ABSTRACT
If, as I have suggested, behind capering Cade there looms manic Hacket, then Henry VI Part Two must have been composed somewhere between the latter half of 1591 and early 1592: produced, that is, when Shakespeare was some twenty-seven years old. Penned so very early in his career, it is a gateway play: an eye-catching construction through which a young actor paraded his ambitious new identity as a metropolitan playwright, and signalled a distinct dramaturgical identity. To demonstrate, therefore, as I hope to, that already his politics are radical, that from his very entry into drama Shakespeare seeks to destabilize establishment ideology, is to challenge fundamentally that traditional conception of a ‘genteel’ bard which has so confi dently underlain expositions of Shakespeare from Coleridge to Eagleton.
