On the first day of April 1649, on the predominantly rural manor of Walton, Surrey, the sight of people preparing land for the plow was unremarkable. To see men up at dawn, dressed for the field in broad-brimmed hats, homespun waistcoats, and short breeches, loosening or breaking up clods with their spades, stooping to toss aside root and rock, was typical. What did raise eyebrows, however, was the sight of such busyness on a Sunday, the Sabbath, and on no less remarkable ground than George Hill, with its “very barren,” sandy soil. When questioned, Gerrard Winstanley reframed this performative break with religious, social, and agricultural norms as he did in his soon to be published manifesto, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced. To work this land was to “declare . . . by action,” as well as by word, that Winstanley, the self-described “prophet” William Everard, and a small number of others had been sent by the Creator to begin their mission of transforming “the Earth [into] a common Treasury for all, both Rich and Poor.”Footnote 1 Rural, religious, and resource poor, the Digger collective has not received substantial attention from performance studies scholars. Even some historians of the seventeenth century have questioned the significance of this small, nonviolent agrarian group in the intensely “charged political atmosphere of the 1640s,” but as a collective whose theatrical social performances raised them from obscurity to national visibility, Diggers are in some ways the epitome of this era.Footnote 2
The Diggers began as one of many, fluid, overlapping groups of radicals to emerge in an age in which religious and political dissent were often indistinguishable. Like Baptists, Familists, and other members of what Digger historian John Gurney calls the “early-seventeenth-century puritan underground,” the Diggers’ mystical and millenarian ideas conveyed the belief that the old order had become untenable and a new one was imminent. Unlike these others, however, Diggers embedded their end-of-the-world rhetoric in a clear program for social and political action, drawing, in all likelihood, from groups like the Levellers and Independents, with their greater parliamentary experience.Footnote 3 It was an inflation-racked decade in which pamphleteering, inflamed by the collapse of print censorship and the closure of public theatres, fed sectarianism. These years saw civil war link and divide all three British kingdoms under the Stuart crown. Newsbooks detailed movements of the New Model Army; antienclosure riots; debates at Putney on “the basis of political life”; and the trial and execution of the king.Footnote 4 Significantly, this restiveness was distinguished not by a lack of order but rather by “a plethora of places, powers, and authorit[ies],” as Oliver Cromwell's Grandees vied with royalists on the one hand and common dissenters on the other for political, religious, and social control of the realm.Footnote 5
Taken together, these forms of unrest constituted a collective reconceptualization of political identity.Footnote 6 Eminently well suited to this task was any group that could instrumentalize performance's power to revivify traditional symbols and the values they represented. The Diggers had an outsized facility for such work. Though they never numbered above forty-five, Winstanley's community anticipated the performance studies insight that everyday social performances have the potential to reshape ideological and material terrain to produce “real, political effects.”Footnote 7
Admittedly, the vast majority of social performances do not do work at the scale of national politics. Yet, the Diggers offer insight into those that do, for Winstanley's mission as both a religious visionary and community leader compelled him to theorize Digger performance in both devotional and sociopolitical terms. What emerges from his twofold analysis, embedded in accounts of performance, is the centrality of heightened affect to religion's political impact.
The very etymology of “religion” supports Winstanley's insight, for at its Latin root, “religion” denotes either the “painstaking observation of rites” (relegere) or “that which ties” (religare) believer to believers, and these to God.Footnote 8 Winstanley settles etymology's irresolution by insisting that religion is both an iterable performance and an affective communal bond; both a “righteous labour” and a collective “joy.”Footnote 9 Affect theory confirms this generative duality and allows us to imagine a new basis for the significance and efficacy of Digger performances.Footnote 10 Donovan O. Schaefer and Sara Ahmed, affect theorists with interests in performance, make the case that affect, generated through group performance, psychically and imaginatively intertwines personal with collective experience.Footnote 11 This entwinement is crucial to the construction of collective identity, a symbolic undertaking whose reverberations may expand beyond the initiating group, becoming, in some instances, a form of extrainstitutional political power.
Political scientist Andreas Kalyvas, calls this power “extraordinary politics”: political sway outside of legal–governmental channels whereby a community “reflectively aims at the modification of the central political, symbolic, and constitutional principles and at the redefinition of the content and ends of a community.”Footnote 12 In other words, “extraordinary politics” is a grassroots movement that reconceptualizes community. The Diggers offer an ideal case study of this process. With their transformative agricultural acts, performances framed and amplified by Winstanley's pamphlets and early modern news networks, Diggers demonstrate the way groups, acting in concert to target traditionally resonant symbolic structures, may disrupt and even change dominant value systems without resorting to the violence so often equated with revolution; this, in turn, calls into question political writing that strives to invalidate the collective performances of popular movements as a breakdown of politics rather than its indispensable core.Footnote 13
To see how collective performance functions politically requires a more granular analysis of Digger performances. These are more concrete in the context of the Diggers’ short narrative arc. The Digger's communitarian project, in which all members shared equipment and labor to reap the rewards of transforming English wasteland into fertile farming communities, posed a radical alternative to a number of traditional patterns, from property holding to early modern hierarchies. Consequently, it was not long before complaints about the Diggers reached the Council of State. Winstanley and Everard were summoned to Whitehall for questioning, but the meeting was inconclusive. A follow-up, on-site inspection led by Oliver Cromwell's Lord General, Thomas Fairfax, only added to the state's ambivalent opinion of digging. Despite Fairfax's bemused confidence in the Diggers’ harmlessness, and his report that “they carry themselves very civilly and fairly in the country,” the army allowed local assaults on the Diggers to escalate.Footnote 14 Winstanley's collective managed to recover after each episode, but by August the additional weight of locally initiated legal actions forced them to abandon George Hill for the nearby common of Little Heath in the parish of Cobham. Increasingly violent opposition at the new site, organized by local gentry (including a minister and Justices of the Peace), proved insurmountable. In April 1650, the small collective disbanded. Whether or not they intended to reconvene at a more propitious time, the members of Winstanley's group largely went their separate ways.Footnote 15
George Hill
As the southernmost boundary between two manors, St. George Hill, as it was called prior to the Protestant Reformation, was an infrequently trafficked part of the commons. Consequently, it was the area in which Digger activity was “least likely to cause disruption for local tenants.”Footnote 16 A part of “Crown Lands,” the hill's property status fell into doubt after the eradication of monarchy earlier that year. As a hill, it offered a naturally raised platform on which to make visible the Diggers’ miracle of “Restoration.”Footnote 17 That such practical considerations entered into Winstanley's identification of a plot of land shown to him “in a Trance” may seem cynical, but current period historians note that his political pragmatism stood not in tension with his religious thought but in conscious support of it.Footnote 18 In this vein, Ariel Hessayon observes that Winstanley generally kept Sunday Sabbath as a “voluntary act of love” but did not hesitate to break it in 1649 to begin digging on George Hill as a “confrontational gesture” to honor the promptings of the “indwelling Christ” over the “outward” ceremony of Anglican or even Baptist church services.Footnote 19 This distinction between inner and outer elements characterizes Winstanley's theology. He encourages all to bring the two into alignment. For Winstanley, Digger performances demonstrate that “the community in spirit, and community in the earthly treasury” are two manifestations of the same restoration of England (and eventually the world) to its prelapsarian economy of abundance.Footnote 20
To break ground at the beginning of April was a matter of survival for the most impoverished of the Diggers, but Winstanley's framing of this act links it to culturally cherished symbols that render George Hill an “emblem,” as well. Sociologist Randall Collins defines emblems as symbols of a political group that serve as touchstones for emotional energy and for group cohesion.Footnote 21 Winstanley's tracts make the simple act of digging on George Hill transformational, a sacramental action aimed at the literal restoration of the earth and its inhabitants to their blessed first condition. Digging brings about the Parousia, resurrecting Christ in the very “flesh” of those whose pious labor restores his Spirit to “enlighten the whole creation.”Footnote 22 Digging also became a gestic autogenesis for a group that initially called itself the “True Levellers” in a nod to the more socially conservative but more militant Leveller movement. Yet, the identity-making aspect of digging went deeper than names and symbols, as more pressure on the productive intersection of performance and affect will show.
Particularly useful for this analysis are Diana Taylor's and Richard Schechner's respective insights about how social performers mirror and rupture scenarios to confront and transform already extant ideas and then “broadcast [these] to the largest possible audience of strangers.”Footnote 23 Consider the Diggers as April wore on and more people arrived on the hill. We can imaginatively reconstruct their actions by contextualizing Winstanley's account in what is known of early modern agricultural practices through contemporary husbandry manuals, woodcut illustrations, and modern peasant studies.Footnote 24 The Diggers use spade and plow to “fatten” or manure the acidic soil. They weed and smooth it with their iron-toothed harrow and the power of the communally shared horses that appear in news reports. They sow it with seeds, then water and tend the seedlings.Footnote 25 On other parts of the hill men wield hand axes and saws to “cut Wood, Heath, Turf, or Furseys [gorse],” to insulate the small single-family cottages they have built.Footnote 26 The women are occupied in and about these cottages, milking the collectively owned cows, cleaning seeds in their aprons, minding children, mending clothing, and preparing the meals. Older children would be set to work fetching water, sweeping, and feeding animals.
In these ways, the Diggers mirror the agricultural choreography of hundreds of other farming families in the region. At a symbolic level, these actions affirm a communally accepted scenario of land and animal husbandry. Yet, to perform this on a Sabbath, and in a place materially unsuited to cultivation and linked by custom to the village, is to rupture the scenario, creating a “cleft in the quotidian” that demands interpretive attention. Onlookers’ interpretive energy, as they try to make sense of the rupture, potentially “[re]semiotizes everything around [the performance]: space, time, story, dialogue, scenery.” The scene heats up as villagers stop to share their observations and wonder at the activity on George Hill.Footnote 27
Schechner suggests that such a crowd's “reconstruction or reenactment of the [performance] event” determines how or if it will be incorporated into the community, so it is crucial to note that early modern spectators were, on the whole, more likely than those in the present day to think analogously, to draw on memory—including fictional and religious knowledge absorbed through stories, songs, and seasonal rituals—to make sense of novel phenomena.Footnote 28 To such a mind, an already symbolically overdetermined site like St. George Hill may become something extraordinary: a liminal space that is neither purely “external world” nor “inner psychic reality.”Footnote 29 All that transpires in such liminal performance spaces is imbued with the dream meaning and feeling that sometimes accompanies religious and other collective rituals.Footnote 30 T. G. Bishop historicizes the desirability of this sensation by noting how early modern theatre productions strove to connect this “sacramental space and time” to the world of the performance, often using techniques inherited from seasonal and occasional performances mounted before there was professional theatre.Footnote 31
These common habits complicate any neat correlations we may be tempted to draw between the social rank of a spectator and the way he or she would have viewed the Diggers. We know that digging elicited a range of reactions, from elation to outrage. What performance studies suggests about the way powerful performance fuses fantasy to rational observation makes sense of some of the wildly negative rumors captured in the archive just after the inaugural planting. The Diggers were said to have threatened, like the cruelest rogues, to “cut [the] legges off” of any locals’ animals found grazing near George Hill.Footnote 32 It was said that they shared their women as well as their farming implements. To those spreading such reports, the Diggers represented a threat. Their poverty and lack of concern for the Sabbath likely linked them to what is now called rogue literature: sensational stories of desperate, homeless con artists who roved the countryside, robbing honest folk and disturbing the peace.
Extant records also point to positive, but equally puzzling responses to the Diggers’ simple agrarian performances—sizable donations, the start of new Digger collectives, and a marked increase in the number of Diggers on George Hill after the first destruction of their homestead at the end of May.Footnote 33 In both positive and negative reactions, we can sense a magic circle effect, in which the rupture that spectators behold in the hardy external world has hooked into the emotional quality of their fantasy-laden, internal world, and emotional resonance has induced a change in the spectators’ respective perception.
Recent scholarship on mass political movements confirms the performance theory insight that the potential of a collective performance to effect political change depends to a great degree on the performers’ ability to move spectators to view the world and its objects in a particular way. To persuade people to alter their internalized perspectives requires a performative catalyst of significant intensity, for “ritually generated emotional energy is a sine qua non for successful social movements.”Footnote 34 Through the repetition of performance, interpretive writing, and debate, Winstanley and the Diggers had begun to right the frame.
In a period in which the poor were increasingly viewed as a drain on scarce resources, Winstanley reanimated old tropes from literature and lore to frame digging in a manner that transformed private shame into joyous solidarity and public purpose. Significantly, Winstanley's depictions of Digger life do not attempt to conceal attributes his audiences would have identified with “the meaner sort.”Footnote 35 Rather than ask viewers or readers to overlook the collective's rough clothing, simple food, or the manual labor associated with lowly status, he resemiotizes them. The Diggers may bow their heads and bend their backs to wrest maintenance from the earth, but
labouring the Earth in righteousnesse together, [we] eat our bread with the sweat of our brows, neither giving hire, nor taking hire, but working together, and eating together, as one man, or as one house of Israel restored from bondage.Footnote 36
Here, the shared meal celebrates the Diggers’ Exodus-like escape from slavery. Layered over this Biblical allusion is one perhaps even more immediate, for Winstanley pointedly identifies the Diggers’ former master as the “Dragon”: the spirit of “Covetousnesse” and “Civill Propriety” (private property) that continues to oppress the land and its people.Footnote 37 Like the pre-Reformation Saint George, England's patron whose name means earth tiller, the Diggers appear “vnfitte” for mighty deeds, due to their “rusticity.”Footnote 38 But like Saint George, the Diggers’ mission ennobles them, for they have come to strike the first blow in the slaying of the Dragon.
For an audience like Winstanley's, steeped in biblical iconography and hagiographic tales, it is difficult to imagine a more satisfying metaphor than dragon slaying to represent the Diggers putting an end to the draconian abuse of the poor. What better conclusion to well over a century of calculated disenfranchisement of England's common folk than to occupy land the Spirit promised to be “returned againe to the / Common people of England, who might improve [it] if they would take the paines”?Footnote 39
Even nature seems to collaborate with the Digger performance. The sprouting of spring barley, evident as early as Fairfax's visit to the hill, may have appeared like a sign of God's blessing on the Digger project.Footnote 40 For a people predisposed to see omens in the natural world, bright green shoots rising from soil deemed barren kindles a kind of utopian flame in those who hope (or fear) that the labors of the Diggers encourage a true “Commonwealths Government [to] arise from under the clods, under which as yet it is buryed, and covered with deformity.”Footnote 41 George Schulman has argued that the Book of Job was a formative text for Winstanley, and if this is so, barley shoots may have called to mind the way Job, in the extremity of his suffering, clung fast to the hope emblematized in the green resilience of the natural world. “For there is hope of a tree,” reads the verse, “if it be cut down, that it will yet sprout . . . / . . . [For] though the stock thereof be dead in the ground / Yet by the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.”Footnote 42 Such hope, the mere scent of water in the face of deprivation and violence, would come to characterize the Digger collective, galvanizing its repeat performances in the crucible of its reception, and drawing others to support the Digger mission to “lift up the Creation from bondage.”Footnote 43
Yet, for many local farmers, the sight of the Diggers tapped less benevolent associations. Consider, for example, this aphoristic couplet, circulated for centuries orally and in writing. Something of a touchstone for early modern rural protests, the version reproduced in the 1604 edition of The Life and Death of Jacke Straw reads: “But when Adam delved and Eve span, / who then was a Gentleman”?Footnote 44 Attributed to itinerant preacher John Ball during the 1381 (so-called) Peasants’ Revolt, this leveling, revolutionary verse has been called a “crucial symbolic text” of the seventeenth century.Footnote 45 Similarly, the proper names of two leaders of this Great Rising, Jack Straw and Wat Tyler, found their way into pamphlets on all points of the political spectrum, where they aroused solidarity or alarm in readers aware of provincial disturbances in past years.Footnote 46 Clearly, for some, the sight of the Diggers, with their rough garb, occupying common land in support of egalitarian principles, raised the never-distant specter of wanton rebellion. It was, in fact, the 1607 Midland Rising that motivated the first, pejorative use of the terms “diggers” and “levellers” to describe participants in an insurrection that began with the uprooting of field enclosures and ended in a “bloody pitched battle with the local gentry.”Footnote 47
More literate viewers may have found digging reminiscent of the foundational act of Thomas More's Utopians in Utopia, reprinted in English in 1639. Hythloday's ideal nation begins, after all, with the feat of digging a channel to transform the Utopian peninsula into an island.Footnote 48 Here, the act of collective digging signals Utopia's symbolic divorce from mainland values as well as its willingness to defend its differences from the contamination of less-enlightened people. Others who identified with more orthodox Protestantism were put in mind of continental Anabaptist communities. It is important to note that the self-sufficiency of both the fictional Utopians and continental Anabaptists served a cloistering function that separated members from a corrupt world.Footnote 49 Such isolation is not only impractical but undesirable for the Diggers, whose cultivation of land and the hearts of men strives to restore the Spirit to the “universal communitie” of all creation. The Diggers dig in a manner contrary to continental Anabaptists and fictitious Utopians. The double meaning of their first manifesto's subtitle—“[t]he State of Community Opened”—belies their comparison to isolationists, for the manifesto not only explains, or “opens,” the Digger mission to readers, but extends to them an invitation.Footnote 50 In this inaugural welcome, Winstanley depicts the Diggers reviving social, economic, and religious values in which subsistence–and village-based life return England to “working together, and feeding together as Sons of one Father, members of one Family . . . equals in the Creation.”Footnote 51
Through Winstanley's framing, and the emotional associations evoked in spectators by the Diggers’ rupture of the agrarian scenario, the collective could take on the emotional resonance of an English saint's triumph over evil, the Israelites’ return to the Promised Land, or a theft by cruel rogues. What mattered was not so much what people saw or heard on the hill as the way it made them feel.
Affect in Action: Winstanley's Motional Knowledge
In essence, the Diggers were a spin-off from overlapping networks of Baptist and mystical Seekers, with a healthy dose of political and legal theory adapted from groups like the Levellers and Independents. Yet, most scholars concede that the many sources that enrich Winstanley's religious thought do so in notably idiosyncratic ways. An example of this is Winstanley's emphasis on “action.” In one tract, explaining the genesis of the Digger collective, Winstanley recalls that an inner voice told him to declare the Digger message, then “write a little book” to amplify his voice:
[Y]et my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts ran in me, that words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.Footnote 52
This assertion has given pause to more than a few readers. Some suggest “action” here is a synonym for speech, a mildly defensive hyperbole from a writer who both deplores clerical sophistry and relies on his own lyrical eloquence to persuade. Others associate Winstanley's call to action with the medieval “book of life,” ecstatic mysticism, or early modern popular protest, all of which, while acknowledging the importance of material bodies, rely on a particular discourse to justify and make sense of its actions.Footnote 53 Such readings reduce action to a metaphor, a prelude or verification of speech—anything, it seems, that does not involve taking Winstanley's statement literally. But consider the distinction Winstanley himself identifies between word and action in his complaint that “[t]he common people are filled with good words from Pulpits and Councell Tables, but no good Deeds; For they wait and wait for good, and for deliverances, but none comes.” The “words” of concern from state and ecclesiastical authorities are offered in lieu of the material succor, the action, the impoverished need.Footnote 54 In view of unrelieved suffering, words are empty. The poor must learn to act, materially and collectively, to transform all social relations and abandon their hope in false promises.
Cromwell had struck a civil war “bargaine” to restore the common people to “universall Liberty and Freedome” in exchange for “Money. . . Taxes, Free-Quarter and Blood shed.” By the winter of 1648, it was apparent he had no intention of keeping his word. In view of this breach, the Diggers offered, through determined but peaceful action, an alternative to their war-exacerbated deprivations.Footnote 55 Through honest labor, they would lay claim to a modest share in the commonwealth for which most of them had already sacrificed a great deal, and would alter matter at the crossroads of politics and religion. As a matter of politics, digging lays bare the disavowed losses of those abandoned by the state. Yet, digging exceeds simple economic compensation through its redemptive function. To dig is a sacrament whose collective, rhythmic repetition promises to redeem “all things from the curse” of covetousness that drives brother against brother.Footnote 56 But like all redemption, digging has its cost.
In August, Winstanley ponders the cause of anti-Digger violence:
And why are they so furious against us? But because we endeavour to dig up their Tythes, their Lawyers Fees, their Prisons, and all that Art and Trade of darknesse, whereby they get money under couller of Law; and to plant the plesant fruit trees of freedom, in the room of that cursed thornbush, the power of the murdering sword [of state justice].Footnote 57
Here, Winstanley, who usually speaks of digging in the ecstatic terms of spiritual restoration, suggests digging's social and monetary implications. This is not a contradiction. For Winstanley, improvement of the spiritual field enhances the social one; the actions that spiritually enrich Digger hearts also quite literally furnish them with the means to free themselves of onerous fees that impoverish and even imprison them to the profit of their enemies. The act of digging may redeem Winstanley's words “of mouth” and of “writing,” and words may serve digging by “declaring the cause,” but to Winstanley, as to Taylor after him, words are one thing, actions another, and the two are no more synonymous than archive and repertoire.Footnote 58 Their relation is one of mutual reinforcement, with “both exceeding the limitations of the other.”Footnote 59
Words and actions both draw on and generate what Winstanley calls “motional knowledge,” a felicitous mixture of intellectual and affective ways of knowing through embodied doing. These ways of knowing inform a song Winstanley wrote for the collective:
You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now,
You noble Diggers all, stand up now.
The wast land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name
Your digging does disdaine, and persons all defame.
Stand up now, stand up now. . . .
With spades and hoes and plowes, stand up now, stand up now; . . .
Your freedom to uphold, seeing Cavaliers are bold
To kill you if they could, and rights from you to hold.
Stand up now, Diggers all.Footnote 60
Perhaps not surprisingly, the lyrics of this repetitive, twelve-versed song rarely draw the attention of literary scholarship. There is little to evoke curiosity, for the diction is oddly lacking in the literary polysemy for which Winstanley is often praised. But what if this is intentional? What if the lyrics’ primary value resides in the steady rhythm that keeps time for laboring bodies, and the predictable end rhyme that makes for mnemonic ease? Studies indicate that agricultural work songs are a boon to repetitive, manual labor, speeding tasks by synchronizing action through rhythm, even dulling the perception of aches and pains.Footnote 61 And what of the song's phatic function? Phatic utterances create social bonds and communicate mood—in this case, a mood that rallies and inspires. With reference to their inward nobility, the song directs Diggers to take up the spade and other tools of their mission. Significantly, they are not instructed to fight or even defend themselves, but simply to “stand up.” The emotive force of this imperative grows clearer when we recall that early modern England was still an extremely corporeal culture that marked and maintained status hierarchies through social performance: from seating arrangements, to bowing, to the slight dip of the head that accompanied “hat honor” (the doffing of one's cap to a social superior). To stand up straight was to acknowledge the dignity of the Spirit within, while ignoring the social pressure to bow to self-serving manor lords offering exploitative wages as an alternative to starvation in the “near famine conditions” of that time.Footnote 62 Motional knowledge told Winstanley and his people that those who make their living through honest labor are no less in dignity than those who feed on others’ rents, tithes, and taxes.
Through their performed labors, the Diggers strove to appear to non-Diggers as their inner dignity merited. The song asserts inner nobility, tested and materialized through their trials. And motional knowledge sparks insights Winstanley elaborates through writing about the indwelling Spirit and its commands. Like the early Quakers whose ranks Winstanley will eventually join, Diggers believe that the Spirit in every male—and more unusually, in every female—can be cultivated to work wonders in the everyday world. Winstanley calls this Spirit “the great Creator Reason” who “dwells in man to govern the Globe; so that the flesh of man being subject to Reason, his Maker, hath him to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself.” To subject oneself to Reason is to be at once rational and to allow the Spirit to “manifest[ ] . . . himself to be the in-dweller in the five Sences of Hearing, Seeing, Tasting, Smelling, Feeling.” In other words, to be subject to reason is to feel. Those insensible to signs of “the blessing” welling up at the sight of the Diggers’ actions on the hill, are blinkered by a “blindnesse of mind and weaknesse of heart,” that thwarts the Spirit of Reason.Footnote 63
In his embrace of what Calvinists often disparaged as the depraved faculties of fallen human senses, Winstanley's theology was unapologetically experiential, emotional, and optimistic. For the Diggers, the kinesthetic action that imparts motional knowledge sharpens their ability to feel an intimate connection to the Creator and creation:
To know the works of God within the Creation, is to know God himself, for God dwels in every visible work or body.
And indeed if you would know spiritual things, it is to know how the spirit or power of wisdom and life, causing motion, or growth, dwels within, and governs both the several bodies of the stars and planets in the heavens above; and the several bodies of the earth below; as grass, plants, fishes, beasts, birds, and mankinde.Footnote 64
Digging proves the theory of immanent plenitude through rehearsal.Footnote 65 But Diggers also find God's will in the ecstatic feeling of community stirred in their performance of digging.
The recent collective turn in affect studies expands these ideas to suggest that “feelings-in-common” function as the kind of “social bond ” that turns individuals into groups through the “very intensity of their attachments.”Footnote 66 Contrary to the rationalist emphasis of most studies of social movements, Winstanley's motional knowledge points to the sharing of intensities—the joy, love, grief, or hope generated through collective acts like farming, praying, and eating together—as that which “give[s] rise to solidarity effects.”Footnote 67 These effects are then reinvigorated through repetition, with the potential to spread to others who watch and feel.
Scholars of extraordinary politics confirm these insights but tend to subordinate emotion to cognitive activity. Kalyvas, for example, explores extrainstitutional, democratic social movements that revolutionize “men ‘from within.’”Footnote 68 This inner transformation depends on charismatically charged events, but Kalyvas's emphasis is on “shared meanings” rather than on the transformative feeling of these events. There remains, even in such bold interventions in political science, a reluctance to think about what well over a century of scholarship characterized as revolutionary hysteria. Yet, performance studies suggests that it is precisely the outsized flows of emotion between participants that bind those who perform to those who watch. Taylor focuses on modern, Latin American performances that convey trauma,Footnote 69 but trauma also plays a crucial role in the Digger identity, as Diggers rebuild, replant, and reconvene after raids by the “Dragonly enemy.” After a number of brutal encounters result in near-destruction of the community, Winstanley describes how:
those Diggers that remain, have made little Hutches to lie in like Calf-cribs, and are cheerful; taking the spoyling of their Goods patiently, and rejoycing that they are counted worthy to suffer persecution for Righteousnesse sake.Footnote 70
This cheerful suffering for what is right taps a tradition that connects pre-Reformation saints to postinterregnum prophets. It is part of the rich “complex of affects” that produce a sense of “embodied . . . group solidarity.”Footnote 71 Digger identity is both created and fortified by the “joy of heart” that connects one Digger to another, and one small community to the potential community of all who would be similarly joyful.Footnote 72 Importantly, Digger joy, articulated in mystical language as the Spirit rising up, is described not as a side effect of more important calculations of greater access to resources or self-interest, but as an immediate balm for present suffering and a light by which to envision a better future.
Reception and the Politics of Entitlement
As noted, reactions to the Diggers ranged from offers of material support to physical assaults and the destruction of property. They garnered “the [good] report of Sober honest men” in Walton-on-Thames, and even “strangers” who came to their aid to donate money and goods, or return the cows repeatedly stolen from the Digger collective.Footnote 73 There is evidence that a number of “well-affected” people in the midland and southern counties began to heed the Digger call. A note in the Baptist church book at Warboys, Buckinghamshire, complains that “the Baptist churches began listening too much to the ‘errors’ of ‘Diggers . . . insomuch that . . . most of our Christian assemblies were neglected or broken up.’”Footnote 74 While the original George Hill collective remained small, Winstanley and his doctrine “featured regularly in the news-books and news pamphlets of the 1640s and early 1650s.”Footnote 75 Broadsides, personal letters, and court records attest to Digger collectives beyond Winstanley's springing up in Enfield, Wellingborough, Iver, and Barnet.
Some spectators of Digger performance, like Fairfax, who was predisposed to revile the Diggers after battling the warlike Levellers, were impressed with Winstanley's reasonable comportment. Even the urbane Marchamont Nedham, who was a writer of newsbooks and initially contemptuous of the “few poor people making bold with a little wast-ground in Surrey,” grew sympathetic as local hostilities resulted in assaults and the Diggers proved their mettle.Footnote 76 Despite rumors of Digger involvement in “tumultuous and riotous meetings” and “fanaticall insurrection,” records relay no evidence of Digger destruction of private property, prevention of village business, or violence offered to any Digger adversaries.Footnote 77
The same cannot be said for the latter. Inflamed by the middling sort, who Winstanley came to recognize as the Diggers’ most implacable enemies, village residents destroyed Digger tools, ruined crops, tore down dwellings, and burned the remains.Footnote 78 Digger animals were maimed, beaten, and stolen; the Diggers themselves were beaten and harassed (Fig. 1). In the “Bill of Account” Winstanley appends to one pamphlet, he itemizes the “Most Remarkable Sufferings that the Diggers have met with” on the hill. Incidents include being dragged from the hill to the town jail on several occasions, hauled before a Justice in Kingston (who then released them, though they are not always so lucky), and being locked in the village church where they are beaten by “the bitter Professors [of the Anglican Church] and [a] rude multitude.”Footnote 79 Clearly, the actions of the Diggers stir the powerful emotional responses performance scholars warn are never entirely in performers’ control. To deform traditional scenarios, as the Diggers did, was a high-stakes gambit.
Figure 1. Anonymous, woodcut illustration of Diggers under attack, ca. 1649. Public domain.
Even a benevolent, romanticized English virtue like hospitality could evoke fury if performed in a way that defied expectation. Local yeoman and county committee member Henry Sanders complained to the Council of State that “[the Diggers] invite all to come in and helpe them, and promise them meate, drinke, and clothes.”Footnote 80 From their hearty invitation to the offer of clothing, the Diggers were ruining the scenario of hospitality. With its roots in feudal, seasonal, and religious festivities, hospitality involved the liberal entertainment of others with meat, drink, and lodging, but Digger performance ruptures the scenario by upending a fundamental feature: the poor were to be recipients of largesse, not its donors. Hospitality's abundance was supposed to move in one direction, from greatest to least. The poor ought to accept alms and then pray for the hospitable, not call out merrily to all and sundry to “joyne with us in this Work” and share in the fruits of their labor.Footnote 81
From Sanders's perspective, peasants were born to toil for the wages wealthier farmers, like Sanders, saw fit to bestow. The Diggers’ transformation of wasteland into “parsenipps, and carretts, and beanes” was as illegible as their making a feast of such pottage vegetables and welcoming others to enjoy it. Sanders refuses to recognize the Digger version of performing poverty. The collective's challenge to prevailing norms offers Diggers a dignified existence—one that infuriates freeholders, who possibly find their own struggle bearable only in relation to those they believe are ordained to suffer more than themselves. For the latter to rise without a similar elevation of the freeholders’ status is intolerable. As Sanders's outrage over the Diggers’ social infractions grows, the possibility that he will overreact to the next one also increases. Perhaps this explains Sanders's fury over a sight he undoubtedly saw numerous times: the firing of the heath. To cut, dry, and burn scrubland in preparation for enriching the soil with the ashes was a well-known technique called “Devonshiring,” or “denshiring.” In view of yeoman Sanders's occupation, and the fact that the Devonshired land came to no more than ten of the two thousand acres that comprised Walton's commons, his aggrieved description of the action as a “very great prejudice to the Towne” is decidedly hyperbolic.Footnote 82 Reports like Sanders's demonstrate how the archive retroactively amplifies and shapes social performance. At present, when the documents pertaining to Digger activity offer diverse degrees of challenge in their acquisition, from accessing digitized collections through academic libraries to traveling to rural county record offices in England, it is sometimes difficult to recall that Digger activity was news that circulated as all other news: in conversations at church, alehouses, and marketplaces, as well as in print.Footnote 83 These embodied forms, in conjunction with Winstanley's own tracts and the reactions of officials like Sanders, newsmen like Nedham, and powerful public figures like Fairfax, did much to catapult small-scale actions in a (literally) marginalized locale into national news—no less worthy of attention than troop movements or the London proclamation of the Act for Abolishing the Kingly Office that might be reported in the same newsbook.
Here is the now-infamous event of 11 June, as described in Winstanley's A Declaration of the bloudie and unchristian acting of William Star and John Taylor of Walton, with divers men in womens apparel, in opposition to those that dig upon George-hill in Surrey. On this day, while most of the collective was in town purchasing supplies, four men remained on the hill “preparing the ground for a winter season.” As they worked, Star and Taylor, two freeholders at the top of the local hierarchy, approached on horseback:
having at their heels some men in womens apparell [sic] on foot, with every one a staffe or club, and as soon as they came to the diggers, would not speak like men, but like bruit beasts that have no understanding, they fell furiously upon them, beating and striking those foure naked [unarmed] men, beating them to the ground, breaking their heads, and sore bruising their bodies, whereof one is so sore bruised, that it is feared he will not escape with life.Footnote 84
Throughout the account, Winstanley contrasts Digger defenselessness with the locals’ armed ferocity; Digger rational discourse with the attackers’ brute silence; Digger mildness with “the malicious wickednesse” of the ambush. Readers often remark on this rhetoric, but surprisingly little attention is given to Winstanley's keen analysis of the collective performance of his opponents. It is the latter that allows him to resemiotize this beating as a sign of Digger success just as he reframed lowly, manual labor as a Digger sacrament. Winstanley concludes that those “beating with their long staves upon [Diggers’] bodies without mercie, [are] testimony sufficient that this cause of digging is just and good, in regard of the furious and bloudy actings of men against such as carrie on the work with love and patience.”Footnote 85 In other words, the cruelty of the beatings is an index of the perceived threat of digging. To beat a Digger mercilessly is to judge as possible his transformation of the social, spiritual, and/or economic world. It is also a method for making distinctions, aligning individuals with one collective against a hated other.Footnote 86
For Winstanley, the “Dragon”-like cruelty of the counterperformance acknowledges the Diggers’ power to release all from the “Covetousnesse and Pride” that hold them in thrall.Footnote 87 Modern readers tend to bypass this colorful explanation for the violence in favor of the Diggers’ economic threat.Footnote 88 In that Diggers neither payed rent, nor worked for the wages that profited landlords and ministers, it is certainly reasonable to presume that local freeholders imagined Digger success would have a negative impact. Yet, this explanation, which even Winstanley seemed to entertain for a short time, is mitigated by circumstances in favor of men like Star and Taylor. The manor's percentage of poor residents was uncommonly high after nearly doubling around 1525, when an influx of new cottagers flooded the region, intent on employment in the lucrative cloth-making or building industries. The utter collapse of these industries in the 1630s left entire families destitute. This impoverishment had a deleterious effect on the rents and taxes ordinarily collected on goods, land, and hearths in the area, but it would also have supplied petty wage payers like Star and Taylor with a surplus of desperate, eager, and cheap hands.Footnote 89 Walton Manor in 1649 appears bottom-heavy enough to supply its few landlords with an abundance of cheap labor beyond those lured away to George Hill.
A related explanation for the June attack views Winstanley's tract The New Law of Righteousness as a call for a general strike.Footnote 90 Yet, this modern labor tactic is neither explicit in the pamphlet nor discernible in the rest of Winstanley's work. On the contrary, Winstanley's transformative materialism stands in opposition to the core principle of the general strike as a negotiating tactic in capitalist economies. Diggers seek not to improve labor conditions but to eradicate capitalist practices, from privatization to market dependency, altogether. Finally, Winstanley's rejection of manorial custom moves some readers to associate anti-Digger animus with socially conservative, or traditionalist, backlash. This perspective tends to homogenize the very different acts of “malicious wickednesse” visited on the Diggers as a unified reaction to the flouting of tradition.Footnote 91 As an explanation, it still seems a bit thin. First, while the conversion of common to arable land did breach manorial custom, breaches of custom were so commonplace that “amercements,” small fines for such infractions, were an intrinsic part of manorial custom since the Middle Ages. Second, it is worth noting that Winstanley himself casts a jaundiced eye on his opponents’ putative traditionalism. He notes that “Kingly Power,” his phrase for social and economic “Dominion over others,” has not died with the Stuart monarch but mutated “from Kingly Law, to State Law.”Footnote 92 The current champions of state law once exulted in the “changing times and customes” that resulted in “casting down the bodies of some that were proud oppressors to be as dung to the earth.”Footnote 93 Now that change threatens the new oppressors’ domination, they cry after tradition.Footnote 94 Winstanley seems unconvinced that the Diggers’ departure from manorial custom motivates the violence of 11 June.
If we recall the historical circumstances of this moment, an alternative interpretation of the beating that supports Winstanley's ascription of blame to “Covetousnesse and Pride” emerges.Footnote 95 By 1649, the part of Surrey in which the Diggers settled had been racked by decades of natural and politically produced disasters, straining the already meager resources of its inhabitants. Add the property damage and burden of quartering soldiers in the wars, and a picture emerges of a bottom-heavy province overseen by a stressed, middling minority—people perhaps a couple of crises away from tumbling into the pool of their own wage laborers and servants.Footnote 96 Gurney's exploration of local manor court records punctuates this account with evidence of protracted local struggles over rents and commoning rights, as Star and Taylor quarreled with tenants and their wealthier neighbors, to maintain control of their property.
In the midst of these pressures, the Digger call for universal “freedom” may have struck freeholders like Star and Taylor as the final straw in the erosion of distinctions they had been fighting to defend and expand. What good was it to be a freeholder or similarly, a master with freedom of the town, if freedom was no longer an exclusive privilege?Footnote 97 What did the dutiful support of Parliament matter, as tax payers, fundraisers, and officeholders, if the reward was to be no greater than that of those who, having next to nothing, contributed less? Why struggle daily to assure oneself (and others) of one's elect status if the Eternal Kingdom could be brought about through the husbandry of a few ragged beggars? Why should the propertyless enjoy greater hope than their propertied superiors? Only this wounded sense of what we would now call entitlement seems capacious enough to hold the many contradictions apparent in Star and Taylor's middling struggles and their reaction to a group that ostensibly sought to end these struggles.
If wounded entitlement explains the two men mounted on horseback and dressed in their own clothes, what are we to make of the cross-dressed men “at their heels,” who fell on the Diggers like so many hounds? Xenophobia was once the favored explanation for the brutality of the attackers of lower rank. In such accounts, the Diggers’ arrival at George Hill stirred embers of an ever-present “hostility towards strangers.”Footnote 98 Although some residents near the Digger's second encampment in Cobham may have had reason to view the group as interlopers, many of the Walton Manor Diggers were not only locals but “solid,” skilled citizens who, like Winstanley, had served in parochial offices and had blood ties to some of their attackers.Footnote 99 This is not to argue that fear of strangers played no role in the attack but rather to suggest that xenophobia alone, like the aforementioned traditionalism, seems inadequate to account for the viciousness of 11 June. Instead, just as the idea of wounded entitlement begins to describe the complex resentment fueling the animosity of the freeholders, “aspiring entitlement” offers insight into the equally complex motives of the cross-dressed laborers.
Readers committed to the traditionalist explanation typically associate the cross-dressing of the humbler men with a performance of popular justice known as “rough music”: the public humiliation of flouters of community norms with impromptu, noisy processions and ritual punishment of a surrogate or effigy. Rough music often forecloses extensive analysis of the 11 June beatings, but performance theory allows us to take rough music as a starting point. The more we compare the 11 June actions to the conventions of rough music, the more anomalies appear. First, although rough music often employs cross-dressing, it is generally limited to cases in which at least one of the offenders is female, and a single man, often the offender's neighbor, can be dressed as her surrogate. No Digger woman stands out in local criticism of the George Hill Diggers, yet an entire crowd of male attackers feels moved to don “womens apparell” for the confrontation. Second, in rough music, the implements used to beat pots, pans, and surrogates are often gendered objects, emblematic of housewifery. In contrast, the men who climb George Hill on 11 June bear “every one a staffe or club,” implements traditionally gendered masculine. Finally, the George Hill incident lacks a number of rough music conventions. There is no “music” of any kind, no laughter, nor hectoring of the Diggers with satirical verse or song. On the contrary, Winstanley emphasizes the unnerving silence of the attackers. No effigy is ritually punished, nor are the Diggers marched in procession, despite begging their attackers to “bring them before their Law to answer in justification of the work [digging].”Footnote 100
These bewildering ruptures to the scenario are generally overlooked in favor of the attack's supposedly larger purpose of popular social management. Christopher Hill's and Robert Brenner's assertion that the cross-dressed men reassert popular judgment in the festive mode of the world-turned-upside-down, punishing the Diggers for newfangled ideas, continues to influence scholarship.Footnote 101 However, a different conclusion emerges when we ponder the ruptures. When thinking about the proliferation of “women,” for example, setting comes to mind. Walton-on-Thames is the kind of land that period studies term “wooded pastureland,” a region of Surrey that skewed heavily Puritan in the early seventeenth century. The relevance of these details is that the mixed farming practiced in such regions often left room for women to contribute as much, if not more, to the household finances as their husbands, through dairy and cloth manufacturing. David Underdown has suggested that this economic power, combined with the (theoretically) expanded role of women through sectarian Protestantism, made women of the wooded pasturelands “more assertive” than their peers.Footnote 102 This may account for the greater interest in popular enforcement of patriarchal norms in the region, reflected in everything from the communal purchase of cucking stools, to some of the most elaborate descriptions of rough music on record.
An account of an attack on the George Hill Diggers prior to 11 June adds an even more intriguing complication. Toward the end of May, the Diggers were “well beaten by an ambuscado of women and children” who prevented Diggers from gathering timber in the wooded part of the commons. The ferocity of these women and children was significant enough to destroy a cart and maim a horse.Footnote 103 Add such vehemence to the general economic depression of the region, the prolonged dearth of work, and the losses incurred through the war (including faith in the social contract arguably implicit in the region's wartime support of Parliament) and the husbandmen of Walton seem ripe for a sense of embattled masculinity.
Into this scene steps a new sect, declaring the “dwelling and ruling King of righteousness” is as possible to awaken in every woman as in every man. As discussed, the spirit of “Reason,” which dwells “in your very flesh,” is fundamental to Winstanley's theology. Significantly, this indwelling Spirit privileges no particular type of flesh.Footnote 104 To those who date ordained inequity to Eve's secondary creation, Digger doctrine would be highly provocative.Footnote 105 Digger doctrine also challenges the predominant social theory that rendered “woman” virtually synonymous with unreason.Footnote 106 How better, then, to mock and punish Winstanley's rising Spirit of Reason than through feminized avatars of irrationality? Who better to drive home the painful truth about preordained male dominance than violent men bearing not the ladles and spindles associated with a proper skimmington,Footnote 107 but clubs and staves?
At the end of the 1640s, these weapons in the hands of a crowd of rural men would have evoked the notorious “Clubmen.” Independent of gentry and even partisan politics, the self-organized Clubmen of central southern and southwestern counties, like Surrey, fended off looting and other “disruptive effects of war.”Footnote 108 In view of the economic decay of the Walton area, looting may have been experienced in a particularly gendered way. How would it feel to be the local cottager, artisan, or tenant farmer toiling to maintain a family, and have one's goods seized by outland representatives of idealized militant masculinity? To beat back such incursions with a simple club or staff, to protect one's own against armed soldiers, may have produced a certain grim satisfaction. Now, the latest threat to the ownership associated with manhood in this period had ascended the hill with little more than spades and seeds.Footnote 109 The Diggers were struggling husbandmen who were yet to seize anything for which they could not claim a right. Yet here they were, just beyond the village, spreading their bizarre, egalitarian ideas, stirring up the women and the landlords—indirectly adding pressure from below as well as from above.
To understand how dressing in women's clothing answers this pincer squeeze, it is necessary to think from a seventeenth-century perspective about the target audience for this spectacle. The Diggers, whose epicene inner Spirit promises additional empowerment to women already challenging masculine authority, may seem the natural target of this shaming ritual, but those who knew of the Diggers’ principled disdain for outer signs of social distinction might have suspected cross-dressing would fail to offend. So, who was the target? Here, a point Diane Purkiss makes in a different context offers illumination. By this period, the unruly woman is a discursive, political topos through which “male anxieties about other men can be allayed.” Under “putatively festive license,” men of the poorer sort sometimes access the trope of the disorderly scold to displace far more dangerous hostility toward the better sort.Footnote 110 Under the festive guise of rough music, the laborers of Walton manor—harried and emasculated by their women and their landlords—let fly their clubs, reminding all who hear of the incident that there is a limit to how far such men will be pushed. For Star and Taylor above them, who seem never to have dismounted, the violence of their tenants offers a reminder that the bodies below are a force to be reckoned.Footnote 111 The beating itself creates distance between the beaters and the beaten, but the flash of petticoats also differentiates the force that beats from the one that rides, marking the apparent show of solidarity among Star, Taylor, and local labor provisional. Footnote 112 This division in the Diggers’ local audience indicates a split that calls into question modernist assumptions, sometimes made, by those without a background in performance studies, about the monolithic nature of early modern audiences.Footnote 113
As Charles Whitney's work on early modern reception indicates, early modern audiences typically consumed theatre in highly pragmatic, personal, and sophisticated ways. This habit trained increasingly savvy and unpredictable interpreters of all social ranks to bring their critical acuity to bear on actions in their everyday lives.Footnote 114 In view of this, the 11 June counterperformance reveals not one collective action, or counterperformance, but two. On the one side are the freeholders, conceivably stung by Winstanley's equation of their capitalistic practices with Kingly oppression, and certainly insulted by the Diggers’ flouting of the social deference to which they feel entitled. On the other side are husbandmen whose socioeconomic struggles might seem to ally them naturally with Diggers. However, in the identity-making logic of collective performance, to join in the work on George Hill would be to identify and be identified with men Winstanley calls the “poor oppressed people of England”—targets of law and authority.Footnote 115 It is also, perhaps, to close the door on a long-cherished dream far easier to imagine than the Diggers’ universal equity. For the impoverished who covet entitlement, it may have been the painful distance between their own gnawing ambition and the Diggers’ saintly model of common wealth that motivated the breaking of heads.
In later tracts, Winstanley himself locates similar rifts in audiences and their counterperformances. In A New-Yeers Gift, written after the Diggers’ move to the Little Heath, Winstanley expresses pity for the “poor enforced slaves” who pull down and set fire to Digger dwellings “for fear they should be turned out of service, or their livings.” Like the ambivalent “Sheriff” or the “very civill” soldier who spoke the Diggers fair and gave them “12d to drink, ” there seem to be those constrained to participate in ways contrary to “their hearts,” in which, as Winstanley suspects, “they are [secretly] Diggers.”Footnote 116 Winstanley here underscores the need to account for counterperformances of silence, inaction, or delayed action as signs of constraint or thwarted sympathy. Such muted actions may be harbingers to a shift in general attitude, a willingness to entertain variations and possibilities in performance scenarios once fiercely defended.Footnote 117
• • •
For one year, despite interference on nearly all sides, Winstanley and his collective dug the Surrey wasteland in the hope of materializing their better world. When attacks came, Digger performances, with their tangible production of food grown, shelters erected, and members clothed, transformed despair into hope, enabling the collective to perform another day.Footnote 118 For one year, digging nourished the dream that Reason would take up its rightful seat in the hearts of men and women. For one arduous year, Winstanley wrote, spoke, and acted in the belief that collective digging would release the Spirit's blessing and dispel the curse of privatization with its associated disorders of pride and covetousness, making life livable for all.
By repeatedly performing scenarios in which collective ruptures of socioeconomic and spiritual import could draw attention, and stimulate new thought and emotion, the Diggers gained serious traction. Even if Winstanley's ideas were ultimately suppressed by Cromwell's disingenuous Hale Commission, convened with the purpose of preventing the most revolutionary ideas from gaining traction, Winstanley propelled his little assembly of ordinary people onto the stage of England's high politics.
Ann Hughes demonstrates the expansive reach of Digger thought even in Winstanley's lifetime. Digger ideas appeared frequently in a variety of news publications of the civil war era, and Winstanley's final and most systematized tract, The Law of Freedom, was heavily “plundered,” repackaged, and circulated even before it was published. By 1652, cherry-picked passages from Winstanley's tracts appeared in no fewer than thirteen newsbooks and pamphlets, a significant number given the keen interest in news for the “‘majority outside formal political processes’” including those “‘on the margins of literacy.’”Footnote 119 People were reading, discussing, and interpreting Digger thought. By this moment in early modern England, news networks and even gossip extended the “public fantasies” Digger performances tapped and made visible. In this way, what Ahmed calls the “felt collective” rippled outward, not only geographically but temporally.Footnote 120
The Diggers’ impact on the Western social imaginary is a matter of record. An inspiration to political, religious, philosophical, and fictional thinkers, from William Godwin to Michel Foucault, the Diggers continue to “inform later struggles for social and economic justice” on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote 121 For agricultural collectives, guerilla gardeners, street theatre groups, egalitarian political activists, song writers, and celebrants of the annual Wigan Diggers’ Festival in Greater Manchester, UK, Winstanley “remains a significant and deeply inspirational figure.”Footnote 122 Putting this seventeenth-century religious and political thinker and the performances of the Digger collective into conversation with scholars of performance and affect, shows us that what gets lost in rationalistic accounts of extraordinary politics is the central role of emotion generated through collective performance. In the aftermath of the summer of 2020, with its numerous, mass demonstrations and signs of systemic revision, the Diggers remind us that political change has long relied on the extraordinary collective actions of ordinary actors.
Ineke Murakami is Associate Professor of English and director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465–1599 (Routledge, 2011) and coeditor of the special issue “Performance beyond Drama” for JMEMS 51.3 (September 2021). She has published on early modern drama, performance, and culture in Shakespeare Survey, Studies in English Literature, Journal of Religion and Literature, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and in the volume Disgust in Early Modern English Literature, ed. Eschenbaum and Correll (Routledge, 2016). Her current monograph explores the way everyday performances, from court to street, deploy religious affects as a kind of extraordinary politics to revise the concept of community in seventeenth-century England.
