잭 케이드 반란과 민중, 그리고 셰익스피어의 ‘급진주의’

Abstract

Though the Henry VI trilogy has been more or less neglected among Shakespeare’s works, those scenes of the popular rebellion under the leadership of Jack Cade 2 Henry VI have invited many important critical attentions. The play allots as many as nine scenes to the Jack Cade rebellion, and they form “a little play of its own, a miniature inset within the greater pattern of the Plantagenet tetralogy.” That is mainly about the power struggle among the ruling classes. The importance critics attribute to the Cade episode comes from the fact that in it Shakespeare seems to take sides on a political issue of relevance, that of popular rebellion more than in any other plays. And it offers a locus for us to assess Shakespeare’s ideas on popular rebellions. The Jack Cade episode has been used to show both a populist and an antipopulist attitude in Shakespeare. While some critics argue that the Cade scenes simply offer the “impious spectacle of the proper order reversed,” others insist that Cade’s rebellion is “a political act and not a moral aberration” One critic even argues that it is “a genuine revolutionary attempt.” How can the same piece of dramatic representation be taken to support such diverse and even opposed arguments? I argue that it manifests a double perspective of Shakespeare’s representing the Jack Cade rebellion. Shakespeare depicts it as a people’s political act with genuine grievances and ideology, but their message is continually ridiculed and subverted throughout the play. The contradictions in Cade’s program of reformation are comically obvious, and the rebellion becomes “a mob frenzy” when their slogan has been translated into action. This “multiperspectivism,” as Pugliatti argues, is Shakespeare’s characteristic attitude. By politicizing a historical event, Shakespeare creatively explores “conceptions such as power, authority, honour, order, and freedom, which only too easily become objects of ‘idolatry’.” This paper aims to examine how Shakespeare creatively and also radically explores the political issue, that of popular rebellion, which also too easily becomes objects of ‘idolatry’, in the scenes of Jack Cade’s rebellion.