In Shakespeare’s play “Henry VI Part 2” is the reasonably famous line spoken by one of the characters that proposes killing all the lawyers, and I have always wondered what this would have meant to a late 14th century audience. Given his fathers occupation as an alderman I presume that young Bill would have a favorable view the legal profession, although this might have changed after his fathers legal troubles.
I have done a few searches but I confess that I am not well read when it comes to the classics, so interpreting the lines and trying to figure out the context is not going well. There are several sites out there but they split pretty evenly along partisan lines so I thought I would tap the learned members of the SDMB.
In case anyone was wondering this is not a homework assignment but rather, an attempt to fill one of the many gaping holes in my knowledge.
Look at it in context of the play. Jack Cade is a troublemaker stirring up the mob, and his henchman, Dick the Butcher, says the line to egg him on and keep the mob stirred up. It was worth a laugh then (as now), but isn’t meant to be taken seriously by the audience. It’s not the considered words of a virtuous or likeable character; it’s just rabble-rousing.
Well, first of all, the quote is unlikely to have meant anything to a late 14th-century audience, since the play wasn’t written until two centuries later
But as for what sixteenth-century audiences would have thought, it’s complicated. (Everything in Shakespeare is complicated!) Cade and his followers aren’t depicted as particularly good people (and they are also clueless enough to be manipulated into rioting by the Duke of York, who is using popular rebellion to sow dissent for his own purposes), but no one in 2 Henry VI is a good person except the king, who is totally ineffectual. Their demands are a mixture of legitimate grievances, totally absurd fantasy, and pointless and destructive violence, sometimes almost in the same breath:
Cade is putting his finger on some real social injustices, especially the abuse of the benefit of clergy, which by the Elizabethan era is basically a free pass for offenders who are privileged enough to be literate. At the same time, the only solutions he can envision are senselessly and wantonly destructive (basically, they involve executing anybody who has more education than they do). Mixed in with all of this is a hefty dose of utopian fantasy, which is the immediate context for the “lawyers” quote:
This is pretty clearly NOT a practical vision for running a kingdom – we’re supposed to see them as ignorant and naive – but it’s also not hard to imagine audiences cheering at some of these lines, especially in a culture where the law and most of the social institutions really ARE biased in favor of rich people. Cade and his followers also happen to be tremendously fun to watch on stage, and there’s a tendency for theatrical audiences to sorta-root for them even if they know they’re supposed to be condemning them. They are anarchists who make us laugh, and that sort of thing tends to have a powerful appeal in the theater even if we’d be appalled at similar behavior in real life.
