The chapter re-examines the notorious Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI in light of widespread political protests across the globe. The bloody chaos of Cade’s failed popular uprising contains within it an important flash – or counter-memory – for the political imagination. First, the popular movement creates a break with the oppressive social order by revealing the systematic silencing and oppression of the commons. It makes the invisible visible. Second, the mass movement makes a positive demand for justice that differentiates the people from the State. Examining the rebels’ “Edenic egalitarianism”, the chapter draws on the recent work of Chris Fitter, Lorna Hutson, and Annabel Patterson in reassessing Shakespeare’s representation of popular politics. However, the chapter critiques the critical tendency to concentrate on what is “useful” or “effective” at the level of plot. It instead turns to imagination as the key to thinking Shakespeare’s popular politics. The force of the “people” is not located in one figure, be it Cade or Salisbury, but is dispersed across the drama. The spirit of the “in-common”, in all its absurdity and impossibility, lives on as a form of negative, or spectral, thinking and dramaturgy. The audience is the ultimate carrier and agent of this political imagination.

The version of 2 Henry VI most people know, read, and study is the play printed in 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. There is, however, an early alternative version of the play, about one third shorter in length, that was printed in quarto format in 1594, entitled The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, and reprinted in 1600 and 1619. The provenance of this shorter text, and its relationship to the Folio text, has provoked much debate. First focusing on the variant versions of a speech about lineage in early quartos and Folio, while drawing in consideration of practices of coauthorship and revision, the chapter then turns to how the death of Gloucester is represented in the various versions. The chapter considers how the different textual versions of this English history play convey also a different emotional register that affects both character and situation.

The relationship of plays to their sources has always been important evidence of chronology, authorship, and the derivation of textual variants. Such evidence has been particularly important to studies of Shakespeare’s early plays. But for centuries source scholarship has been based on random anecdotes: a scholar reading one text notices something about it that reminds them of another text. We can now re-evaluate those anecdotal findings by testing them systematically against digital databases. Such tests establish that Margaret's long speech at the beginning of Scene 2 of The First Part of the Contention is based on a passage in Hall's chronicle, whereas the variants in the Folio text of 2 Henry VI instead draw upon Holinshed's chronicle. This evidence supports revision rather than memorial reconstruction. Likewise, the links between the Contention speech and Edward II are best explained by Marlowe's authorship of both.