The Shaksperean Mob

Frederick Tupper Jr

doi:10.1632/456818

The Shaksperean Mob

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020

Frederick Tupper Jr

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Among the scholars of Cambridge who essayed the presentation of Thomas Legge's Latin play of Richardus Tertius at St. John's in 1579, perhaps the most ambitious were those three ingenuous and versatile youths, Howland, Henlowe, Kendall, who enacted the “chorus tumultuantium civium.” Surely, “a little o'erparted”! Easier far with three rusty swords to fight over York and Lancaster's long jars than to portray through three, four, six, or even seven or eight persons the many-headed monster in its varying moods. To trace the evolution of mob-mind from the stage of orderly self-possession and personal consciousness through the psychic process of the withering of the individual and the accumulation of collective energy under the stress of exciting causes to its final state of a fiercely emotional and keenly suggestible crowd-self, lay of course far beyond the purpose and powers of Thomas Legge. Far, too, was this above the aim of such controversial playwrights of the Reformation as that Catholic author of Respublica who presented “the people” in the guise of a single smatterer of dialect. Yet this study of multiplied suggestion which has taxed the observation of ancient historian and modern psychologist has always and with reason made large appeal to that analyst of many men's motives, the dramatist. Humanity in the mass exerted its fascination sometimes over Shakspere's fellows and followers; but it cast a far more potent spell upon Shakspere himself—notably in the Jack Cade scenes (2 Henry VI) and in the two Roman plays of Julius Cæsar and Coriolanus.

Type: Research Article
Information: PMLA , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , 1912 , pp. 486 - 523

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1632/456818 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1912

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References

^{page 487 note 1} Blumenthal, Grabbes Werke, iv, p. 159.

^{page 487 note 2} Shakspere's Attitude to the Working Classes, 1907, p. 140.

^{page 487 note 3} Cited by Verity, Coriolanus, 1905, p. xxxiii.

^{page 487 note 4} Shakspere: His Mind and Art, p. 325.

^{page 487 note 5} Shakespeare, Ses Œuvres et ses Critiques, pp. 153-157.

^{page 488 note 1} Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xlvi, pp. xxxi-xxxii.

^{page 488 note 2} Œuvres, 1819, vii, pp. 370, 383.

^{page 488 note 3} Shakspeare-Studien, p. 222.

^{page 488 note 4} Cf. Johnson, Shakspere and his Critics, pp. 285-286.

^{page 488 note 5} Pp. 319-320.

^{page 488 note 6} Coriolanus, p. xxxiii.

^{page 489 note 1} P. xxxi.

^{page 489 note 2} Oehme's elaborate dissertation Die Volksszenen bei Shakespeare und seinen Vorgängern, Berlin, 1908, so praiseworthy for its careful analysis of Shaksperean mob-traits, invites the seemingly ungrateful criticisms that the writer sometimes fails to distinguish between the characteristics of quiet burghers talking apart, or of an orderly throng like the army of Henry V, and those of a riotous mob swayed by passion; and that here and elsewhere he disregards the recent teachings of social psychology concerning the force of multiplied suggestion.

^{page 489 note 3} William Shakespeare, p. 536.

^{page 489 note 4} P. 163.

^{page 490 note 1} See The Nonne Preestes Tale (B, 4584) and perhaps Troilus and Criseyde, iv, 196-210; and compare Carleton Brown's note, Modern, Language Notes, Nov. 1911.

^{page 490 note 2} “As lyke unto Yll May Day as could be devised in all manner of circumstances mutatis mutandis” (Recorder Fleetwood's letter of September 1586 to Burghley, cited by Simpson, Notes and Queries, Series iv, vol. viii, 1 and Schelling, English Chronicle Plays, p. 210).

^{page 490 note 3} Chronicles, iii, pp. 617 f., derived, of course, from Hall.

^{page 491 note 1} Maitland, History and Survey of London, 1756, i, p. 278.

^{page 491 note 2} Hamlet iv, v, 98 f.

^{page 492 note 1} Romeo and Juliet, i, i, 80.

^{page 492 note 2} Titus Andronieus, ii, i, 37.

^{page 492 note 3} Julius Cæsar, i, i, l.

^{page 492 note 4} “The fourth and last sort of people in England are daylaborers, poor husbandmen and some retailers (which have no free land), copyholders and all artificers as tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, brickmakers, masons, etc.” (Harrison, Elizabethan England, chap. i.)

^{page 493 note 1} “Ye pretend a commonwealth. How amend ye it? By killing of gentlemen, by spoiling of gentlemen, by imprisoning of gentlemen. A marvelous tanned commonwealth. Why should ye thus hate them?‘ For their riches or for their rule? Rule they never took so much in hand as ye do now. They rule but by law … A great sort of you hath more need of one gentleman than one gentleman of a great sort of you” (Cheke, Holinshed's Chronicles, iii, p. 987.) Compare with this the old saw of the Peasants’ Risings, “When-Adam delved,” etc., and the cries of Cade's rebels, “It was never merry world in England since gentlemen came up ” and

“'Tis for liberty,

We will not leave one lord, one gentleman.“

(2 Henry VI, iv, ii, 10, 193-194).

^{page 495 note 1} See New English Dictionary, s. v. for examples of each.

^{page 495 note 2} Mark too in Coriolanus, iii, i, 93, “Hydra here”; iv, i, 1-2, “the beast with many heads.”

^{page 495 note 3} Appius and Virginia, v, iii.

^{page 495 note 4} John Webster, pp. 194 f.

^{page 495 note 5} The Horatian image appears not only in Sidney and Daniel (N. E. D.), but in the anonymous play of Jack Straw, “this multitude, the beast of many heads ”; at least twice in Ben Jonson, Catiline, iii, i, “Herculus and his hydra” (Cicero and the people), Discoveries, Schelling, p. 82, 29-31, “Jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter with the beast, the multitude ”; in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, Pt. ii, Sect. 1, “a monstrosity more prodigious than hydra”; in Butler's account of “A Rabble” (Characters) as “the greatest and most savage beast in the whole world”; and in John Wilson's Andronicus Comnenius (1664), iii, ii, “this giddy multitude, this beast of many heads.” Compare, among more recent instances, Walter Scott's description of “the changeling crowd” as a “many-headed monster thing” (Lady of the Lake, v, 30).

^{page 496 note 1} Compare the Publisher's preface to the second quarto of Troilus and Cressida, “Never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar.”

^{page 497 note 1} Works, Cambridge, 1853, i, p. 567.

^{page 497 note 2} Religio Medici, Pt. ii, Sect. 1. Cf. Ralegh's. Preface to his History of the World.

^{page 497 note 3} It is interesting to compare with Browne's scorn of the vox populi Gascoigne's like disgust at the phrase in his Dulce bellum inexpertis, v. 10, and John Wilson's contemptuous mention, Andronicus Comnenius, iii, ii.

^{page 498 note 1} Paradise Regained, iii, 43 f. Victor Hugo builded far better than he knew, when he made the Milton of his Cromwell and the arch-Puritan, Cromwell himself, contemn the weakness of the crowd.

^{page 498 note 2} Die Volksszenen bei Shakespeare, p. 98.

^{page 498 note 3} To argue with Boas, Shakspere and his Predecessors, p. 542, for Shakspere's authorship of the Cade scenes of the old play on the ground that “their temper is in complete harmony with Shakspere's treatment of mob leaders” is to ignore entirely the conventional character of such situations. Boas seems, too, equally unfortunate in his claim that “it is almost incredible that the creator of the Pinner of Wakefield [Robert Greene] should have given so unsympathetic a sketch of the representative of popular aspirations and grievances.” It is not at all incredible if one remembers that the creator of the Tanner of Tamworth, Thomas Heywood, most democratic of Elizabethans, portrays in that very play, Edward IV a wretched mob led by sorry rascals (infra). I hold no brief for Greene's hand in The Contention, but Boas's premises are of the weakest.

^{page 499 note 1} Nowhere in Elizabethan drama save in Shakespere is any stress laid upon the rank scent of the people. See Brandes, pp. 536-538.

^{page 500 note 1} Shakspere's Roman Plays and their Background, 1910.

^{page 501 note 1} Pp. 111 f.

^{page 501 note 2} A word later of Shakspere's exclusion of Holinshed's rebel petition.

^{page 501 note 3} Histoire de la Littérature Française, 1895, p. 269 (cited by MacCallum, p. 141).

^{page 502 note 1} Compare a few of North's englishings of Amyot with Langhorne's far more literal, if far less spirited renderings of Plutarch:— “When the people saw Brutus in the pulpit, although they were a multitude of rake-hells of all sorts and had a good will to make some stir” (North); “At the sight of Brutus the populace though disposed to tumult” (Langhorne). Or again: “Hereupon the people ran on head in tumult together” (North); “An assembly was held in a tumultuous manner” (Langhorne). And when North writes of “tumult and hurly-burly” (Life of Coriolanus), one remembers the common application of the second word to contemporary London riots. Such a list might be indefinitely increased.

^{page 502 note 2} Shakspere and his Predecessors, p. 485. See also MacCallum, p. 84; Neilson's Cambridge Shakespeare, p. 1097.

^{page 502 note 3} Macbeth is a signal instance.

^{page 503 note 1} The descriptions of the riotous populace in North's version are very close to those of the English Chroniclers:—“ Many mutinous and seditious persons, being the superfluous ill humors that grievously fed this disease ”; “The multitude of the poor needy people and all such rabble as had nothing to lose”; “The common people should so arrogantly and outrageously have abused their authority.”

^{page 503 note 2} Thus the tribunes in North's version: “They nourished against themselves the naughty seed and cockle of insolence of sedition which had been sowed and scattered abroad amongst the people”; “They stirred up sedition without any new occasion or just matter offered of complaint.”

^{page 504 note 1} “Leave out the insurrection wholly and the cause thereof,” wrote that zealous official, after his reading of Sir Thomas More (Simpson, Notes and Queries, Ser. iv, Vol. viii, 1).

^{page 505 note 1} Cf. Le Bon, The Crowd, p. 94.

^{page 506 note 1} 2 Henry VI, iv, viii, 36 f.

^{page 506 note 2} So Boas, p. 469. Cf. Brandes, pp. 321-322, MacCallum, pp. 253-254.

^{page 507 note 1} Compare Quintilian's Si vis me flere, flendum Uhi.

^{page 508 note 1} Cf. Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion, p. 34.

^{page 508 note 2} Pp. 525-526.

^{page 508 note 3} P. 26.

^{page 509 note 1} Thus “Citizen 1” in Coriolanus, i, i is energetic, resolute, and an embittered opponent of the hero; in ii, iii “Citizen 1” is restricted in his views and is the hero's champion.

^{page 510 note 1} Voltaire prefaces his Brutus (1730) with a “Discours sur la Tragédie” addressed to Lord Bolingbroke (Œuvres, 1819, i, pp. 315 f.):—“Peut-être les Français ne souffriraient pas que l'on fit paraître sur leurs théâtres un chœur composé d'artisans et de plebeians romains, que le corps sanglant de César y fut exposé aux yeux du peuple et qu'on excitât ce peuple à la vengeance du haut de la tribune aux harangues.”

^{page 511 note 1} Oehme's detailed discussion (pp. 3-11) of the place of folk-scenes in the construction of Shakspere's dramas precludes any further consideration of this interesting subject here.

^{page 512 note 1} See Pinvert, Jacques Grévin, 1899, p. 136. Grévin shows, in another way, a marked tendency to humanise the chorua by presenting it as a fickle band listening to the harangues of Brutus, Cassius, Decimus Brutus, and Antony (see Collischon's edition of César, supplementing his essay “Jacques Grévin's Tragödie, César, in ihrem Verhältniss zu Muret, Voltaire und Shakspere,” Ausgaben und Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Romanischen Philologie, lii, 1886).

^{page 512 note 2} Supra.

^{page 512 note 3} Cf. Jebb, Classical Greek Poetry, pp. 169-170.

^{page 513 note 1} V, viii, 287 f.

^{page 513 note 2} Bacehœ, 1125 f.

^{page 514 note 1} Cf. also Hippolytus, 1179 f., Phœnissœ, 1281 f. For these Euripidean examples I am indebted to my colleague, Professor S. E. Bassett.

^{page 514 note 2} Richard III, iii, vii, 1-42.

^{page 514 note 3} Julius Cæsar, i, ii, 235.

^{page 514 note 4} John Webster, pp. 194 f.

^{page 514 note 5} Compare the crowd of Sir Thomas Wyatt, in which play Webster had a hand.

^{page 515 note 1} “Hydra-headed multitude” is ubiquitous (supra), as Stoll admits, and “Roman fry,” which is not Shaksperean, may be matched by Heywood's “filthy fry of ditches,” applied to the rebellious peasantry (Edward IV, Part I, i, v).

^{page 515 note 2} Cited by Stoll, l. c.

^{page 516 note 1} Cf. Briggs, Sejanus, (Belles Lettres Series) 1911, p. 285.

^{page 517 note 1} Very diverting is the stage-direction of The Recruiting Officer, ii, iii, “Enter Kite with a mob in each hand drunk.”

^{page 517 note 2} That all Frenchmen were not of this mind is seen in Mercier's approbation of the Shaksperean multitude and in Diderot's attempt to persuade Tronchin to introduce a crowd into his Catilina. Cf. Jusserand, Shakespeare in France, 1899, pp. 367-369.

^{page 518 note 1} Professor Lounsbury points out (Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, p. 147) that “the offense consisted not in the character of the conversation (between tribunes and tradesmen) but in there being any conversation at all.”

^{page 518 note 2} See Voltaire, “Observations sur le Jules César de Shakespeare,” Œuvres, vii, 426.

^{page 518 note 3} See Lessing's Sämtliche Schriften, Stuttgart, 1887, iii, pp. 357-359.

^{page 519 note 1} See Schiller's letter to Goethe, April 7, 1797.

^{page 520 note 1} Life of Goethe, i, pp. 330 f.

^{page 520 note 2} See Herder's Sämtliche Werke, 1884, xxvii, pp. 52 f.

^{page 520 note 3} Cf. Hoch, Shakespeare's Influence upon Grabbe (University of Pennsylvania dissertation, without date), pp. 38-39.

^{page 521 note 1} Julius Cæsar, i, ii, 234 f.

^{page 522 note 1} Compare the introduction of the Roman hero's name, “First, you know Caius Marcius is chief enemy to the people” (Coriolanus, i, i, 6).

^{page 522 note 2} See Sedgewick's close analysis of mobbish traits in his “Mob Spirit in Literature,” Atlantic, xcvi, 1905, pp. 9 f.

^{page 523 note 1} Parallels of language are suggestive. Stockmann's telling figure, “There seems to be precious little oxygen in many and many a house in this town, since the whole compact majority is unscrupulous enough to want to found its future upon a quagmire of lies and fraud. You poison the whole country,” reminds us of Goriolanus, iii, iii, 120 f.,

“You common cry of curs whose breath I hate

As reek o' the rotten fens,“ etc.

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