The Book of Thomas More, a play originally written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle in the 1590s and heavily revised by at least three other hands, was likely never performed before the twentieth century. The existing handwritten manuscript, now held at the British Library, is a messy, incomplete affair with pages torn out and others clearly inserted. Nonetheless, it provides a rare snapshot of an Elizabethan script in evolution.
The many revisions were in part a response to the sprawling, all but unperformable nature of the original draft, with fifty-nine speaking parts, large crowd scenes, and massive number of lines for the title character. Another compelling reason for revision was royal censorship. Edmund Tilney, “Master of the Revels” under Elizabeth I and James I, withheld approval for the play largely because the first two acts concerned the deadly 1517 May Day riots targeting “strangers” (i.e. foreign workers, some of whose ancestors had been in England since the 1330s) in Henry VIII’s London. Similar anti-foreigner riots in 1592, this time attacking French-speaking Protestants seeking refuge in Protestant England, were too fresh in the national memory to risk a performance “as is.”
Beyond a select minority of historians and literary scholars, none of this attract much interest in the play were it not for two interesting and related details. First, one of the manuscript’s revisers (known as “Hand D”) was almost certainly William Shakespeare. Though there remain—as always—doubters in the contentious world of Shakespeare studies, many scholars consider the handwritten speech More delivers to the rioters at St. Martins in Act II to be the playwright’s only known extant literary manuscript. Second, that very speech—which in its defense of a persecuted minority of resident aliens has powerful resonances in our own day—reveals a subtle and sympathetic understanding of More who, after all, was executed as a traitor at the order of Queen Elizabeth’s father. This More is not the pedantic and merciless heresy hunter of the Wolf Hall trilogy, a caricature of an admittedly flawed man that Hillary Mantel contrasted with her makeover of Thomas Cromwell—the Tudor crown’s quintessential company man—as a model of twenty-first century tolerance trapped in a turbulent time.
For those who live in our own turbulent era, Shakespeare’s More exemplifies the seemingly lost art of imagining the other’s experience. As I receive unsolicited invitations to celebrate extrajudicial incarcerations or screeds from self-described Christians denouncing “toxic empathy” as a gateway drug to godless socialism, this Thomas More speaks a necessary truth to raw power. For those ready to wrestle with the text, see below. Those who prefer the spoken word, Ian McKellen’s dramatic recitation can be found here.
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reason, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Feed on one another.…
You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in lyam
To slip him like a hound. Alas, alas, say now the King,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you: whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That breaking out in hideous violence
Would not afford you an abode on earth.
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But charter’d unto them? What would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
