The Many-Headed Monster in Henry VI, Part 2
The spectacle of the severed head is so common a feature of Eliza bethan and Jacobean history plays that it invites identification as the emblem (or perhaps fetish) that most prominently characterizes the genre. Visual representations of severed heads occur in a broad range of history plays, including Thomas Lodge's The Wounds of Civil War, George Peele's Edward I, William Shakespeare's Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3, Richard III, and Macbeth, George Chapman's Caesar and Pompey, Thomas Dekker's Sir Thomas Wyatt, and John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's Sir John van Olden BarnaveltThe reasons for the preval ence of the severed head in the history play are not difficult to deter mine. The display of the head serves as a striking, unmistakable image signifying not only the defeat and demise of the victim, but, more crucially, the loss or transfer of political power which is consoli dated through this act of violence.2 The political symbolism of the image is clearly evident in the closing scene of Marlowe's Edward II in which the newly crowned Edward III orders that Mortimer's head be placed on top of the murdered king's hearse. The resulting cere monial tableau not only symbolizes the avengement of murder but also encapsulates the transit of power through the course of the play, from Edward II to Mortimer and finally back to Edward's dynastic line.
Rebellion, Class Consciousness, and Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI
As we all know, history is made by the questions we ask--or more by those we don't ask. Our conclusions derive as much from the ideological assumptions that we bring to a problem as from the 'facts of the case'. This is demonstrated by examining a little noticed line in a well known play, Hamlet. When the prince is handling the first skull thrown up from Ophelia's grave he comments: This might be my Lord Such-a-one ...now my Lady Worm's, chopless, and knocked about with a sexton's spade. Here's fine revolution, and we had the trick to see't (V.1.70-6). Ideology, it emerges, informs even the most 'neutral' of scholarly activities, the editor's investigation of lexical history. The most recent editor, Philip Edwards.s does not gloss 'revolution'; Harold Jenkins offers "as of the wheel of Fortune or the whirligig of time".3 Now it is true that the word 'revolution' derives from the observation of celestial rotation, but its immediate and particular context, embedded in imagery that reminds us that man himself as well as death can be a great leveller, makes us aware that the modem meaning, the overthrow of an order or regime by those previously subject to it (OED, 7), may be appropriate here. (Significantly, perhaps, the first recorded use in OED of the word with this meaning dates from 1600, about a year before Hamlet was written.) That is one point of reference. Ideology affects theatre too. In the 1982 BBC television version of 2 Henry VI, Dick the Butcher who demolishes the pretensions to authority of Jack Cade, was placed immediately before the camera, his opinions thereby foregrounded and valorised. Jack Cade became thereby a comic figure. It will be the point of this paper that what Cade proclaims constitutes a cause, and a cause that emerges from class oppression.
The Moral Economy of the Crowd: Some Twentieth-Century Food Riots
But often in the world's most crowded streetsAnd often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life …. The Buried Life, Matthew Arnold Any comparison between historical phenomena is fraught with many dangers, particularly where a century separates their occurrence. Nevertheless, it is proposed to compare certain aspects of social protest in 1916-17 with the disturbances more closely associated with the final decade of the eighteenth century — the form of protest in question being taxation populaire. For, while examples of such riots can be found from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, as R. B. Rose has written, “… we shall be justified in regarding taxation populaire as primarily and typically an eighteenth century phenomenon.” E. P. Thompson, moreover, considers that “… the final years of the eighteenth century saw a last desperate effort by the people to reimpose the older moral economy as against the economy of the free market.” In both periods the country was suffering from wartime inflation, and food shortages caused by failures in domestic harvests and interruptions in imported supplies, threatened to cause breaches in social harmony. And in both cases the two national governments that emerged were fully prepared to repress the threat to national security posed by outbreaks of working-class unrest. Besides such central parallels, others of a more trivial nature spring to mind. Not too much imagination is needed to see the spirit of the Church and King Mobs marching amongst the ranks of those who attacked pacifist meetings and the property of those with German names; though it may be considered outrageously fancilful to see the devilry of Arthur Thistlewood behind Mrs. Wheeldon's plot to poison Arthur Henderson and Lloyd George.