The chapter re-examines the notorious Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI in light of widespread political protests across the globe. The bloody chaos of Cade’s failed popular uprising contains within it an important flash – or counter-memory – for the political imagination. First, the popular movement creates a break with the oppressive social order by revealing the systematic silencing and oppression of the commons. It makes the invisible visible. Second, the mass movement makes a positive demand for justice that differentiates the people from the State. Examining the rebels’ “Edenic egalitarianism”, the chapter draws on the recent work of Chris Fitter, Lorna Hutson, and Annabel Patterson in reassessing Shakespeare’s representation of popular politics. However, the chapter critiques the critical tendency to concentrate on what is “useful” or “effective” at the level of plot. It instead turns to imagination as the key to thinking Shakespeare’s popular politics. The force of the “people” is not located in one figure, be it Cade or Salisbury, but is dispersed across the drama. The spirit of the “in-common”, in all its absurdity and impossibility, lives on as a form of negative, or spectral, thinking and dramaturgy. The audience is the ultimate carrier and agent of this political imagination.

Julius Caesar presents the theatrical creation of “the spirit of Caesar”. The chapter turns to Hobbes to help articulate how Shakespeare captures the role of the popular imaginary in the generation of the sovereign spirit, the Leviathan that subsumes the raucous multitude. Negation is here central. First, the spirit of Caesar is raised in and through his sacrificial death. Second, we see the power of the people (deciding Rome’s fate) as it is not seen, as it is lost, as it is given away to Antony’s manipulative theatricality and all the future Caesars. The play’s conclusion also reveals what haunts monarchical sovereignty: “a man”. Brutus is negated, but the negation, like Caesar’s before him, raises him to spiritual status. The spirit of Brutus becomes an imaginary rival to the victorious spirit of Caesar. It raises a haunting republican “what if”, a spectral, negative carrier of justice or the common good. Brutus becomes our spirit in the second circle of the audience. The audience is constituted as an alternate crowd, an overarching seat of judgment, able to see the potentially radical implications of this sceptical play: that supposedly divinely ordained sovereignty is an imaginative creation of the theatrical crowd.

Production fulfils the making of a thing by bringing it to public scrutiny. Production is therefore the cutting edge of rhetorical performance in law, politics, media, and all aspects of civic and social life. The appeal to ‘making with’ has been a technique favoured by orators throughout the history of political rhetoric. Donald Trump employed it when he famously said, ‘we have to build a wall, folks’. Perhaps he borrowed the technique from his background in business and sales, for the appeal to ‘making with’ is also pervasive in modern marketing practices. Companies seeking to sell their goods and services become so beholden to the public that the public as co-Producer begins to market its demands to the supplier. When this dynamic operates in a political context, it can be a force for good and a model of democratic, devolved government, or it can amplify errors by forcing a political leader to pipe whatever tune the public pays for. In the case of Donald Trump, perhaps his more extreme and illogical utterances have less do to with his own manifesto than with maintaining the brand that his market demands.

The “vulgar,” as political actors, would play important roles in the resistance to imperial policies, and the “vulgar,” as political speech, would inform the eraʼs confrontational political dialogue. The language of protest in the 1760s and 1770s expressed political critique not only of imperial policies but also of the legal institutions and practices that promoted them. In fact, genteel cultural and political authority, which had been drawn from conduct and courtesy books and the polite coffeehouses of the metropole and extended through statutes and courtrooms, was severely tested by protest and rebellion. Under the previous regime, as politeness joined piety as a core cultural value for the Massachusetts elite, the language of statutes, prosecutions, and depositions had shifted to the rhetoric of gentility in addition to godliness. General sessions courts had imagined the portion of good social order, “the king’s peace,” that had to do with speech as a nearly exclusively masculine space governed by the metropolitan code of refinement. Prosecutions for vulgar speech had constructed a social hierarchy based in politeness, but it would not survive the Revolution intact.

The fifth century BCE exhibited what has generally been termed ‘gang violence’: that is, the deployment of (relatively) well-organised gangs of lower-class men by elite figures, such as Publius Clodius Pulcher and Titus Annius Milo, in their pursuit of specific political purposes. This chapter analyses this phenomenon from the larger perspectives of self-help in Rome, the political violence that had begun to affect Roman civic life in the second century BCE (intensified by the civil war of the eighties BCE), and by way of the institutional and social features of Roman life (e.g. clientele and collegia) that facilitated the creation and exploitation of gangs. It concludes with innovations introduced by Augustus which effectively brought an end to gang violence in the city of Rome.