SOURCE: Bernthal, Craig A. “Jack Cade's Legal Carnival.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 42, no. 2 (2002): 259-74.

In the following essay, Bernthal analyzes the ways in which Shakespeare used carnival imagery in Henry VI, Part 2, both to defend and condemn Jack Cade's rebellion.

C. L. Barber was one of the first critics to recognize that Shakespeare portrays the Cade Rebellion of Henry VI Part II as carnival: “an astonishingly consistent expression of anarchy by clowning: the popular rising is presented throughout as a saturnalia, ignorantly undertaken in earnest; Cade's motto is ‘then are we in order when we are most out of order.’”¹ Scholars who have recently examined the Cade Rebellion of Henry VI Part II, among them Michael D. Bristol, Ellen C. Caldwell, Alexander Leggatt, and Phyllis Rackin,² tend to agree that Cade is not only a carnivalesque inverter of rank and privilege, but also, as Leggatt puts it...