Who do the people love?

Summary

Not so long ago, within the memory of some professors emeriti yet living, a number of Shakespearian critics spent considerable time and energy in attempts to determine ‘what Shakespeare believed’ about some subject, which usually meant what they wanted him to believe, which always meant what they themselves believed. They had no trouble in demonstrating, by a judicious selection of supporting evidence from the plays, and a judicious avoidance of any evidence to the contrary, that he shared their views on art, family, friendship, honour, justice, love, marriage, nature, religion, revenge, sex, war and many other subjects. But they had a great deal of trouble with his view of politics, because they wanted him to believe in democracy but he obviously did not. He only gives us three extended treatments of ‘the people’ as a separate political entity and agency in the action – Jack Cade’s rebels in Act 4 of 2 Henry VI, and the Roman plebeians in the first three acts of Julius Caesar and of Coriolanus – and in all three plays they are presented as a ‘rabble’ who are mindless, fickle, easily swayed and murderous. Moreover, they are always shown to be wrong. Cade’s rebels set out to exterminate the middle and upper classes (hence their notorious proposal to ‘kill all the lawyers’) and establish an egalitarian utopia where food and claret wine are free and ‘all things shall be in common’, including wives, but finally, in one brief scene (4.8), they are persuaded by Clifford to yield to the King, and then by Cade to continue their rebellion, and then by Clifford to abandon Cade and go off to fight the French. The plebeians in Julius Caesarcheer Caesar at the Lupercalia, but after his assassination they are persuaded by Brutus to approve of the conspirators responsible for it, and then they are persuaded by Mark Antony to go on a violent rampage against them (during which they kill the wrong Cinna), and this results in civil war and the destruction of the Roman republic.