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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral “[K]nit and united to one part” Commons, commonalty and commonweal/th The commons and rebellion Commons voices The commons on the late Elizabethan stage Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Representing the Commons in Early Modern England

    Ce livre est recensé par

    Précédent Suivant
    Table des matières

    Chapter 4

    “The commons, knit and united to one part”: Representing, Fearing and Controlling the Commons

    « Le commun uni et tissé ensemble » : les représentations, la peur et le contrôle du commun

    Janet Clare

    p. 73-93

    Résumés

    In De Republica Anglorum, published posthumously in 1583, Thomas Smith enumerates “the division of the parts and persons of the Common-wealth”. The fourth “sort” or class includes men who “have no voice nor authority in our Common-wealth, and no account is made of them, but only to be ruled, and not to rule other”. Such an ideology of the commons, however, masked the riotous and rebellious propensities of a heterogeneous commonalty, resentful of their systematic exclusion from the politics of the realm, stretching back at least to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Sixteenth-century rebellions, together with the representations of popular revolt in the chronicles, and the giving of voice on the stage to historic rebels such as Jack Straw, Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, initiated a debate about the role of the commons in national politics, a debate which was often stifled through censorship and propaganda. This chapter explores the semantics and emergent ideologies of the commons in the political discourse of the mid-sixteenth century, their articulation on the stage before an audience comprising members of the class itself and the control of commons’ voices in a period when the “fourth sort” was reckoned by other parts of the commonwealth to have no voice or authority.

    Dans son De Republica Anglorum, publié à titre posthume en 1583, Thomas Smith énumère “les divisions entre les parties et les personnes du Commonwealth”. La quatrième catégorie correspond à ceux qui “n’ont ni voix ni autorité dans notre République : on ne fait d’eux aucun cas, sinon pour être gouvernés et jamais pour gouverner”. Une telle idéologie “du commun” cache cependant les dispositions à la rébellion d’une communauté hétérogène, qui refuse d’être systématiquement exclue des affaires politiques du royaume – et cela au moins depuis la révolte des paysans de 1381. Les rébellions du seizième siècle ; la manière dont les chroniques représentent la révolte populaire ; ou encore le fait que certains dramaturges fassent parler sur scène des rebelles historiques tels que Jack Straw, Wat Tyler et Jack Cade : tout cela contribua à faire naître un débat sur le rôle du commun dans la politique nationale, même si ce débat fut souvent étouffé par la propagande et la censure. Ce chapitre étudie les idéologies émergentes relatives au commun dans le discours politique de la deuxième moitié du seizième siècle tel que celui-ci fut articulé sur la scène théâtrale devant un public qui comprenait des membres de cette même classe.

    Texte intégral “[K]nit and united to one part” Commons, commonalty and commonweal/th The commons and rebellion Commons voices The commons on the late Elizabethan stage Bibliographie Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    1The evocative, and much-cited, new historicist metaphor of literary studies as “the desire to speak with the dead” has gained common currency.1 In the decades since Stephen Greenblatt’s pronouncement, the project of recovering voices from the past has expanded to include more socially or culturally marginalised identities where textual traces tend to be sparse or mediated through more literate contemporaries. Undoubtedly, some voices are more accessible or recoverable than others. The commons, individual and collective, actual and simulated, leave fewer traces in the archives than do the higher social orders. Even when their voices are recorded, depictions of the commons are often controlled, notably in accounts and representations of the great mass uprisings of medieval England. The focus of this chapter is on the commons at moments of political crisis as they are heard, represented and re-created in chronicles and in plays of the late sixteenth century.

    2In the Elizabethan history play, archival material, folk memory and commons ideology are woven together to articulate commons voices. To reach some understanding of what the commons might signify in plays such as Shakespeare’s The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster we need, however, to uncover something of the longue durée of commons ideology together with commonweal and commonwealth from which it is inseparable. Whether representing medieval England or ancient Rome, the plays are history plays. Do the projected images of the commons reflect an historic and topographical sense, or are they always / already anachronistic in depicting the commons as governed by the dominant ideology of late Tudor England? This ideology is encapsulated in an observation of a local magistrate in 1512: “if you suffer the commons to rule, and follow their appetite and desire, farewell all good order”.2 To what extent, then, do plays depicting the commons, written by men of commons ancestry and performed before audiences comprising in part the commons, offer a more nuanced view of the official line?

    “[K]nit and united to one part”

    3I want to begin with the anonymous manuscript play Sir Thomas More, a work which has been extensively written about as an object of theatrical censorship. As is well known, the opening scenes of the play, depicting the London May Day riots in 1517 against foreigners – the French, Lombards and Dutch, whose activities in trade and banking were allegedly injurious to the citizens’ livelihoods –, were subjected to comprehensive censorship.3 The Master of the Revels, the theatrical licenser, ordered the insurrection and its causes to be removed from the play before it could be performed. His injunction is a significant indication of the preoccupations of late Elizabethan censorship. The play was never printed in the period, and, since there is no record of performance, there is some consensus that, despite attempted revision, official interference with the play had been so extensive that it could not have been performed. In one of the offending scenes, the leader of the commons, John Lincoln, identified as a broker, has composed a bill of complaint.4 For his complaint to reach to a wider audience, Lincoln appeals to one of the preachers of the Spital Sermons – a Dr Beale – to include the bill in his preaching.5

    4The actual bill of complaint of the London commons in 1517 survives and is recorded in the chronicles. It has an interesting transmission history, as it moves from sermon to chronicle (Hall to Holinshed), to the play Sir Thomas More. But it did not reach its further intended destination of the public platform of the theatre, since the licenser has marked for omission the entire scene in which Lincoln reads his bill.

    5“By the foolish sermon”, reports Holinshed, “many a light person tooke courage and openly spoke against strangers”; a marginal gloss on Beale calls him “an indiscreet preacher”.6 In the uncensored play text, the playwright has taken Lincoln’s words almost verbatim from Holinshed. Having set out grievances, his peroration calls on the commons:

    Wherefore, the premises considered, the redress must be of the commons, knit and united to one part. And as the hurt and damage grieveth all men, so must all men set to their willing power for remedy, and not suffer the said aliens in their wealth, and the natural born men of this region to come to confusion.7

    The two modern editors, those of the Revels and the Arden editions,8 gloss “commons” here as “commoners” and “the common people”, respectively. But Lincoln’s rhetoric in its repeated call to “all men” is much more socially inclusive than the glosses suggest. His complaint alleges that foreigners not only take their living from “artificers” (that is, artisans and craftsmen) who are indisputably members of the commons, in the narrow sense, but also affect the commerce of merchants, so that “every man bewaileth the misery of others”.9 To our eyes, Lincoln’s appeal is disturbingly familiar: the whipping up of hostility against foreigners who are made scapegoats for national economic ills. In its context, however, the address to the commons is an attenuated appeal to the notion of a commonweal, a coalition of richer and poorer members of society – here, urban – united not against the gentry and nobility, as in earlier mass uprisings, but against immigrants. What is interesting about Lincoln’s appeal to the commons – however uneasy we might be about the xenophobic context – is that he is drawing on an earlier notion of commons to serve a nationalistic agenda. In recovering the notion of commons as community bound together by common interest, in a context of nationalism, the play debases a key word in English vernacular politics, while its reconstitution in this play illustrates some of the fractures and ambiguities of its usages in the period and earlier.

    Commons, commonalty and commonweal/th

    6As John Watts reminds us, “commons” was one of the central concepts of English political life between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.10 It was deployed extensively in sermons and public poetry, in bills and manifestos, and also in the playhouses, a fact which goes unmentioned by Watts. In both early modern discourse and amongst modern day historians, the inter-related terms of commons, commonalty and commonweal – descendants of the French commun – are not only highly resonant, but slippery and volatile. For Watts, a word that in the fourteenth century primarily denoted political community and universal representativeness gradually came, over the course of the fifteenth century, to mean something very close to “lower class”11 or “lower orders”. David Rollison has stressed the centrality of the terms to English vernacular politics, while noting the changing semiotics of the commun family.12 In the early modern period, commonalty could denote the third estate in the social order, but it continued to mean community (local, regional and national), potentially including – as in Lincoln’s rallying call – a cross section of all classes and ranks. In looking at history from below and from a specifically regional perspective, Andy Wood notes that the leaders of the commonalty in sixteenth-century Derbyshire, for example, were not drawn exclusively from the third estate.13 Similarly, in his study of the revolts of 1536-1537, Richard W. Hoyle observes that the commons were not a single, undifferentiated body of people.14 From even such a brief overview, in attempting to define commons and commonalty, we seem to be left with what Rollison sees as a portmanteau term. The pejorative image of the commons as the many-headed multitude, frequently deployed in the late sixteenth century, alludes literally to the diversity in the constituents of the multitude. We must question the notion that the commons is a class-bound, undifferentiated, apparently homogenous body of individuals. Further, we must differentiate between the occasions when the commons self-identify as “the commons”, as in Lincoln’s rhetoric recorded in chronicle and play, and those when its identity – often pejoratively – is imposed from above. Depending on who is speaking, the meaning of the word can shift between the extremes offered by Watts.

    7The identity of the commons cannot be divorced from their relationship to the commonweal. Early modern discussions of the commonweal were contentious. The term “wele” originated as an Anglo-Saxon term signifying welfare, well-being, happiness, and did not denote “wealth, riches and possessions”, which were more readily associated with “commonwealth”. Through the sixteenth century, the term acquired nuances of meaning. The commonweal was organic, denoting productive and inter-connective relations among the estates, supposedly for the good of all. The compound form “commonwealth”, on the other hand, refers more specifically to the state and to the association of the people. “Serving our commonwealth”, as Phil Withington has noted, became a claim made by Elizabethans across the social spectrum to justify their actions.15 Thomas Elyot, writing his treatise The Governor, a work of moral philosophy, education, and political theory, published in 1531, rejects the notion of a commonweal, conveying an anxiety about what it might actually come to represent. He distinguishes between a public weal (Res publica) and a common weal (Res plebeia), countenancing the first and rejecting the second.16 In Elyot’s strictly hierarchical thinking, “common weal” would have to mean that only commoners were wealthy and that gentlemen and noblemen were needy and miserable or, alternatively, it would exclude gentility, treating all men as of one sort or degree. For Elyot, in including the well-being of all ranks and classes, the term had a dangerous levelling potential which went entirely against the dominant idea of order. The idea that respect for degree and estate is crucial in a public weal – with everyone knowing their place – is a notion that was hammered into the populace in the official Tudor church homilies. Anxiety about the residual levelling potential inhering in commonwealth seems evident in the words of Robert Aske, a gentleman and lawyer and one of the leaders of the Yorkshire branch of the mass northern rebellion in 1536, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Aske administered an oath to the rebels, swearing that they would not enter into the Pilgrimage of Grace “for the Commonwealth”.17 As a respectful petitioner professing loyalty to the king, Aske saw the pilgrimage as religious in motivation and undertaken “for the preservation of Christ’s church in this realm of England, the king our sovereign lord, the nobility and commons of the same”,18 thus distancing himself from a rebellion aggressively fought on behalf of “the commons” and “commonalty”.19

    8The maintenance of the constituent parts of the realm – the four degrees, estates, or sorts – was vital to the life of the commonwealth. In the most celebrated discourse on the commonwealth, Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum,20 written during his embassy in France in 1562, Smith emphasised the important part that people – although notably only men – play in establishing and maintaining the commonwealth.

    A Common wealth is called a societie or common doing of a multitude of Freemen, collected together, and united by common accord and covenants among themselves, for the conservation of themselves as well in Peace as in Warre.21

    As is clear elsewhere in Smith’s treatise, without social deference common accord and covenants break down. The commonwealth is variously divided. First there is the division between those who bear office (magistrates) and those who are private men, analogous to Roman patricians and plebeians. Then it is divided according to degree. While the French divide the commonwealth into les nobles and le populaire or gentilhommes and vilains, the English divide it into four sorts: gentlemen, an estate which runs from the king to “simple” gentlemen; citizens; yeomen; and, last, artificers and labourers, a class to which Smith gives scant attention.22 It is notable that Smith’s usage of “the commons” is confined to elected representatives – the House of Commons – from the shires and boroughs: “the knights, Esquires, and other Gentlemen, with Citizens, Burgesses, and Yeoman, bee accounted to make the Commons”.23 He marginalises “the fourth sort […], day labourers, poore husbandmen and all Artificers, as Tailors, Shoomakers, Carpenters, Brickmakers, Brick-layers, Masons”.24 This heterogeneous class was defined as commons in chronicles and plays of the period, but Smith – possibly because of residual associations of commons with commonalty – declines to designate them as such.

    9In their focus on the political role of “the masses” in medieval England and France, Vincent Challet and Ian Forrest have observed that terms such as “masses” and “commun” conceal diversity and elide social distinctions in order to create a politically excluded class.25 In theory, the fourth sort were excluded from any role in governance. Following William Harrison, Smith concludes his discussion of degree with the point that this last sort of people “have no voice nor authoritie in the commonwealth”, but are to be “ruled, and not to rule other”.26 They are not completely neglected or without voice, however, for Smith concedes that the fourth sort are capable of holding office, serving on juries in the absence of yeomen, and acting as church wardens and constables. One thinks of Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and Elbow in Measure for Measure. It is also worth noting that Christopher Marlowe’s father was a shoemaker, Shakespeare’s father was a glover, and Ben Jonson’s step-father was a bricklayer, all members of the fourth sort whose sons went on to find powerful and influential voices.

    10A further sub-division in Smith’s commonwealth is pertinent for literary scholars, since it informs so much imaginative literature of the period. For every category in the commonwealth, Smith recognises a binary: the one, good and just; and, the other, evil and unjust. So, the obverse of the king is the tyrant. The aristocracy should be led by the best men; it is debased when government is usurped by “a few Gentlemen or a few of the richer and stronger sort”.27 Where the multitude does govern, “the one they call a Common-wealth or the rule of the people the other the rule of the usurping of the popular or rascal or viler sort”.28 Citing the periods before the reigns of “Sylla” and Julius Caesar, Smith concludes that the usurping by the “Rascality can never long endure, but necessarily breedeth, and quickly bringeth forth a Tyrant”.29 Examples of kings acting as tyrants or the usurpation of power by the baronial class or faction could be cited from English history. It was not possible, though, to illustrate through national example the usurping of the rascality as productive of tyranny, since such an event had never happened in English history. Nevertheless, along with kings as tyrants, factions taking control, the usurping populace, and the rascality, the viler sort became paradigms for occasions when the commons overstepped their pre-ordained role.

    The commons and rebellion

    11As Rollison has noted, seldom did the commonalty manifest itself in ways that could be directly observed and experienced.30 However, prophecy and rebellion were symptoms of pressure on a political system that excluded the commons and evidence that people deprived of an institutional voice are not entirely without one.31 In the great revolts of medieval and early modern England – several of which, as we shall see, were represented on the stage –, members of the fourth estate did find leaders who questioned the notions that they should be speechless, ruled and not “rule other”. In the illuminations of manuscripts, in the accounts of chroniclers and on the stage, the heterogeneous mass of the fourth estate acquired visibility. At such times, the commons as a class could cut across the estates presented in The Common-Welth of England. Members of other estates might have joined the lowest estate out of self-interest or in common cause; while the higher powers might try to divide and rule, the lower classes’ self-identification as commons sought to bring unity to their cause. Accounts of these revolts by the chroniclers who furnished material for the Elizabethan playwright are variously unreliable, hostile or alarmist, with chroniclers excelling at creating an atmosphere of rumour and crisis. There is little trace of sympathy for the lower order or recognition of their grievances, often founded on extortionate taxation and lack of food. Froissart’s Cronycles,32 for example, dismissed the great mass of the English population, seeing the great Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 as occasioned more by envy than by justifiable grievance. In Lord Berners’s translation, Froissart notes that, had the people “come to their entents, they would have distroyed all the noblemen of Englande and thereafter all other nacyons wolde have folowed the same”.33

    12Every so often, though, we hear a faint echo of the commons. According to Froissart, thirty thousand gathered at Blackheath on their long march from North-East Kent to London:

    And so long they went forwarde tyll they came within a foure myle of London, and there lodged on a hyll called Blacheth: and as they went, they sayd ever they were the kynges men and the noble comons of Englande.34

    Not only do we see the manifestation of “monarcho-populism” identified by James Holstun as a constant in commons uprisings from the medieval to Tudor period,35 but in identifying themselves as “the noble comons”, the people challenge class distinctions, claiming to speak nobly for the realm.

    13At other moments, the chroniclers mock and treat ironically the commons’ attempted subversions of the hierarchy. Thomas Walsingham, in his Historia Anglicana,36 recounts the revolt in Norfolk led by the dyer, Geoffrey Lister, who, with his followers, invaded the sheriff’s office and the royal gaol at Norwich Castle, and presided over a court at Thorpe Castle. According to Walsingham, no place could be safe from commons who had unanimously conspired to pursue their evil aims. Local knights were coerced to serve the commons. To retain “the favour of that ruffian”, John Littestere, who called himself “King of the Commons”, the knights deigned to be tasters of his food and drink and knelt to him in deference as he sat at meals.37 The rebels’ actions are reproduced in a narrative inflected with derisive condemnation. Walsingham reports, with some satisfaction and irony, “The end of John Littestere, King of Norfolk”.38 Lister is brought to the place of execution accompanied by the “warrior” Bishop of Norwich, who, according to Walsingham, brought peace to the region and indescribable profit to the whole kingdom, thanks to his commendable probity and bravery. Order – subverted when commoners act the part of kings – is restored.

    Commons voices

    14Only incidentally are the peasant grievances revealed by the chroniclers. Traces of rebels’ voices can be found in the letters preserved in the chronicles sent by the rebels to their fellow commons. The priest John Ball, a member of the large ecclesiastical proletariat of late medieval England and recognised by the chroniclers as one of the instigators of the revolt, sent letters to the leaders of the commons in Essex which were, according to Walsingham, “full of obscurities”.39 What has come down to us in this voice of the commons is indeed coded; Ball advises the rebels on caution, relying on shared religious imagery of Piers Ploughman, while pronouncing on the rightness of a cause rooted in Christian egalitarianism:

    JOHON SCHEP, som tyme Seynte Marie prest of York, and now of Colchestre greteth wel John Nameles, and John the Mullere, and Johon Cartere, and biddeth hem that thei bee war of gyle in borugh, and stondeth togidre in Godes name, and biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his werk, and chastise wel Hobbe the Robbere, and taketh with yow John Tremman and alle hiis felawes, and no mo, and loke schappe you to on heved, and no mo.
            Johan the Mullere hath grounde smal, smal, smal;
            The Kynges sone of hevene schal paye for al.
            Be war or ye be wo;
            Knoweth your freend fro your foo;
            Haveth ynow, and seith “Hoo”;
            And do wel and bettre, and fleth synne,
            And seketh pees, and hold you terinne
            And so bideth Johan Trewman and all his felowes.40

    15As in the French Jacquerie, the chroniclers tended to reduce the commons to a single personal name.41 The chronicle of Henry Knighton describes the rebels’ entry into London, confusing Wat Tyler with Jack Straw, and includes the addresses of Jack Straw, Jack Miller, Jack Carter and Jack Trueman to a “miserable crowd” of some twenty thousand men:

    Jakke Carter prayes yowe all that ye make a gode ende of that you have begun and do well and ay, better and better. For at the even, men praise the day. For if the end be wele, than is all wele. Let Piers the Ploughman my brother dwell at home and furnish us with corn, and I will go with you and help that you may have your meat and your drink, that you not fail; lokke that Hobbe robyoure be well chastysed for lesyng of youre grace for ye have gret nede to take God with yowe in alle youre dedes. For now is tyme to be war.42

    These letters offer a rare view from below, in which the rebel commons express brotherly solidarity, conveying a clear vision of a world in which God is on the side of right, not might.

    16Unlike these simple letters, the rebels of 1450, led by Jack Cade, and represented by Shakespeare in The First Part of the Contention, were able to express their aims in the form of a coherent written programme. “The complaint of the commons of Kent, and causes of the assembly on the Blackheath”, listing fifteen items, followed by “The requests by the Captaine of the great assembly in Kent”, are recorded by John Stow in his Annales.43 They offer some insight into the actual motivations of this rebellion, largely travestied in Shakespeare’s play. One complaint was that the king lived “onely on his commons”44 whilst his own revenues were held by other men; another was that the people of the shire did not have free election in the choosing of the knights of the shire, that is, those who should represent them in the House of Commons. “Stuff” used by the royal household has not been paid for, undoing “the poore commons of this Realm”. The rights of the “poore people and commons” to “the perfect Title to their land” are being eroded by the claims of the “king’s menial [household] servants”.45 Rumour played its part in fuelling the commons’ concern – they had heard that all of Kent should be destroyed and made a wild forest as reprisal for the death of the Earl of Suffolk, “of which the commons of Kent were never guiltie”. Cade’s requests further reflected political and social discontent. In his role as “Captain of the Commons”, Cade outlined these requests, first declaring his desire for the welfare of the king: “if he raigne like a king royall, according as he is borne our true Christian king anoynted we all will live and dye in the quarrell as his true liege man”.46 As in other risings, and as we see repeatedly in the English history play, a persistent complaint from the commons was that the king was subject to bad counsel. Amongst Cade’s demands was that those who had “contrived and imagined” (that is, devised and plotted) the death of the Duke of Gloucester should be brought to justice. The commons are not ignorant; they show authority in their knowledge of high court politics. They know that Gloucester is no traitor, and purpose “to live and die” to prove the accusation false. As in the earlier rebellion, extortionate taxation fuels grievance:

    […] the said Captaine and commons desire that all the extortations used daily among the common people, might be layed downe, that is to say, the greene Wax the which is falsely used, to the perpetual destruction of the kings true commons of Kent.47

    Green wax, as the seal of documents or escheats giving notice of fines, is here symbolic of systematic abuse in extorting fines.

    The commons on the late Elizabethan stage

    17In the chronicle narrative of popular regional rebellions, then, commons’ voices can occasionally be heard. Nearly two centuries later, how were the medieval commons, with their egalitarian rhetoric and sense of commonweal, commemorated? As Jean E. Howard and Paul Strohm have demonstrated, earlier sixteenth-century plays, often reliant on an allegorical frame, projected ideas of the commons that had partially slipped from favour.48 Plays such as the Henrican King Johan, the Marian Respublica and the Elizabethan Gorboduc are hospitable to attenuated notions of commonweal. By the 1590s, however, theatre had become mass entertainment and, through the agency of the Master of the Revels, was subject to fairly stringent state control. The great social movements of the past, the Peasants’ Revolt and Jack Cade’s rebellion, were simulated in late Elizabethan drama, but in a context in which the view of the commons as a collective, inflamed with a vision of communitas, was largely discredited.

    18Published anonymously in 1593, The Life and Death of Jack Straw takes as its theme the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which convulsed most of the southern counties and which came to a head with the confrontation of the people’s captain Wat Tyler and the young Richard II in London at Mile End and Smithfield. The play opens with an episode integral to all accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt over the centuries: John Tyler’s murder of a tax collector for threat of or actual sexual violation of his daughter to ascertain whether the girl is old enough to be included in the payment of the detested poll tax.49

    19The story had been variously modified in transmission, and the play presents its own version. In the play, it is Jack Straw, and not John Tyler (unmentioned in the play), who confronts the tax collector:

    […] thou goest beyond the Commission of the King,
    We graunt to His Hignes pleasure in every thing:
    Thou hast thy taske money for all that be heere,
    My daughter is not fourteene yeares olde, therefore she goes cleare.50

    20He is adamant that he will pay no further tax: “thou gettest no more of me. / For I am sure thy Office doth not arme thee with such authoritie. / Thus to abuse the poore people of the Countrie” (I.i.21-23). Outraged by the tax collector’s “searching” of his daughter, Straw kills him. The commons unite. Parson Ball and Wat Tyler enter with the fictional characters Nobs and Tom Miller. Parson Ball is the spokesman for the commons, putting community above degree, invoking God and “good scripture”:

    England is growne to such a passe of late,
    That rich men triumph to see the poore beg at their gate.
    But I am able by good scripture before you to prove,
    That God doth not this dealing allow nor love.
    But when Adam delved, and Eve span,
    Who was then a Gentleman.
    Brethern, brethern, it were better to have this communitie,
    Than to have this difference in degrees:
    The landlord his rent, the lawyer his fees.
    So quickly the poore mans substance is spent,
    But merrily with the world it went,
    When men eat berries of the hauthorne tree,
    And thou helpe me, Ile helpe thee. 

    (I.i.78-90)

    21Straw promises to make Ball Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England. It shall be no other but he, concurs Wat Tyler, because he “favours the Communaltie” (I.i.120). It is easy to dismiss such language and its speaker as unsophisticated and naïve, but for those who were at the rough end of the dealings of lawyers and landlords, the lines have force and meaning. Ball’s stress on community and mutuality belongs squarely in the Christian humanist tradition expounded, for example, in the revised edition of Erasmus’s Adagia (1508). Erasmus comments on the proverb “Between friends all is common”, adding in his commentary: “[…] it is extraordinary how Christians dislike the common ownership of Plato’s, how in fact they cast stones at it, although nothing was ever said by a pagan philosopher which comes closer to the mind of Christ”.51 In their levelling rhetoric, Ball’s lines come close to the ideal of common ownership. Further, they make a direct and simple challenge to the Tudor political theorists, dismissing the notion that the fourth sort have neither voice nor authority in the commonwealth.

    22In the first of two brief meetings of king and commons in Jack Straw – loosely based on historic meetings at Mile End and Smithfield – the rebels capitulate without much ado after the king has granted pardon (a great simplification of events). Wat Tyler, though, reminds us of the extremities of dearth suffered by the commons:

    Ere wele be pincht with povertie,
    To dig our meate and vittels from the ground,
    That are as worthie of good maintenance,
    As any Gentleman your Grace doth keepe,
    We will be Kings and Lords within our selves,
    And not abide the pride of tyrranie. 

    (III.i.715-720)

    There is nothing explicitly revolutionary in this speech, which is addressed to “your Grace”, thus tacitly accepting the royalist position. At the same time, Tyler not only equates himself and his sort with gentlemen, contemptuously evoked as “kept men”, he also locates an area “within our selves” where, in defiance of hierarchical divisions, they are “Kings and Lords”, and, in a final assertion of “common” pride and self-respect, declares an intolerance of tyranny.

    23However, the language of commons is employed almost exclusively and pejoratively by the lords set on suppressing the rebellion and disregarding its causes. The Archbishop52 dismisses the common sort as slack in their payment of tax, proclaiming the multitude “a Beast of many heads, / Of misconceiving and misconstruing minds” (I.ii.188-189), which, in its ignorance, fails to understand that taxes are for the benefit of “common weale”, not for private good. But the playwright does not allow the Archbishop to get away with this equation of the good of the commonweal with paying taxes to the royal coffers. A nameless secretary intervenes and rather tentatively claims that men in his position “see the peoples harts” and recognise the people’s essential goodwill:

    When such as we doo see the peoples harts,
    Exprest as farre as time will give them leave,
    With hartines of their benevolence,
    My thinks it were for others happines,
    That harts and purses should together goe. 

    (I.ii.203-207)

    The meaning is not entirely clear, and it is quite possible that the text has suffered from censorship. However, the suggestion seems to be that the premise of giving – that is, paying tax – should be to advance the happiness not only of the king and the higher echelons but of all, the communitas. Yet, the secretary fears he will be misjudged, and concludes with royalist sentiments:

    Misdeeme not good my Lords of this my speach,
    Sith well I wote the Noble and the slave,
    And all so live but for a Common weale
    Which Common weale in other tearmes, is the Kings. 

    (I.ii.204-207)

    Again, the drift of the speech is unclear, and there is tension in the way an egalitarian view of commonweal has given way to a more absolutist one. The secretary identifies initially with the commons, recognising their sense of communitas. At the same time, he seems aware of the potentially subversive implication of what he is saying. The noble and the slave are equal in their loyalty to the commonweal, personified in the king. A few lines later – on learning that the commons in Kent are up in arms – the secretary betrays no sympathy for the people, as he concludes the scene with a familiar castigation of popular rebellion:

    What barbarous mindes for grievance more than needs,
    Unnaturallie seeks wreake upon their Lord,
    Their true annointed Prince, their lawful king:
    So dare this blind unshamefast multitude. 

    (I.ii.231-234)

    This royalist position continues to dominate the play. The Count of Salisbury pronounces that the young Richard II “will make the prowdest Rebell know / What tis to moove or to displease a King” (I.iv.312-313). The king’s party is monolithic and univocal in its formulaic condemnation of the commons’ uprising, without any recourse to commonweal thinking. A bishop asks if amongst the rebels there are any men of worth. Morton replies in the negative: “[…] they be men of no great account, / For they be none but Tylers, Thatchers, Millers and such like” (I.iv.392-393), that is, the artificers who should have no voice in Smith’s “Common wealth”. Morton fails to see the implications of his words when he says that “before this mutiny” never in their lives did they come to field, that is, take up arms. No questions are posed as to why they should come to field now.

    24Some members of the fourth estate, once it has found a voice, do not easily relinquish it. While the Essex men, with Hob Carter as their spokesman, readily accept the king’s pardon, the Kentish commons, led by Straw, Tyler and Ball, refuse to capitulate. In Ball’s words:

    Neighbours and friends never yeeld,
    But fight it justilie in the field:
    For God will give you strength and might,
    And put your enemies to flight:
    To stand against them day and night,
    For of mine honestie your quarrels right. 

    (III.ii.860-865)

    Ball offers a threefold reason why they should not give way: their cause is affirmed by justice, God and his own conscience.

    25It is notable how Jack Straw moves from a position of sympathy for the rebels to one that celebrates their vanquishment. In a confused version of the historic enforced surrender at Smithfield, Jack Straw braves the king, prompting the mayor of London, William Walworth, to claim his part in the story by stabbing Straw and proclaiming him a dunghill bastard. King and commonweal have thus been freed from ill by Walworth’s killing of Straw, for which “valiant act” he is knighted. Walworth’s apparent heroism had become the feature of the revolt most frequently publicised and celebrated by fifteenth-century London chronicles. Straw is killed at the end of Act III. In response to his followers’ cries that their captain is slain, the king asserts that he will be their captain and their friend: rhetoric which is hardly borne out by subsequent reneging on promises. As Stephen Schillinger has commented, the royalist conclusion is inevitable for the printing and performance of a play about popular insurrection.53 To this I would add that the play text is exceptionally short, and it is quite probable that a play dealing in any way favourably with commons rebellion would have been subjected to official interference in the form of cuts and substitute lines. In the text as it has been handed down there are evident tensions, such as in the lines of the secretary when he both recognises the legitimacy of the rebels’ wish to return to another form of commonweal and yet articulates a traditional monarchical viewpoint. The rebels’ egalitarian talk is apparently undermined by the notion that they will seize power only to be new lords and masters of it. But despite all the hostile rhetoric directed at the commons, the rebellion as depicted in Jack Straw is designed to redraw lines of power in the interests of local community or regional control. Ball, Straw and Tyler die unrepentant, rejecting any idea that the failure of the rising invalidates its cause.

    26Jack Straw is unusual amongst English history plays in conveying a sense of history from below, evoking – perhaps nostalgically – an inclusive view of the commonweal. Shakespeare’s The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (later 2 Henry VI), published the following year,54 advertises on its title page another popular uprising, “the notable Rebellion of Jack Cade”. Cade’s uprising is sometimes compared to the Peasants’ Revolt. Both revolts followed a period of military humiliation by the French; both were centred in southeastern England, and both were to some extent precipitated by excessive war taxation. On both occasions, the rebels displayed a monarcho-populism in expressing loyalty towards the king and hatred of the government’s central and local officials. Cade and his poor commons of Kent, though, were more articulate in formulating their grievances into petitions and requests.

    27In discussing the popular element of 2 Henry VI, commentators tend to concentrate on Cade’s rebellion, but the commons as a collectivity have a presence well before the rebellion becomes part of the fabric of the play in Act IV. From the outset, the commons have a clear identity in defining the political and moral compass of the nobility as the latter jostle for power and influence. The commons love the good protector, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, a point not lost on Gloucester’s enemies, who predict that if they attempt to remove Gloucester the commons could rise in his support. Margaret of Anjou scornfully declares that he has won their hearts through flattery, although she is astute enough to recognise that they will follow him should he “make commotion”.55 Suffolk wants to murder Gloucester, knowing that if he is tried in a court of law, not only will the king intervene to save his life, but the commons will also rise to save him. The contrast between Gloucester and Suffolk in their relationship with the commons is stark. While Gloucester is known to be a man sympathetic to the petitions of the commons, Suffolk is the object of such petitions – a practice which Margaret finds alien: “Is this the government of Britain’s isle / And this the royalty of Albion’s King?” (I.iii.47-48). Intercepting the commons’ petitions, Suffolk reacts furiously to the petition against himself for enclosing the commons, that is, common land. Misrepresentations of Gloucester’s relationship with the commons ring hollow. Amongst the trumped-up charges of treason is the accusation that he has stopped the soldiers’ pay, the cause of Henry’s loss of France. Gloucester denies the charge: rather than tax the “needy commons”, he has paid the soldiers’ wages himself (III.i.115-117), aligning himself with the tradition of the good protector of the commonweal.

    28The commons find their voice when they hear of Gloucester’s death and demand Suffolk’s banishment or death. Warwick reports, “The commons, like an angry hive of bees / That want their leader, scatter up and down / And care not who they sting in his revenge” (III.ii.125-127). Their cries are heard off-stage insisting on an answer from the king. Suffolk may dismiss them as “rude unpolished hinds” (III.ii.274), that is, labourers, but it is not this perspective which prevails. The commons not only speak but, in Henry’s banishment of Suffolk, are listened to.

    29In 2 Henry VI the commons certainly do not match Smith’s view of the fourth estate as having no voice or authority. Quite clearly, they do have moral authority. Arguably, it is when, as personified in Cade, they seek political authority that Smith’s binary is activated and the commons become the rascality. At the same time, as depicted on stage, Cade is not truly representing or representative of the commons; he is a tool of the Duke of York, who flatters him into believing that he is born of noble blood and is in fact Sir John Mortimer. Still, it remains the case that his rebellion is cast in a popular idiom. François Laroque has succinctly summarised the different critical responses to Cade’s revolt, variously interpreted as genuinely revolutionary beneath the grotesqueries of the rhetoric, an indictment of mob rule, and a ludic celebration of popular rule embedded in recognisable festive custom.56 In its transference from chronicle to stage – its aestheticisation – it is possible to see the configuring of all these elements. The rebels’ dialogue in 2 Henry VI has resonances of the egalitarian discourse of Jack Straw. The first rebel reports that Jack Cade will “set a new nap” on the “commonwealth” (IV.ii.6-7). The imagery is sustained by the second rebel: “So he had need, for ‘tis threadbare. Well, I say it was never merry world in England since gentlemen came up” (IV.ii.8-10). The fourth sort are of no account: “Virtue is not regarded in handicraftsmen” (IV.ii.11-12); “The nobility think scorn to go in leather aprons” (IV.ii.13-14). Cade on first entry is a lord of misrule, declaring that “our enemies shall fall before us, inspired with the spirit of putting down kings and princes” (IV.ii.36-37). On entering London, he pronounces himself “lord of the city” (IV.vi.1), declaring that, during the first year of his reign, nothing will run in the “pissing conduit” but claret wine (IV.vi.2-4). Cade re-enters for a scene set in Southwark with the opening cry to pull down the Savoy palace and the inns of court (IV.vii.1-2). When Cade makes the laws, he promises “all things shall be in common” (IV.vii.17). Interestingly, this ludic scene is curtailed in the Folio when Buckingham and Old Clifford enter promising pardon, and the would-be rebels declare their loyalty to the king; the whole uprising is diffused before it is even underway. The omission of this particular scene depicting Cade with the rebels in 2 Henry VI prompts questions about its possible censorship.

    30The various modes employed in presenting the commons – carnivalesque, containment, serving as a moral compass together with an appeal to commonweal principles – indicate a complex, multifaceted view of the commons, if not of commons rebellion. The commons have voices, agency and authority, as long as they do not disturb the order of the commonwealth.

    31I want to conclude with a brief reference to The Tragedy of Coriolanus (1608), a play in which the mutinous commons are more graphically represented than in any other play by Shakespeare. Smith had identified the English fourth sort with the Roman proletarius or operarii, reserving the term plebeian as the binary for magistrate in the division of the commonwealth. In Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, the source for the life of Coriolanus, the rioters are described as “the poore common people”, “the people”, “people”, “poor citizens”.57 Shakespeare, though, consistently describes them as citizens. As they loudly and effectively proclaim their grievances, the citizens hardly correspond to Smith’s second sort in the commonwealth. In recognising their adversary in Caius Martius, “a very dog to the commonalty”,58 the citizens are the commons by another name.

    32The two plebeian uprisings described by Plutarch – one occasioned by usury and the other by the accumulation and non-distribution of corn – are compounded to provide an effective and dynamic opening for the play. If the play endorses Coriolanus’s view of the citizens as volatile and easily manipulated by the tribunes, it does not dismiss them in terms of his inordinate condemnation as a mindless, undeserving rabble. The plebeian “voices” are, from the beginning, individually articulated. The first citizen points to the material interrelationship of his class with the patricians. A real sense of injustice prevails with the disclosure that the patricians are hoarding grain and denying it to the needy citizens:

    What authority surfeits on would relieve us. If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome we might guess they relieved us humanely, but they think we are too dear. The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. 

    (I.i.15-21)

    33The facile reasons offered for the dearth of corn – the gods, the citizens should believe, are responsible – only reinforce this sense of the patricians’ contempt for their social inferiors. The senate, we are told, daily repeals acts against the rich, while statutes are enacted “to chain up and restrain the poor” (I.i.82). We are at some remove from the ideal of the commonweal governed by distributive justice, with members of each estate enjoying a share in return for performing duties according to their degree.

    34Menenius’s fable of the body, with its specious moral that the plebeian members are dependent on the digestive functions of the patrician belly, attempts to counter commons rebellion. The commons are the mutinous members, while the senators are the belly, digesting “things rightly, / Touching the weal o’ th’ common” (I.i.48-49). But the appropriation here of an organic view of a commonweal in which all the members are mutually supportive is quite evidently politically weighted against the commons. There is no sense of mutual support or common good in a Rome where food shortages bring the lower orders close to famine. The fable’s irrelevance is reinforced by the words of Caius Martius, who enters as Menenius is concluding his tale, claiming that the commons are “dissentious rogues” (I.i.162). Rather than being part of the body, a mutually sustaining society, they are merely “scabs” created by “the itch of their opinion” (I.i.63-64). His scorn is an ironic juxtaposition with Menenius’s presentation of the benevolent government of the Roman state and the patricians’ alleged care of the populace.

    35In post-monarchical Rome, the commons do have voices: voices which Coriolanus must solicit if he is to be endorsed as consul. In his disdain for both custom and people, Coriolanus mockingly reduces the commons to “voices”:

    Here come more voices.
    Your voices! For your voices I have fought,
    Watched for your voices, for your voices bear
    Of wounds two dozen odd; battles thrice six
    I have seen and heard of for your voices, have
    Done many things, some less, some more. Your voices!
    Indeed I would be consul. 

    (II.iii.125-131)

    36Coriolanus’s tragedy becomes bound up with a clash of social orders in which the commons have agency and voice. For all their demagoguery, the tribunes are right to see in Coriolanus a consul who would take from the people, as Brutus puts it, “their liberties” and “make them of no more voice / Than dogs that are as often beat for barking / As therefore kept to do so” (II.iii.215-217). The commons would give their voices if Coriolanus would value them more kindly. In their self-estimation and in implicitly rejecting the notion of the commons as an unindividuated mass, the citizens value their involvement in the election of the consul. “Every one of us has a single honour in giving him our own voices with our own tongues”, declares the third citizen (II.iii.38). Yet, the commons are deeply aware that Coriolanus has only contempt for them. To the fourth citizen’s comment that he has not loved the common people, Coriolanus’s scornful rejoinder, “You should account me the more virtuous that I have not been common in my love” (II.iii.94-95), appropriates “common” in its derogatory sense.

    37Indeed, The Tragedy of Coriolanus might be seen as encapsulating the tension Raymond Williams identifies in “common”: the affirmation of something shared or contempt for what is ordinary, low or vulgar.59 In representations of the commons, the two meanings – variously nuanced and sometimes overlapping – are evoked in sixteenth-century treatises, chronicles and plays. How the commons appear – noble commons, loyal commons, poor commons, or rascality – depends on how close they come to speaking for themselves. Drama ventriloquises; by its very nature it gives voice to the imaginary and recovers the voices of the half-forgotten and marginalised. It individuates amongst classes and orders: the commons no less than the nobility. On the early modern stage, members of commons have identities and agency denied them in contemporary commonwealth thinking. Even as new attempts were made to define their identity in a commonwealth premised on order and degree, occasionally, and despite all the pressures of Tudor ideological control, we catch the voices of commoners appealing to residual commonweal thinking. At times, those voices are heard as the commons reclaim themselves, their identities, and their human dignity: “Kings and lords within ourselves” who will abide no tyranny.

    Bibliographie

    Ball J. (1381), John Ball’s Letter to the Peasants of Essex, British Library, Royal MS 13 E IX, fol. 287r.

    Challet V., Forrest I. (2015), “The Masses”, in Government and Political Life in England and France c. 1300-c. 1500, C. Fletcher, J.-P. Genet, J. Watts (eds.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 279-316.

    Clare J. (1999), “Art made tongue-tied by authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship [1990], 2nd ed., Manchester, Manchester University Press.

    Dardot P., Laval C. (2019), Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century, M. MacLellan (trans.), London, Bloomsbury Academic.

    Dewar M. (1979), “A Question of Plagiarism: The ‘Harrison Chapters’ in Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum”, The Historical Journal, vol. 22, no. 4, p. 921-929.

    Dobson R. B. ([1970] 1983), The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, 2nd ed., Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

    Elyot T. ([1531] 1962), The Book Named the Governor, S. E. Lehmberg (ed.), London – New York, Dent – Dutton.

    Erasmus ([1518] 1965), The Colloquies, C. R. Thompson (trans.), Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

    Froissart J. ([1523-1525] 1927), Froissart’s Cronycles, translated out of the French by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, Oxford, B. Blackwell.

    Greenblatt S. (1988), Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

    Hill T. (2005), “‘The Cittie is in an uproare’: Staging London in The Booke of Sir Thomas More”, Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 1-19.

    Holinshed R. (1587), The Third Volume of Chronicles, Beginning at Duke William the Norman, London, printed by Henry Denham.

    Holstun J. (2002), Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution, London, Verso.

    Howard J. E., Strohm P. (2007), “The Imaginary ‘Commons’”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 37, no. 3, p. 549-578.

    Hoyle R. W. (2001), The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

    Laroque F. (1994), “The Jack Cade Scenes Reconsidered: Popular Rebellion, Utopia, or Carnival?”, in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, T. Kishi, R. Pringle, S. Wells (eds.), Newark, University of Delaware Press, p. 76-89.

    The Life and Death of Jack Straw, 1594 ([1593] 1957), K. Muir (ed.), Oxford, Malone Society.

    Munday A. et al. ([n.d.] 1990), Sir Thomas More: A Play, V. Gabrieli, G. Melchiori (eds.), Manchester, Manchester University Press (The Revels Plays).

    Munday A., Chettle A. ([n.d.] 2011), Sir Thomas More, J. Jowett (ed.), London, Arden Shakespeare.

    Plutarch (1579), “The Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus”, in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes Compared Together by That Grave Learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea; Translated out of Greeke into French by James Amyot… and out of French into Englishe, by Thomas North, London, Thomas Vantroullier.

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    Rollison D. (2006), “The Specter of the Commonalty: Class Struggle and the Commonweal in England before the Atlantic World”, William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 63, no. 2, p. 221-252.

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    Shakespeare W. ([1594] 1987a), The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, S. Wells, G. Taylor (eds.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, vol. 3, p. 55-89.

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    Notes de bas de page

    1The term was coined for the new historicist project by Stephen Greenblatt in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Greenblatt 1988, 1).

    2Quoted in Watts 2007, 248.

    3Clare 1999, 51-58.

    4The real John Lincoln was indeed a broker and a surveyor of foreign goods, employed in the household of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham (Hill 2005, 3).

    5The Spital Sermons were delivered on the Monday or Tuesday after Good Friday at the outdoor pulpit in the churchyard of the city church, St Mary of the Hospital, in honour of the aldermen. They were a platform for aspiring preachers and, since the area of the Spital was four times that of the yard of the Globe Theatre, the sermons attracted a wide audience (Suman 2015, 230-231).

    6Holinshed 1587, 841.

    7Munday et al. [n.d.] 1990, I.i.116-122.

    8Munday et al. [n.d.] 1990 and Munday & Chettle [n.d.] 2011.

    9Munday et al. [n.d.] 1990, I.i.115.

    10Watts 2015, § 2.

    11Ibid., § 3.

    12Rollison 2006, 225.

    13Wood 1999, 260.

    14Hoyle 2001, 423.

    15Withington 2010, 135.

    16Elyot [1531] 1962, 2.

    17Hoyle 2001, 457.

    18“Aske’s Proclamation to the City of York”, 15-16 October 1536 (quoted in Hoyle 2001, 456-457).

    19For a discussion of the use of “commons” by the rebels and in royal propaganda, see Watts 2015, § 1.

    20The work was published posthumously in 1583 and in 1589 as The Common-Welth of England. All citations are from the second edition. The variant spellings of commonwealth have been retained.

    21Smith 1589, 19. The use of Ramist letters has been systematised.

    22There is nothing original in Smith’s discussion of the degrees and estates, since it is taken largely from William Harrison’s “Description of England” in Holinshed’s chronicles (Dewar 1979, 922).

    23Smith 1589, 45.

    24Ibid., 34.

    25Challet & Forrest 2015, 281.

    26Smith 1589, 66.

    27Ibid., 4.

    28Ibid., 6.

    29Ibid. Sulla and Julius Caesar were regarded as dictators by Cicero and upholders of the Roman Republic.

    30Rollison 2006, 231.

    31Challet and Forrest discuss rebellion and prophecy as aspects of the upward pressure on governance by those excluded from it, and see the masses as engaged in a long, subtle and complex process of integration into the state by trying to establish a global political space able to include and answer their grievances (Challet & Forrest 2015).

    32Translated into English by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, and published in 1523.

    33Froissart [1523-1525] 1927, I.iv.1100.

    34Ibid., I.iv.1100-1101.

    35Holstun 2002, 56-57.

    36Walsingham 1864, 5-8.

    37Dobson [1970] 1983, 257-261.

    38Walsingham 1864, 8 (translation ours).

    39Ibid. (translation ours).

    40Ball 1381.

    41There is, however, some difference of emphasis. In the Jacquerie, the peasant insurrection of 1358 in northeastern France, the French nobles used “Jacques” to refer contemptuously to any peasant; Jack Straw, along with Wat Tyler and Parson Ball, is a character in all the historical accounts of the English Peasants’ Revolt, as well as in the eponymous drama.

    42Quoted in Dobson [1970] 1983, 282.

    43Stow 1631, 388-390.

    44Ibid., 389.

    45Ibid.

    46Ibid., 390.

    47Ibid.

    48Howard & Strohm 2007, 551.

    49The tax collector’s astonished reaction to Straw’s outrage suggests that his groping of prepubescent girls to discover whether or not they are old enough to be included in taxation was not an uncommon practice.

    50The Life and Death of Jack Straw, 1594 [1593] 1957, I.i.13-16. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

    51Erasmus [1518] 1965, 67. For an exploration of the continuity between classical and Christian humanist tenets on communal ownership, see Rhodes 2018, 3-5. See also “Archaeology of the Common”, in Dardot & Laval 2019, 9-34.

    52Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury. Blamed for the unjust taxation which sparked the revolt, he was dragged from the Tower of London and executed by the rebels in 1381.

    53Schillinger 2008, 88.

    54The First Part of the Contention was published in quarto in 1594. Its relationship to The Second Part of Henry the Sixth in the Folio remains a matter of debate, although it is generally agreed that The First Part of the Contention derives from performance, with some corruption in transmission. Since the 1594 text reflects a version of the play seen in the 1590s, all quotations are from this text, unless stated otherwise, as published in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare (modernised spelling).

    55Shakespeare [1594] 1987a, III.i.29. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

    56Laroque 1994, 76-77.

    57Plutarch 1579, 239, 243-246.

    58Shakespeare [1608] 1987b, I.i.27. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

    59Williams 1976, 61-62.

    Auteur

    • Janet Clare

      University of Bristol

      Janet Clare is professor emeritus in Renaissance literature at the University of Hull, honorary professor in English at the University of Bristol and research fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London. In 2016 she was visiting professor at the Università degli studi di Firenze. Her books include Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (2nd ed., Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999); Drama of the English Republic, 1649-60 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002); and Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014). She has edited What You Will for the Oxford Complete Works of John Marston (forthcoming). Her current research, for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, concerns cosmography and the early modern English literary imagination.

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    1The term was coined for the new historicist project by Stephen Greenblatt in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Greenblatt 1988, 1).

    2Quoted in Watts 2007, 248.

    3Clare 1999, 51-58.

    4The real John Lincoln was indeed a broker and a surveyor of foreign goods, employed in the household of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham (Hill 2005, 3).

    5The Spital Sermons were delivered on the Monday or Tuesday after Good Friday at the outdoor pulpit in the churchyard of the city church, St Mary of the Hospital, in honour of the aldermen. They were a platform for aspiring preachers and, since the area of the Spital was four times that of the yard of the Globe Theatre, the sermons attracted a wide audience (Suman 2015, 230-231).

    6Holinshed 1587, 841.

    7Munday et al. [n.d.] 1990, I.i.116-122.

    8Munday et al. [n.d.] 1990 and Munday & Chettle [n.d.] 2011.

    9Munday et al. [n.d.] 1990, I.i.115.

    10Watts 2015, § 2.

    11Ibid., § 3.

    12Rollison 2006, 225.

    13Wood 1999, 260.

    14Hoyle 2001, 423.

    15Withington 2010, 135.

    16Elyot [1531] 1962, 2.

    17Hoyle 2001, 457.

    18“Aske’s Proclamation to the City of York”, 15-16 October 1536 (quoted in Hoyle 2001, 456-457).

    19For a discussion of the use of “commons” by the rebels and in royal propaganda, see Watts 2015, § 1.

    20The work was published posthumously in 1583 and in 1589 as The Common-Welth of England. All citations are from the second edition. The variant spellings of commonwealth have been retained.

    21Smith 1589, 19. The use of Ramist letters has been systematised.

    22There is nothing original in Smith’s discussion of the degrees and estates, since it is taken largely from William Harrison’s “Description of England” in Holinshed’s chronicles (Dewar 1979, 922).

    23Smith 1589, 45.

    24Ibid., 34.

    25Challet & Forrest 2015, 281.

    26Smith 1589, 66.

    27Ibid., 4.

    28Ibid., 6.

    29Ibid. Sulla and Julius Caesar were regarded as dictators by Cicero and upholders of the Roman Republic.

    30Rollison 2006, 231.

    31Challet and Forrest discuss rebellion and prophecy as aspects of the upward pressure on governance by those excluded from it, and see the masses as engaged in a long, subtle and complex process of integration into the state by trying to establish a global political space able to include and answer their grievances (Challet & Forrest 2015).

    32Translated into English by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, and published in 1523.

    33Froissart [1523-1525] 1927, I.iv.1100.

    34Ibid., I.iv.1100-1101.

    35Holstun 2002, 56-57.

    36Walsingham 1864, 5-8.

    37Dobson [1970] 1983, 257-261.

    38Walsingham 1864, 8 (translation ours).

    39Ibid. (translation ours).

    40Ball 1381.

    41There is, however, some difference of emphasis. In the Jacquerie, the peasant insurrection of 1358 in northeastern France, the French nobles used “Jacques” to refer contemptuously to any peasant; Jack Straw, along with Wat Tyler and Parson Ball, is a character in all the historical accounts of the English Peasants’ Revolt, as well as in the eponymous drama.

    42Quoted in Dobson [1970] 1983, 282.

    43Stow 1631, 388-390.

    44Ibid., 389.

    45Ibid.

    46Ibid., 390.

    47Ibid.

    48Howard & Strohm 2007, 551.

    49The tax collector’s astonished reaction to Straw’s outrage suggests that his groping of prepubescent girls to discover whether or not they are old enough to be included in taxation was not an uncommon practice.

    50The Life and Death of Jack Straw, 1594 [1593] 1957, I.i.13-16. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

    51Erasmus [1518] 1965, 67. For an exploration of the continuity between classical and Christian humanist tenets on communal ownership, see Rhodes 2018, 3-5. See also “Archaeology of the Common”, in Dardot & Laval 2019, 9-34.

    52Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury. Blamed for the unjust taxation which sparked the revolt, he was dragged from the Tower of London and executed by the rebels in 1381.

    53Schillinger 2008, 88.

    54The First Part of the Contention was published in quarto in 1594. Its relationship to The Second Part of Henry the Sixth in the Folio remains a matter of debate, although it is generally agreed that The First Part of the Contention derives from performance, with some corruption in transmission. Since the 1594 text reflects a version of the play seen in the 1590s, all quotations are from this text, unless stated otherwise, as published in The Complete Oxford Shakespeare (modernised spelling).

    55Shakespeare [1594] 1987a, III.i.29. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

    56Laroque 1994, 76-77.

    57Plutarch 1579, 239, 243-246.

    58Shakespeare [1608] 1987b, I.i.27. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

    59Williams 1976, 61-62.

    Representing the Commons in Early Modern England

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    Clare, J. (2025). “The commons, knit and united to one part”: Representing, Fearing and Controlling the Commons. In J. Elprin & M. Popelard (éds.), Representing the Commons in Early Modern England (1‑). Presses universitaires de Caen. https://doi.org/10.4000/13omz
    Clare, Janet. « “The Commons, Knit and United to One part”: Representing, Fearing and Controlling the Commons ». In Representing the Commons in Early Modern England, édité par Jeremy Elprin et Mickaël Popelard. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2025. https://doi.org/10.4000/13omz.
    Clare, Janet. « “The Commons, Knit and United to One part”: Representing, Fearing and Controlling the Commons ». Representing the Commons in Early Modern England, édité par Jeremy Elprin et Mickaël Popelard, Presses universitaires de Caen, 2025, https://doi.org/10.4000/13omz.

    Référence numérique du livre

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    Elprin, J., & Popelard, M. (éds.). (2025). Representing the Commons in Early Modern England (1‑). Presses universitaires de Caen. https://doi.org/10.4000/13on7
    Elprin, Jeremy, et Mickaël Popelard, éd. Representing the Commons in Early Modern England. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 2025. https://doi.org/10.4000/13on7.
    Elprin, Jeremy, et Mickaël Popelard, éditeurs. Representing the Commons in Early Modern England. Presses universitaires de Caen, 2025, https://doi.org/10.4000/13on7.
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