Notes on Shakespeare’s Contribution to “Sir Thomas More”

Shakespeare lived in London from around 1590, but it seems he didn’t see himself as a Londoner.  Appearing as a witness in a court case in 1611, he calls himself “William Shakespeare of Stratford” – a town he hadn’t lived in for over twenty years.  Maybe in this respect he simply saw himself as others saw him: he was an outsider here in London, he probably spoke with a west midlands accent and dialect, home was three days away on horseback.  And when the time came, he died where he was born, not where he’d lived.

Shakespeare’s part in the writing of “Sir Thomas More” reveals something of how plays were written in late-Elizabethan and Jacobean England.  They were frequently collaborations, in this case involving around half a dozen different hands.  Shakespeare was brought in to write a speech to be delivered by Thomas More, calling on Londoners to show some toleration towards the new faces in their midst, to abandon calls for them to be expelled from England.  It’s a scene based on historical reality – More appears to have given such a speech – but the words are Shakespeare’s.

Given the parallels with his own circumstances, the speech he writes for More is in some ways surprisingly incoherent.  It advances something like five separate arguments in trying to bring its audience onside.  It begins with a warning: those who challenge “order” will be destroyed by disorder, because order protects them from harm: blood will have blood, as another of Shakespeare’s heroes observes.  Next, a theological argument: the insurgents have taken up “arms against your God”, More tells them (to their alarm), because God has empowered the king and “willed you to obey”.  “God forbid that” comes the response.

The theology continues: “what do you to your souls?” More asks – implying that repercussions may extend beyond this life and into the next – before enjoining the crowd to “kneel to be forgiven!”  Now a more practical argument develops: rebels cannot quell mutinies, he tells them, suggesting that the momentum they’re generating may be hard to control.  The speech closes with a veiled threat: if the king expels you and “you must needs be strangers”, you’ll be vulnerable to the kinds of dangers you wish on others.

This lack of coherence is reflected in the diverse registers the speech employs.  At times, it’s academic and detached: “if you will mark”, More suggests with a professorial flourish, “You shall perceive how horrible a shape / Your innovation bears”.  The mob may or may not have been persuaded by such formulae.  More likely they’d be touched by the vivid images the speaker employs, the image of the knife at the throat perhaps, or of the “ruffians” who will “shark on you … like ravenous fishes” that “feed on one another”.

A parallel uncertainty informs the relationship the speaker draws with his audience.  At times it is cosy and supportive: “Let me set up before your thoughts, dear friends, / One supposition”, he suggests at first, as he reminds them (professorial again) of a Christian duty to obey authority.  But the conciliatory mood doesn’t last: disobedience is “a sin” he observes with a faint air of menace – to disobey the king is to disobey God, it seems – and here the mood changes as he enjoins the mob to “Wash your foul minds with tears” and strive for peace. One almost wonders if the reference to “dear friends” was ironical, even sarcastic.

Either way, it’s a powerful speech, and if it’s not always coherent, that may reflect the fact that the author wasn’t sure which angle to explore: More was a statesman and writer as well as a theological authority, and half a dozen playwrights collaborating on a single play may not agree on which trait takes precedence.  But the purpose of the speech is to persuade – it’s ultimately a political speech, a manifesto for order, stability, obedience and civilised values – and one imagines that its theatre audiences will normally be as responsive as the audience on stage: “Faith, a says true: let’s do as we may be done to”.

It is also of course a literary speech, delivered by a semi-fictional character in a literary text.  Its main rhetorical resource is similes, normally drawn from animals or natural geological features.  We’ve already seen human beings likened to “ravenous fishes [that] feed on one another”; later comes the warning not to depend on people who will “Spurn you like dogs”.  To do so to others, he concludes, amounts to “mountainish inhumanity” – a vivid if unfamiliar image that brings the speech to a close.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays reflect on the role of monarchs in the preservation of social order and on the place of kings in the cosmos.  Few go so far as this speech in giving concrete shape to the relationship of monarch to God.  Some of the theology here is detailed and tenuous, even presumptuous: we are told that to the king, God “hath his office lent / Of dread, of justice, power and command”.  In the sense that Henry VIII was all-powerful, the speaker is probably right in this.  But – “to add ampler majesty” – God has gone further, it seems, and “hath not only lent the king his figure, / His throne and sword, but given him his own name, / Calls him a god on earth”.  This analysis may have been enough to persuade the Tudor masses back into line – this play suggests it was.  A generation later, it was the sort of talk that cost the king his life.