ABSTRACT
In both Richard II and I Henry IV, Shakespeare tied unmistakeably to the rebel in each play—first Bullingbrooke, then Hotspur—the flamboyant Earl of Essex. This chapter reviews the wealth of connections identifying historical rebel with contemporary earl in the latter play: which effectively continued a counter-propaganda campaign to combat the earl’s industrious self-promotion. This was a remarkable (if commercially remunerative) theatrical policy, disclosing a very daring, politically activist author: one entirely at odds with the dramatist ‘invisible’ in his works of whom we so often hear. This chapter positions Shakespeare’s vision within the six political paradigms current in his day, finding that the ‘black realpolitik’ inherited from Marlowe and contemporary cynicism was mitigated, the conclusion argues, primarily by the populist vision. Shakespeare’s broadly democratic sympathies, levelling ironies, suspicion of metaphysics, licence of bodily pleasure, and puncturing workaday materialism, derive substantially from a ‘medieval’ nexus of beliefs: the plebeian Commonweal vision.
