Serious treatment of the relationship between the nobility and the classes dominated by it cannot avoid portrayal of conflict that undermines the premises of the national history play. Dramatists interested in interclass relations but committed to patriotic appeal must accordingly choose between two alternatives, neither of them entirely satisfactory. They must either deny the reality of class struggle and posit social unity instead...or view popular rebellion in relatively unsympathetic light.-Walter Cohen, Drama of NationIn Drama of Nation, Walter Cohen argues that representations of class conflict were threat to the seriousness of the national history play in early modern England (223).1 Contemporary playwrights solved this problem by either eliding the importance of popular action or depicting it in negative terms, as the work of an archetypal mad multitude. On the surface, the history plays written and produced in the last decade of Elizabethan rule appear to fulfill Cohen's hypothesis in that they frequently present their lower-class characters as ignorant, violent, and anarchically opposed to hierarchically ordered body politic. This essay focuses on three such enactments of lower-class rebellion: The Life and Death of Jack Straw, 2 Henry VI, and George a' Greene. Performed between 1591 and 1594, the plays chronicle the reigns of Richard II, Henry VI, and Edward I, respectively, and focus on how weak monarchs, corrupt princes, aggressive foreign powers, and rebellious peasants could endanger the stability of the emerging nation-state. But unlike the first three categories, which focus on the political threat wielded by discontented nobility, peasant rebellion focuses on lower-class grievances, and is most often represented in comic terms. In this essay, I suggest that, instead of disabling class conflict, peasant rebellion's comic framework enabled critique of social and economic inequality within the precincts of the national history play.While recent studies have drawn attention to popular voice in the histories, literary-critical discussion on the subject has, by and large, presented lower-class insurrection as antithetical to articulations of genuine social protest.2 In her investigation of Shakespeare's first tetralogy, Phyllis Rackin writes: Segregated by restrictions, the plebeian characters . . . can rebel against their oppression, but they can never finally transcend the conventions of comic representation that keep them in their social place and mark their separation from the serious historical world of their betters (221). As opposed to the high political demands of the aristocracy, plebeian complaints are disregarded because of their comic tenor. Rackin thus posits generic restrictions as an insuperable obstacle to subversive portrayal of rebellion from below. This critical devaluation of comic characters appears to derive from neoclassical theories that were deeply influenced by Aristotle's brief discussion of comedy in Poetics. In that text, Aristotle traces comedy's etymological origins to dispute between the Dorians and Athenians:For the Dorians say that they call the suburbs comae whereas the Athenians call them demes, and from this fact the Dorians argue that the word comodoi (comedians) came not from the verb comazein (to revel) but from the wandering of the comedians among the comae, since they were held in low esteem and were driven out of the city. (3)Since comic performances were limited to the comae or villages, its practitioners were automatically equated with the lower classes.3 Sanctified in the Poetics, Aristotle's commentary had profound influence on medieval and Renaissance interpretations of the ludic.4In Elizabethan England, the association of comedy and rusticity was embodied in the term clown. Thought to have originated in the Latin colonus, or tiller of the soil, the term was synonymous with a countryman, rustic, or peasant. …