Inciting his fellow Kentishmen to rebellion, Jack Straw complains that, "The king God wot knowes not whats done by such poore men as we, / But wele make him know it, if you will be rulde be me…" (Anonymous 62-63). The dialectic between royal and commoner that Straw evokes here was a popular motif for the professional theater of London in the years after the Armada victory. The chronicle plays of civil and international wars formed a popular vogue during the late 1580s and early 1590s, but within that vogue a small but substantial proportion of plays adopted a decidedly more provincial approach to the social changes that were taking place in England. Using local color and topical issues was hardly a new technique for authors anxious to attract substantial audiences, of course. Yet those writing for the early professional theaters seem to have discovered an important new market for plays that took as their setting indigenous English sites and as their subjects English characters distanced from practical political power. Plays as diverse as the anonymous The Life and Death of Jack Straw, A Notable Rebel in England and Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester (1590), Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589) and George a' Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (1590), and Anthony Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber (1590) offer evidence for a vigorous appetite for plays set in England and examining intimate social and political concerns. As playwrights worked to satisfy that interest, they were participating in a compelling, ongoing dialogue over just what an English identity really signified, and who would be fully able to participate in such an identity.

I am not attempting to argue for a concert of interest or direction among these various works; indeed, it is their range and diversity that I believe call them to our attention. Studying their polymorphous styles and their several threads of shared emphasis gives us a fascinating look at the workings of the marketplace on the form and content of Elizabethan drama. Specifically, these dramas suggest that the playwrights and playgoers of the late 1580s and early 1590s were in the process of negotiating new motifs through which contemporary concerns about the structure and obligations of the political hierarchy might be explored. The plays generally invite a more immediate identification between audience and characters than the chronicle plays allow, and dramatize the playgoer's perception of himself or herself as English. At the heart of each of them is a patriotic zeal, and eager and occasionally xenophobic definition of the national self that clearly furthers a conservative support for the status quo, and it seems safe to assume that this mood has more to do with popular tastes than with the influence of the Master of Revels. In these plays, it is not merely England's monarch and nobility that mark her as preeminent, but something in the character of the people themselves.

Yet this patriotism is almost never presented as unqualified or untroubled. Repeatedly, patriotism is called upon to define and defend itself against forces that threaten social bonds that are presented as traditional and nurturing. This pattern of tensions speaks to a substantial anxiety on the part of prospective audiences over the divisive nature of a political hierarchy that encodes distinctions among a citizenship that should function, the plays imply, as an extended and harmonious family. More troubling is the frequent perception that those hierarchical distinctions are arbitrary and ultimately oppressive.

The consolidation of political authority under the Tudors tended to collapse the traditional hierarchy of privilege and status.

Unwittingly royal policy favoured the development of individualism in its subjects. Intent to destroy the power of venerable institutions, the alternative lay in recognizing the power of man. The crown, averse to strengthening an already created order, was obliged to have recourse to individuals to carry out its policies, and though it tried to treat these as servile tools, at the first opportunity they escaped from such dependence. (Einstein 105)

Yet a central tension in this ideology is that the gap between ruler and subject remains absolute even as the gaps between other divisions of status are diminished. Developments such as the creation of the Tudor civil service, staffed by the educated but not necessarily the wealthy or landed, and the growing accumulation of wealth in the hands of traders and merchants, put pressure on received notions of status and distinction, and the ironies and discomforts that this pressure created can be explored in these plays.

It is inappropriate, however, to attempt to characterize these plays as seriously rebellious or even overtly "political" in purpose. Clearly, the dominant tenor of these plays, like the wider variety of the chronicle plays, is a politically conservative enthusiasm for all things English. After Friar Bacon has disposed of the German Vandermast in a one-sided contest of magical prowess, for example, he prepares a meal for his royal guests, King Henry of England and Frederick, Emperor of Germany. When Bacon's man Miles brings in "a mess of pottage broth" (Greene 2:1310 s.d), the Emperor protests, offended that the "[p]resumptuous friar" would dare to serve "peasants fare" (1320-21) to such a guest, and King Henry agrees that this "feeble fare" (1328) is insulting to his guest. Bacon, however, explains that "I shewed the cates / To let thee see how schollers use to feede, / How little meate refines our English wits" (1330-32). Green's play is a celebration of "common" virtues; repeatedly, the selfish, decadent desires of the nobility are answered by the selfless and moral convictions of what the play insists are true English types. Bacon, for example, who claims the power to "[m]ake storming Boreas thunder from his cave, / And dimme faire Luna to a dark Eclipse" (218-219), is laboring to raise brass walls to encompass England, so that "all the legions Europe doth containe, … should not touch a grasse of English ground" (231-32). Ardolino has pointed out that Bacon here "is shown to be politically and morally wrong" in this desire to isolate England, and the collapse of his plans, combined with the catastrophic deaths of Lambert and Serlsby and their sons, inspires Bacon to renounce his necromancy (Ardolino 221). In the end, England's strength and security comes, not from artificial power, but from moral integrity. "England can hold her own with the best of Europe (as Bacon shows in the contest with Vandermast); there is no need for, but rather danger in, England's withdrawal behind brass walls" (Traister 74).

In the play's second plot, Margaret, the Keeper of Fressingfield's fair daughter, wins the love of Lacie, the Earl of Lincoln, and eschews temptations of wealth and property in favor of romantic affection. Although she recognizes that the man wooing her "in countrie apparell" (346.s.d) is quite different from the other farmers who sue for her attention, her love for Lacie springs from his courtesy and wit long before she learns of his social status. Yet when two gentlemen, Lambert and Serlsby, seek to tempt her with "seven hundred pounds a yeare" (1400) or "garments of Imbrodred silke; / Lawnes and rich networks for thy head attyre" (1426-27), she is unmoved. She asks for ten days' respite to think about their offers, but is merely stalling for time.

David Bevington points out that the contrast between Lacie and Lambert and Serlsby is more than the conventional contrast between romantic love and the temptations of wealth. Serlsby points out to the Keeper that he is "the landslord … of the holds, / By coppie all thy living lies in me" (1369-70). Implicit in Serlsby's promise not to raise the Keeper's rent if Margaret marries him is the threat of real suffering if she chooses another husband. "Margaret's unwelcome wooers are anathema to popular taste, not only as believers in arranged marriage by as representatives of the landed gentry …. They woo Margaret by bribery and extortion, just as they always oppress their social inferiors" (Bevington 222). Barbara Traister has faulted Margaret here, arguing that if she is to be credited for transforming Lacy from "willing go-between to equally willing suitor, she must also bear the responsibility for transforming the two squires … from best friends to dueling enemies" (Traister 70). Yet Margaret's deception can be seen as an indication of the degree to which Lambert and Serlsby pose a real risk; Margaret cannot "easily [tell] them that she loved someone else" (Traister 70) if she, and by extension the audience, clearly believes that Serlsby's threat to her father is more than mere bluster.

Yet if Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay challenges the presumptions of the new pretenders to social status, exposing the landed gentry as motivated by greed and lust while demonstrating the traditional nobility of the nobility, it also challenges an equally traditional valorization of masculine friendship as superior to romantic love. Lacie goes to Margaret in the first place at the request of his friend Prince Edward, who has become enamored with Margaret. That Lacie then falls in love with Margaret himself is a familiar device, but Greene specifically calls attention to the degree to which Lacie's affection constitutes a betrayal of two social obligations, both to his prince and to his friend. "Recant thee, Lacie," he admonishes himself, "thou art put in trust: / Edward, the soveraignes sonne, hath chosen thee, / A secret friend, to court her for himself: / And darest thou wrong thy Prince with trecherie?" (669-672).

When Edward learns of the deception, he angrily confronts the couple, promising Margaret wealth that Lambert and Serlsby could only dream of and, when she rejects him, threatening to have Lacie executed as a traitor. Note 1 He is specifically shocked at the fact that Lacie could betray their close friendship in this manner.

Injurious Lacie, did I love thee more
Than Alexander his Hephestion?
Did I unfold the passions of my love,
And locke them in the closset of thy thoughts?
Wert thou to Edward second to himself,
Sole friend and partner of his secreat loves,
And could a glaunce of fading bewtie breake
The inchained fetters of such privat friends? (947-54)

Only when Edward sees that Lacie's death will not automatically transfer Margaret's affection to him does he regain control of his emotions. Still shocked by Lacie's betrayal, he nevertheless resolves to conquer his passions and reassert the control over himself that he had lost in the play's opening scene, a control that befits him both as an English man and as a prince. "Is it princely to dissever lovers leagues, / To part such friends as glorie in their loves?" he asks himself. "Leave, Ned, and make a vertue of this fault, / And further Peg and Lacie in their loves…" (1039-42). Calling himself by the familiar "Ned," the Prince asserts his identity as a stalwart Englishman, rather than as a prince; he is celebrated not for the discipline it takes to manage the country, but for the discipline it takes to manage the self.

Thus Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay takes a rather interesting political stance, valorizing aspects of a traditional, perhaps idealistic hierarchy while opening room for values which implicitly question the assumptions upon which that hierarchy rests. Greene seeks "an idealistic image of English society which is both hierarchical in its insistence on the prominence of royalty and aristocracy and egalitarian in its allowance of ascendancy through personal merit" (Ardolino 220). Edward, who appears capricious and lustful in the opening scenes, redeems himself with his assertion of self-control and restraint. These personal values are mirrored in the political plot, for Bacon's efforts to defend England within walls of brass is similarly an image of security and order as a product of impassivity. When Miles ruins his experiment, Bacon flies into a rage every bit as towering as Edward's, but finally comes to recognize his magic as sinful and proud, resolving to devote the remainder of his life to "pure devotion, praying to my God, / That he would save what Bacon vainly lost" (1852-53).

Against these celebrations of personal and political order, Greene sets the surprising relationship of Margaret and Lacie. Paul Dean traces the genealogy of this plot device "at least as far back as the rivalry between good and bad angels for the soul of Everyman" and more directly to "Lyly's Campaspe, in which the emperor Alexander and the painter Apelles contend for the love of the eponymous heroine, a slave girl" (39). But Dean says little about the political implications of this device beyond its ability to link "the ruler's government of the state and of himself" (39).

Lacie's willingness to betray his friend and prince turns into a virtuous celebration of romantic love, and their union challenges contemporary assumptions about the importance of marriage within class boundaries. What is perhaps surprising about the way Greene handles this story is that he largely disregards much of the traditional and expected protestations of impropriety. When Margaret believes that Lacie has abandoned her for a Spanish Princess, it is not her presumption at seeking to marry above her station for which she berates herself; rather, it is that she was too foolish to anticipate the inconstancy of love. "but now the touch of such aspiring sinnes / Tels me all love is lust but love of heavens; / That beautie used for love is vanities; / The world containes nought but alluring baites…" (1868-71). When Lacie reveals that the supposed betrayal was simply a test of her love, the choice before her is a simple one: "God, or Lord Lacie: which contents you best…?" (1934). Her decision to marry Lacie is clearly motivated by emotional rather than materialistic desires; "[t]he flesh is frayle; my Lord doth know it well, / That when he comes with his inchanting face, / What so ere betyde I cannot say him nay" (1937-38).

Greene's play, then, is curiously divided upon itself, suggestive of shifting tastes in the audiences for whom he was writing. Amid the play's boisterous celebration of English virtue and English wit, he uses romantic love to level the ideological distance between nobility and the commons, implying that the class distinctions separating them are extrinsic to the persons occupying those categories. In revealing Serlsby and Lambert as manipulative extortioners, Greene exercises a familiar motif, attacking the materialism of those who misuse their lands and offices for personal gain. Yet the similarity between the behavior of these minor gentlemen and Prince Edward himself, who is similarly tempted to abuse his power and privilege to achieve his selfish ends, is quite telling. The end of the play, restoring order and propriety to the chaos, clearly supports the play's conservative defense of a hierarchy arranged upon values of mutual accord and responsibility, but it cannot entirely overcome the perception that those most distanced from legitimate political power are always at risk. Presumably, many in Greene's audience would be familiar with the kind of dilemma the Keeper faces when Serlsby threatens to raise his rent if Margaret does not marry him. And it is only Friar Bacon's access to magic that keeps him from eating "peasants fare" with his guests, an access that most in the audience, it seems safe to assume, would not have enjoyed. Writing of the Renaissance history plays as a group, Graham Holderness has argued that "by posing an ideal commonwealth in romantic-comic terms, a play could differentiate sharply between its own self-evidently fantastic world and the reality its fantasy denied" (Holderness 35). If the play offers its audience a fantasy-fulfillment escape from daily cares through the comic resolution of both domestic and national concerns, it also reveals that such an easy resolution remains unavailable in the world outside the playhouse doors.

Anthony Munday mirrors Greene's theme of romantic intrigue and patriotic magic in John a Kent and John a Cumber, and if Munday's play is less successful artistically than Greene's, it is nevertheless evidence for a mounting interest in patriotic fables in which love conquers all. Like Friar Bacon, John a Kent is a magician of formidable prowess. His opponent, John a Cumber, describes him as a "man whom all this Brittishe Isle admyres; / For his rare knowledge in the deepest artes" (673-73). Kent uses his abilities to secure the marriages of two nobles, Prince Griffin of Southwales and Lord Powesse, to the women they love, Sydanen and Marian. Munday avoids the class struggle that Greene uses to add a degree of topical anxiety to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; Griffin and Powesse's rivals are earls themselves, and the reasons for Sydanen and Marian's fathers' antipathy toward Griffin and Powesse is never really established.

While both Greene and Munday use a contest between magicians as the focus for the patriotic energy of their plays, Munday differs from Greene in one interesting way. John a Kent has successfully rescued Sydanen and Marian from their unhappy fates by the end of the second act of the play; logically, there is no reason at all for a conflict with John a Cumber, who only arrives with Sydanen's father Llwellen after Kent has united the women with Griffin and Powesse. Yet Kent is not satisfied with the ease with which he has been successful, and sends his boy Shrimp back to the castle to raise the stakes by revealing the deception before the marriages can be effected. Unlike Bacon's contest with Vandermast, Kent deliberately provokes his contest with Cumber. He justifies his actions by claiming that he is testing the affection of the interested parties for their own good. "One brunt is past, alas, whats that in loove? / where firme affection is most truely knit, / The loove is sweetest, that moste tryes the wit" (532-34). But this explanation rings hollow, however, when set against his desire "to sporte myself awhyle" (535). Later, having defeated and humiliated Cumber through a series of disguises and illusions, Kent simply releases his prizes, Sydanen and Marian, again, warming to Cumber's challenge, "I pray thee John, shall we have one cast more?" (1462). If one of Bacon's central virtues is humility, Kent's chief characteristic is an exuberant self-confidence,a pride in himself and his prowess that keeps him returning to the fray even after the battle has been won. Defeating Cumber a third time, Kent finally brings about the marriages between Griffin and Sydanen, Powesse and Marian, and ends the play on a triumphal note.

Both Greene and Munday, then, characterize national virtues in the wisdom and skills of legendary figures, animating them to affirm patriotic zeal through the conquest of foreign opponents. Although Bacon and Kent are characterized in diametrically opposed ways, they both figure in themselves a perception of English ability and confidence that clearly found an enthusiastic and receptive audience. An interesting modification of this approach can be found in George a' Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, generally attributed to Robert Greene. Note 2 Like Bacon and Kent, George is a figure out of English legend and ballad who exemplifies the pride and self-assurance born not of status or wealth but simply out of the fact of his English identity. Lord Warwicke describes George in glowing terms:

For stature he is framde,
Like to the picture of stoute Hercules,
And for his carriage passeth Robin Hood.
The boldest Earle or baron of your land,
That offereth scath unto the town of Wakefield,
George will arrest his pledge unto the pound;
And who so resisteth beares away the blowes,
For he himself is good inough for three. (Green 770-775)

George differs from Bacon and Kent, however, in that his strengths are, for all their romantic exaggeration, merely human. He can fight Robin Hood to a draw, but he does so without the aid of magic. More thoroughly than these magicians, George is constructed as a representative of, perhaps the epitome of, the English folk watching from the audience. Irving Ribner points out that the play is designed "to exalt the virtues of the English yeoman" (Ribner 268), and when King Edward offers to knight him, George foregoes the honor, asking:

let me live and die a yeoman still:
So was my father, so must live his sonne.
For tis more credite to men of base degree,
To do great deeds, than men of dignitie. (1196-1199)

There is no indication, however, that George turns down the one-half of Kendall's possessions that Edward also offers him.

George's relationship to the social structure of his world is much more problematic than that of either Bacon or Kent who, as scholars and magicians, are clearly seen as separate from the "real" political and social world with this they occasionally interact. George, on the other hand, is an officer of the town, "the local official responsible for the safekeeping of livestock and property. In his hands are the keys to the pound, which can hold human malefactors as well as stray beasts, baron as well as peasant" (Bevington 227). Finding strangers in town who are ignoring the laws against allowing horses to graze in the public wheat, George calls for them to make good the damage their horses have done. The strangers, rebels in disguise, protest that they are gentlemen, to which George replies that, "by my fathers soule, were Good King Edwards horses in the corne, they shall amend the scath, or kisse the pound…" (464-466). Throughout the play, George vigorously defends his loyalty to his king, while simultaneously disdaining any social distinction between men below royal rank. Like the romance between Lacie and Margaret, George's heroic exploits reveal the gradations of the social hierarchy to be arbitrary and specious, always excepting the status of the king himself. The overall effect suggests either a curious ambivalence on the part of the playwright or a deliberate hedge designed to appeal to popular tastes without offending royal authority. Bevington sees in this ambivalence a playwright who is "detached, safe from commitment" (Bevington 224), but it seems equally plausible to describe him as anxious to appeal to the widest possible audience base.

Other elements in the play reinforce the gentle attack on social hierarchy that George himself represents. Although George is responsible for the defeat of the English traitors, the invasion of James of Scotland is stopped by old William Musgrove who, in spite of being one hundred and three years old, was "twice the man" James was, and James confesses that a "stronger man I seldome felt before; / But one of more resolute valiance, / Treads not, I thinke, upon English ground" (743-746). Similarly, the scene of a shoemaker challenging the disguised kings Edward and James, forcing them to adhere to the town's custom that no one may bear a staff as a weapon, but must "trail it all along throughout the towne" (1021) suggests that the characteristics of indefatigable masculinity that George embodies are not his alone, but reside firmly in the common English character.

The play never really confronts the question of just how a nation of such virility and honor can nevertheless breed traitors such as Kendall and his followers; Kendall mouths the claim that, "I rise not against King Edward, but for the poore that is opprest by wrong; and, if King Edward will redresse the same, I will not offer him disparagement…" (502-505). But this defense, familiar from the lips of rebels in contemporary chronicle plays, quickly and clearly rings hollow. Friar Bacon and John a Kent had foreign enemies to test themselves against; George a Greene, although more common and familiar than these magicians, is confronted with enemies both foreign and domestic, and the distinction alone is clearly intended to demonstrate just what it means to be English.

A valuable contrast to Robert Greene's gentle criticism of social and political hierarchy is available in the anonymous Fair Em, The Miller's Daughter of Manchester. In many ways, the issues and concerns of Fair Em and Green's plays are quite similar, a situation that apparently drew Greene's verbose ire in his prefatory letter to his Farewell to Follie. Yet unlike either Friar Bacon or George a' Greene, in which romantic love offers a legitimate point of attack against divisive social inequities, Fair Em emphatically supports a conservative ideal linking class distinction and marital propriety. In this play, both the political and the private story lines contrast the destabilizing consequences of unruly passion with the restorative powers of custom and decorum.

As the drama opens, William the Conqueror becomes infatuated with the picture of Blanch, princess of Denmark. The Conqueror impetuously abandons his royal duties to travel to Denmark, but there he discovers that Blanch is not quite as beautiful as her picture made her appear to be -- "[i]ll head, worse featured, uncomely, nothing courtly, / Swart and ill-favoured, a colliers sanguine skin -- / I never saw a harder-favored slut" (3.27-29). William quickly shifts his attention to Mariana who, although a Swedish princess and therefore also of the appropriate rank to marry a King, is a hostage in the Danish court. To complicate matters further, Mariana is beloved by the Danish Marquis Lubeck, a friend of William's. William attempts a number of strategems to secure Mariana, finally arranging to steal her away to England and matrimony. When he learns that the disguised woman whom he has brought back to England, nearly precipitating a way with Denmark, is really Blanch herself, William eventually capitualtes, discovering in Blanch a "modest countenance, a heavenly blush" (17.225). That with this union William secures the right to succession of the Danish crown after Zweno's death helps matters substantially.

In Fair Em's plot, too, a parallel pattern of plot-twists and comic surprises helps align romantic emotions with hierarchical interests. The courtier Mountney, one of three pursuing the miller's daughter, argues that "love respects no difference of state, / So beauty serve to stir up affection" (4.58-59), but throughout the play there is a steady current of anxiety about Em's station in life. Manvile, whose suit appeals most strongly to Em at the start of the play, points out that a "miller's daughter, says the multitude, / Should not be loved of a gentleman" (4.8-9), and most of the characters who meet her agree with the miller's man Trotter that Em is "too fine to be a miller's daughter" (2.84-85). Em herself launches into an impassion defense of a due observance of station in marriage when she attempts to turn away Valingford's unwanted advances.

If you be a lord, sir, as you say, you offer both yourself and me great wrong: yours, as apparent in limiting your love so unorderly, for which you rashly endure reproachment; mine, as open and evident, when being shut from the vanities of this world, you would have me as an open gazing-stock to all the world. For lust, not love, leads you into this error. But from the one I will keep me as well as I can, and yield the other to none but my father, as I am bound by duty. (16.41-50)

The audience could hardly miss the irony here, since Em is seeking to dissuade Valingford so that she might be free to marry Manvile. More importantly, Trotter's observations are true; the miller is in fact Sir Thomas Goddard, in disguise for fear of retribution from the Conqueror, and Em's true station is at least equal to that of Valingford's. The knots in the plot are untied in the play's final scene, although because of the corrupt nature of the surviving text the process by which Em's affections are transferred from Manvile to Valingford, if indeed they are, is not entirely clear. Dean calls this scene a "purely conventional tidying up" (Dean 40); William simply bestowes Em upon Valingford, and whisks the company off stage for the nuptials before either can say another word. We assume a happy ending, but the text, in its present condition, does not necessarily record it.

In both plots, Fair Em sublimates romance to social and political concerns, masking the demands of a rigorous hierarchy behind the fabulous machinations of love. In both story lines, the emotional rewards of love are realized only after the necessities of propriety have been met. One telling distinction between the two plots is the manner in which the play suggests the consequence of failing to recognize those necessities. Em fears public ridicule for herself and reproach for Valingford if they marry in defiance of social protocol. On the other hand, Williams decision to abandon his royal duties to pursue Blanch exposes to England to civil war, and his elopement, supposedly with Mariana but actually with Blanch, precipitates war with Denmark. As the playwright constructed his didactic moralizing against the evils of passion, he clearly saw the consequences of passion as substantially more dangerous among the politically powerful. In dramatizing the happy resolution of emotion and responsibility, depicted as a willing submission of love to duty, the playwright appeals to the most conservative ideals of his audience, reassuring them that personal happiness need not be inconsistent with a due consideration of social demands.

That Jack Straw also appeals to the conservative members of its audience has long been noted. The conflict between passion and order is dramatized here as well, although the passions of Jack Straw are political rather than romantic. The nature of this play as rather heavy handed Elizabethan propaganda has been clearly articulated. Note 3 Yet when Ribner discusses the play's structural debt to the morality tradition, he describes Jack Straw as a man with legitimate social and political grievances, at least at first. The opening scene of the play is essentially sympathetic to the men of Kent who have no legitimate opportunity for redress against a Tax Collector who "goest beyond the Commission of the King…" (11). Jack accuses the Collector of illegally trying to tax his underage daughter and, worse, "[t]o play so unmanly and beastly a part, / As to search my daughter thus in my presence" (28-29). Although Bevington characterizes this scene as "an isolated abuse" that reveals the rebels' "motiveless impulse for troublemaking" (Bevington 236), it seems to me to be a synecdoche for a system-wide abuse of the privileges of status against those social bonds which should, in a properly structured world, encourage the strong to protect, rather than take advantage of, the weak. The conflict is characterized as one between office and family; the tax collector is nameless, and Jack Straw, whose name reveals his occupation and, by extension, himself, asserts that "I am sure thy Office doth not arm thee with such authoritie. / Thus to abuse the poore people of the Countrie" (21-22).

After the opening clash, however, the play quickly becomes the strident defense of royal authority that other critics have described. Mary Adkins has pointed out that the playwright chose to present King Richard in a substantially more favorable light than the chronicle sources offered,16 and the behavior of the rebels rapidly shifts from political outrage to opportunistic riot. To rally support in the opening scene, Parson Ball exclaims:

Brethren, brethren, it were better to have this communitie,
Then to have this difference in degrees:
The landlord his rent, the lawyer his fees.
So quickly the pore mans substance is spent…. (84-87)

But moments later, Jack is talking not about leveling degrees, but simply replacing the old with the new:

Wee will haue all the Rich men displaste,
And all the brauerie of them defaste,
And as rightly as I am Jacke Straw,
In spight of all the men of Law,
Make thee Archbishop of Caunterberie,
And Chauncellor of England or Ile die. (112-17)

Even after King Richard has offered a full pardon to the rebels if they disperse, Jack Straw proclaims, "I came for spoile and spoile Ile have" (759).

The collapse of rebellion into riot is sudden and complete; Adkins is probably quite right when she writes that, "I take this change to be due to dramatic inepitude [sic] rather than to a shift in the author's attitude; it may of course be a means, also inept, of intensifying the menace inherent in rebellion" (Adkins 66). Yet the shift also reinforces the sharp distinction between the disposition of the king and the nobles toward the commoners. While Richard can describe the rebels as, "my people whom I love so deare" (339), the Archbishop describes them as "[t]he Multitude a Beast of many heads" (188-89), and to Sir John Newton the "Troupes of men" are "[l]ike Bees that swarme about the hony hive" (562-63). This contrast between the King's paternal care and the dismissive arrogance of the other nobles is maintained throughout the play.

For their parts, the rebels quickly set their course not against Richard himself, but against the learned and enfranchised classes. Hob Carter promises "wele not leave a man of lawe. / Nor a paper worth a hawe…" (519-520), and at the height of the action, Tom Miller describes how "I have made a bonfire here of a great many of Bonds and Indentures and Obligations, faith I have bin amongst the ends of the court, & among the Records, & althat I saw either in the Guild-Hall or in any other place, I have set fire on them…" (780-84).

Jack Straw dramatizes -- even while mocking -- the rebels' impression that the natural order of things has been perverted to their detriment by those with privileged access to power in the form of status, education, and wealth. Whatever sympathy the initial scene affords the rebels comes from the attack upon Jack Straw's fourteen-year-old daughter by the Tax Collector, the perversion of natural, familial order by the artificial political order. The commoners lose that sympathy almost immediately when they seize the wife and children of Sir John Morton in order to force him to bear their grievances to the King (263-271). Tom Miller underscores this tactic as a grotesque perversion when he threatens, "Let him [Morton] take heed he bring a wise answere to our worships, or els his pledges goes to the pot" (272-73). In the very next scene, we meet the Queen Mother, who fears for the safety of "my sonne their true anointed King" (305). Shortly after this assertion, King Richard makes his first appearance on stage, and it is at this point that he makes his sympathetic and solicitous referral to "my people whom I love so deare" (339). This progression of scenes is clearly intended to valorize Richard as the true source of both moral and political order.

If Jack Straw is, as Adkins has identified it, "a tacit but strong defense of Elizabeth" and her tax policies (Adkins 62), it is also, like Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and George a' Greene, an evocation of increasingly disruptive tensions between various strata of the commonwealth. The censorious and abusive attitudes towards the rebels expressed by the nobility of Jack Straw certainly helped the playwright characterize rebellion as not merely dangerous, but dehumanizing as well. Yet these attitudes probably also had a resonance for a substantial proportion of the play's London audience, men and women who feared "Kentish insurrectionists" (Bevington 237-38), but who were also skeptical of an entrenched privileged class who may have looked at them with much the same opinions as those expressed by Jack Straw's Archbishop.

While all these plays dramatize a patriotic fantasy that asserts the "natural" ascendancy of English life and English folk -- so long as those English folk respect the proper customs and traditions -- in different ways they do suggest that this ascendancy is neither permanent nor without cost. The celebration of romantic love in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and the easy community between king and pinner in George a' Greene both in their own manner suggest a dissatisfaction with the divisive nature of the social hierarchy, which tends to promote tension and mistrust among people who should be amicably united. Writing of those plays like George a' Greene in which a disguised king achieves real communication with his people, Anne Barton notes that:

[i]t is the fundamental premise of all these plays that the king, rightly considered, is but a man, and a remarkably understanding man at that. If only, they seem to suggest, king and commoner could talk together in this way, without formality or embarrassment, how many problems would be solved, how many popular grievances redressed. (98)

At one level or another, each of these plays pits an emotional, affectionate social bond against a mercenary, self-serving one, valorizing the emotional bond, whether the romantic love of a man and a woman or the mutual responsibility and commitment of a family, as the true source of England's strength. The easy camaraderie of King Edward and George a Greene or the loving solicitude of King Richard for his misguided children-subjects is a romantic idealization of the nation as a united whole. Yet only Munday's John a Kent manages to portray this without also including signs of tension and suspicion between members of that unity.

The crass Lambert and Serlsby employ threats and bribery in vain efforts to secure Margaret's hand. George a Green proudly dismisses all social distinctions save for the royal privilege itself. Fair Em struggles with the complications that those distinction pose for a happy marriage. The mutual animosity of noble and commoner during the Kentish uprising threatens the very life of the civic family. All these conflicts speak to a substantial level of fear and mistrust complicating even the most idealized images of the English national self. The playwrights working to place marketable products upon the stages of the Theatre, the Curtain, or the Rose could not of course resolve the problems that their audiences faced, but they did create a diverse forum within which those problems could be interrogated and exposed.

1 Traister claims that Edward's anger here is a ruse (80), yet she also points out that the fact that Edward learns of the relationship between Lacie and Margaret by spying upon them through Bacon's prospective glass, which transmits visual images but not sound. Traister mentions that "Edward only sees that Lacy kisses and is about to marry Margaret; he does not hear Lacy debate his love and his loyalty, nor does he hear the conversation between the lovers," and admits that this "may partially explain the extreme response of the Prince" (82).

2 Collins remarks that "I think the balance of probability inclines, though not quite decisively, in favour of Greene." J. Churton Collins. Introduction, George a' Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield. The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene. 2:163.

3 Ribner points out the many "Tudor commonplaces about the rights and duties of kingship and the evils of rebellion" (74), while Bevington calls the play "unusual in its conservative bias even among English history plays" (237). Walter Cohen suggests that the "allegiances of the author of Jack Straw are so unambiguously monarchical that he can present the rebels' position in the serene confidence that it will be contemptuously dismissed." (227-28.)

Adkins, Mary Grace Muse. "A Theory about The Life and Death of Jack Straw." Studies in English 28 (1949): 57-82.

Anonymous. The Life and Death of Jack Straw. Oxford: The Malone Society Reprints, 1957.

Anonymous. Fair Em. A Critical Edition. Ed. Standish Henning. New York: Garland Publishing, 1980.

Ardolino, Frank. " 'Thus Glories England over All the West': Setting as National Encomium in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay." Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. 9 (1988): 218-229.

Barton, Anne. "The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History." The Triple Bond. Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance. Ed. Joseph G. Price. University Park: Pennsylvania State U P, 1975.

Bevington, David. Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1968.

Cohen, Walter. Drama of a Nation. Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1985.

Dean, Paul. "Shakespeare's Henry VI Trilogy and Elizabethan 'Romance' Histories: The Origins of a Genre." Shakespeare Quarterly 33:1 (Spring 1982) 34-48.

Einstein, Lewis. Tudor Ideals. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1921.

Green, Robert. The Honorable Historie of frier Bacon and frier Bongay. The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene. J. Churton Collins, Ed. 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1905. Volume 2.

-----. George a' Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield. The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene. J. Churton Collins, Ed. 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1905. Volume 2.

Holderness, Graham. Shakespeare's History. New York: St. Martin's,1985.

Munday, Anthony. John a Kent and John a Cumber. Ed. Arthur E. Pennel. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980.

Ribner, Irving. The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, rev. ed. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965.