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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.