ABSTRACT
The stage direction which begins Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2 carries onto the stage the portentous emblem for a discursive genre which, I will be arguing, was to carry a devastating political charge in the mid-and later1590s. For Rumour's polyglot body, seething with tongues 'Upon' which 'continual slanders ride' (6), is the dramatic figure of that swarm of illegitimate discourses which the Elizabethan elite feared were generated and disseminated by their social inferiors. Whilst I take Shakespeare's Rumour as my starting point, this essay is not intended as a 'reading' of the play in which it appears, nor a conventional historical analysis of the popular discursive genre of which it is a trace. Rather my concern is to examine the connection between certain forms of subversive plebeian speech and more overt forms of popular resistance, such as riots. I will be concerned with the historical conjuncture around 1597 when rumour and riot were arguably more widespread and more feared than at any other time in the turbulent final decade of the sixteenth century. My deployment of the Shakespearean text here, then, is as one of a series of textual responses to this moment of crisis.
