ABSTRACT
It is difficult to say how many spectators in the early 1590s would have shared Cade's egalitarian outrage as they sat in the theater watching Shakespeare's rendition of the turbulent events of the 1450 revolt and the ensuing War of the Roses. But all of them would have understood Cade's assumption that "talk of a noun and a verb" was more than a purely linguistic enterprise. Scholarship on Shakespeare and grammar has tended to adopt the sociological perspective implicit in the viewpoints articulated, albeit to very different ends, by Cade and Mulcaster. Grammar matters for what it symbolizes in sociopolitical terms: cultural capital, membership in a self-regulating elite, and the institutionalization of social reproduction. Nevertheless, if grammar retained its cultural prestige and capaciousness in the Renaissance, grammar as Shakespeare would have imbibed it when he was a schoolboy in Stratford in the 1570s was radically different from that of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the way it was taught.
