite has betrayed the people. They are traitors who will all be brought to justice, and this justice will be meted out not by judges and lawyers but in a call-and-response between the leader and his mob. The English treasurer Lord Saye “can speak French"-“and therefore he is a traitor" (4.2.153). It makes perfect sense: “The Frenchmen are our enemies. . . . I ask but this: can he that speaks with the tongue of an enemy be a good counselor, or no?" The crowd roars the answer:
“No, no-and therefore we'll have his head!"
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