ABSTRACT
Henry VI Part 2, focuses on the things English. Against this background, Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter term the Henry VI trilogy arguably Shakespeare's most English works', while E. M. W. Tillyard holds that the main character of the dramatic pieces is none other than England itself, a fact that becomes especially obvious in the second part of the trilogy. In Henry VI Part 2, however, Jack Cade becomes not only a representative of the masses but also the spokesman of a particular form of mass-compatible nationalism. The Shakespear's play presents us not only with Cade's marred popular nationalism and the king's calculated absolutist nationalism, but also with further class-bound concepts of the nation. Shakespeare's play does not entirely discredit any recourse to national identity, though, but juxtaposes these self-interested usages with a more positive one a nationalism that in its concern for the nation indeed deserves its name.
