The Meaning of History

I recently wrote about the plethora of history plays that we've been blessed with on some of our most respected stages, and since then I've read handfuls of articles on the topic, but this one got me thinking about our upcoming production here at Bad Quarto: The Life and Death of Jack Straw: A Notable Rebel. If we accept that history is more about the present than it is about the past, and the telling of history tells us more about who we are than who we were, what can the story of the rebel Jack Straw tell us now?

First a little bit of history: Jack Straw is based on the Peasants Revolt of 1381, which was inspired by so many causes that "general uncertainty about the future" is probably the best reason. After suffering the black death, overburdened with taxes due to the Hundred Years' War, and facing the prospect of governance by a weak king (Richard II was only 14 at the time), rebel leader Wat Tyler, inspired by the fiery, what we would call "progressive," political rhetoric of the minister John Ball, led a rebellion that very nearly toppled the throne.

The Death of Wat Tyler at the hands of Walworth, Mayor of London, with
the young Richard II looking on. Library Royal MS 18.E.i-ii f. 175,
dated c. 1385-1400. 

What I find most interesting about Jack Straw is that Straw can, at best, be described as one of the leaders of the rebellion, which is also known as "Wat Tyler's Rebellion." Straw might not even have existed, but he is the focus of this play, first printed in 1593, which was also a time of uncertainty for England. Despite the successes of the English against the Spanish Armada in 1588, bad harvests, plague, and famine followed, and lacking any marriage prospects and approaching 60, Queen Elizabeth I would die childless, leaving the future of the kingdom precarious. There are more than a few parallels between the late 1580s/early 1590s and 1381, and the anonymous author of Jack Straw seems to be speaking those uncertainties, and most specifically the fears of the groundlings, who he seems to target by placing a lesser figure in the rebellion front and center in the play.

The Life and Death of Jack Straw 1593 title page

When Pollack-Pelzner says (in the New Yorker article above)

Commoners must fight for space on Shakespeare’s stage—and it’s not obvious whether the drunkards and prostitutes who populate the tavern where Prince Hal escapes the burdens of court, for instance, serve as rehearsals for responsive sovereignty, critics of royal ideology, or comic baggage to be shed on the way to the throne. It’s hard to know how sympathetically to view Jack Cade’s populist rebellion against the crown in “Henry VI, Part Two”; or the soldier who complains, of Henry V, “When our throats are cut he may be ransomed and we ne’er the wiser”; or the ferocious warrior women, Joan la Pucelle and Margaret of Anjou, who haunt the first tetralogy. Did Shakespeare prop up the royal system that gave him patronage or expose the crown’s hollow core?

He clearly didn't have Jack Straw in mind, and as he argues that Shakespeare's histories are "wedded" to the "great man" theory of history, Jack Straw smiles back at him. And us. Whoever wrote Jack Straw was able to tap into their present fears and anxieties while scaffolding a message that out and out rebellion leads to ruin (no spoilers here: it's right on the title page). With supporters of Donald Trump burning down the Republican Party as we know it, and with a number of Bernie Sanders supporters on the left threatening to do the same thing to the Democrats, I can't help feeling that this is a message we could all stand to hear.

The Second Shepherds' Play in Historical Context

No one really knows when The Second Shepherds' Play was written, but popular estimates place it somewhere between 1400 and 1450. For those keeping score, that means anywhere between the reign of Henry IV through Henry VI, and possibly as early as the reign of Richard II. This was a particularly tumultuous period in English history, and it closely follows one of the most devastating times Europe has ever known.

In the mid 1300s, the Black Death ravaged Europe, killing roughly 1/3 of the population. The bulk of these were from the peasant classes, which created a severe labor shortage. Appalled by the sudden power of the peasantry to demand higher wages, Parliament passed the "Ordinance of Labourers"in 1349, and then the "Statute of Labourers" two years later. These laws set a maximum wage at pre-plague levels, and required able body individuals under the age of 60 to work. Hugely unpopular, these laws helped fuel Wat Tyler's Peasant Revolt of 1381, and possibly Jack Cade's Kentish rebellion in 1450 (Shakespeare conflates the two in 2 Henry VI, and there was a significant amount of literature from the 1380s on both sides of the Peasant Revolt.

The complaints of the shepherds are grounded in the sorts of complaints the peasants revolted over, in both 1381 and 1450. The laws of England provided severe restrictions on their daily lives, and minimal social protections. Those with even a little bit of land or money held enormous sway over those who had little or none.

One of the reasons why I really like The Second Shepherds' Play is that the birth of Christ doesn't make things better. They are still cold and hungry, but now also have hope of something better in the life to come. The shepherds begin to see the pains of this world as transient things in the face of a promise of greater equity than they could ever hope for in this world, and a life in a land of plenty governed by a greater king than this world has known.

Peace, stability, and prosperity were meaningful promises for men who lived at the subsistence level in medieval Yorkshire. Even if the world isn't perfect, faith and right religion at least gives the shepherds a glimmer of hope for something better. In a world thick with disease, hunger, rebellion, and poverty, a little bit of hope can go a long way.