SOURCE: "The Jack Cade Scenes Reconsidered: Popular Rebellion, Utopia, or Carnival?", in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, edited by Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle and Stanley Wells, University of Delaware Press, 1994, pp. 76-89.

In the following lecture originally delivered at the International Shakespeare Association World Congress in 1991, Laroque discusses the Cade scenes in 2 Henry VI in the context of medieval and Renaissance festivals and revels, emphasizing the linkage of savagery and buffoonery in these scenes, and focusing on Cade as both the voice of Utopian radicalism and a carnivalesque Lord of Misrule.

Important critical attention has recently been devoted to the scenes depicting the popular uprising under the leadership of Jack Cade, the Kentish clothier, in 2 Henry VI. The rebellion appears in scenes 2 to 10 of act 4 and forms a little play of its own, a miniature inset within the greater pattern of the overall sequence of the Plantagenet tetralogy, which...