Begging at the gate: Jack Straw and the acting out of popular rebellion.(Report)

THE Life and Death of Jack Straw (1) is a short, anonymous, and rarely read history play from 1593 or 1594. (2) We know nothing of its authorship, little of its performance history, and even less of how audiences reacted to its performance, if it was performed at all. Extant copies of the play are probably incomplete or error-ridden. From a comparison to the various other documents produced by its original printer we can surmise that the play was initially printed with modest profit aspirations and without much concern for the specific content of the text. (3) Even though we have no reason to attribute the text to one person or another, its language either echoes, or is echoed in, other texts from the period. (4) In short, all we know of Jack Straw is the result of what we can read in its two alternate versions, and what we can imagine as possible for this play from within its context.

Situating Jack Straw in its context is a deeply compelling project as the play represents the most important popular revolt in English history and does so at a time when London was frequently stirring with riots. If ever there was a play in need of reconsideration after the changes in the study of early modern drama, it is Jack Straw. In its curious relationship to the actual 1381 uprising, Jack Straw departs from its sources and, in its contradictory representation of the rebels and the royalists alike, poses intriguing questions about early modern English culture, riots, popular rebellion, and the reception of early modern plays.

Jack Straw gives voice to the period's most radical ideas about popular revolt and protest, suggesting how the public theater could reflect a sense of significant political unrest in the city. Jack Straw represents historical events which themselves were part of the early modern cultural memory in significantly different ways for people at different positions in the social hierarchy. The figure of Jack Straw participates in the Robin Hood tradition, and as such is an important cultural signifier so that his representation cannot easily be contained by royalist or aristocratic readings. Nonetheless, Jack Straw has very rarely been studied. (5) The issue is not that Jack Straw is literally never read nor mentioned in scholarship, but that its consideration is so profoundly superficial and seemingly secondhand that even very basic aspects of the interactions between characters are entirely lost in scholarship. This most cursory understanding of the play makes it difficult to use the play to develop our knowledge of either the stage or the period. My reading of Jack Straw emphasizes the public playhouse as a site in which sentiments of more genuinely radical, common revolt are given articulation. Yet these articulations in the play are almost impossible to see as long as the context of reception is constrained by current models for understanding power and audience reception, and as long as the play is read only in the service of studying Shakespeare.

Jack Straw begins with the rebels presented as sympathetic and ends with the valorization of the royalist position and the valorization of the Lord Mayor. The royalist conclusion is politically inevitable for the printing and performance of the play. So the questions remain: how sympathetically are we to read the rebels after the first scene? Also, how radical are we to perceive the representation of the rebellion throughout the body of the play? The argument of this essay is that the play's royalist-didactic conclusion should be seen as necessarily formulaic and designed to safely contain what is otherwise a generally sympathetic representation of the rebels and the goals of the rebellion. A sympathetic reading of the rebellion emerges by studying not only the formal construction of the play, but from its possible audience reception. Furthermore, the material texts and the adjustments therein are indicative of early modern readers who approved of the rebel position.

There were two printings of Jack Straw. The first of these printings occurred in 1593/94 from John Danter. The second, a decade later, was from Thomas Pavyer. From these two printings, Jack Straw exists in five copies from the early modern period. None of the five versions from 1593 to -1604 can lay claim to being the true version of the play, nor can any of them be considered secondary copies. The 1604 version seems to be based upon the 1593 copies, but there are good reasons, based on what we know to generally be the case with plays from the period, to not imagine the 1593 copies as especially privileged. The 1604 version does not exist inevitably, but had to emerge for its own specific reasons. If nothing else, the multiple editions of the play suggest a level of popularity over and above the median for the period since under half of all the plays were fortunate enough to see a second printing. (6) Therefore it makes sense to see Jack Straw as the two concrete versions of the play, giving precedence to the 1593 version as the primary text in the obvious sense that it emerges first and is the source for the 1604 text. Those moments where the 1604 text differs from the 1593 thus become particularly significant.

Prioritizing the 1604 version is an unorthodox scholarly maneuver. Stephen Longstaffe, while writing in the interest of producing a consistent, readable critical edition, is not especially impressed by the 1604 version. He considers it as "set up very carelessly from Q1 [1593], and thus has no textual interest beyond the occasional plausible correction it introduces" (17). Longstaffe's perspective echoes that of the Malone Society edition in which Kenneth Muir dismisses the 1604 version as "an inaccurate reprint of the first, and is textually worthless" (v). Prioritizing the 1593 version reflects a tradition wherein editorial scholars reason through the production of a text under the assumption of an ideal, intended play, beyond the idiosyncrasies of printers. This is also a model of editing wherein the priority in the study of the documents is to reveal an idealized poetic text where representation is strictly understood as a result of the graphic system--words on the page. In contrast, in the case of studying early modern plays where the relationship between written, printed, and performed plays is especially complicated, it is important to study the plays as concrete, material texts with a range of meaning-producing systems within them.

In the case of The Life and Death of Jack Straw, to not give serious consideration to its printing history limits our ability to understand the possible audience responses. Variations in its printed versions are not definitive indicators of how the play was read, but they do indicate how printers approached the play and how they thought it could be presented to a market of possible consumers. While Muir and Longstaffe see their projects as creating readable modern editions, from a critical, historicist perspective it is hard to fathom putting any special emphasis on the 1593 version since it is almost certainly the case that the play that was performed was only loosely adhering to the 1593 text (or vice versa). Thus the first printing has little primacy over the 1604 version. In fact, it is a much more fruitful approach to consider these printings in contrast to one another.