If you accept prevailing wisdom, it is nothing short of a miracle we have this play. It presents a famously controversial episode in British history when the turmoil from that controversy still raged. For centuries the play was buried from public view, seemingly lost forever.
Most incredibly, it is the only extant play manuscript that includes handwritten verses by William Shakespeare, who composed at least most of one scene. Handwriting experts are convinced, anyway; so are many leading Shakespearean scholars.
So why is Sir Thomas More so hard to get excited about? Is it just because the play is mostly not by Shakespeare? Or is it just because it’s mostly not by anyone?
The play spotlights two major moments in the life of Thomas More, the legendary British saint and “man for all seasons.” In the first, he smooths over a potential riot in London directed against non-English merchants whose presence angers the locals. King Henry VIII names him Lord Chancellor as reward. In the second episode, he is stripped of that title when refusing the king’s order to sign an important document. When More continues to disobey, he is executed for treason.
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| "The light of greatness is with triumph born;/It sets at midday oft, with public scorn." [scene xi, lines 87-88]. Above, Paul Scofield as More in 1966's A Man For All Seasons, a popular adaptation of Robert Bolt's play which makes a more compelling case for More's greatness. Image from https://www.canonlaw101.com/blog/a-man-for-all-seasons |
Even locked up in the Tower of London, he clings to his faith:
MORE: Here let me live
estranged from great men’s looks.
They are like golden flies on leaden hooks. [scene xiii, lines 131-132]
Sir Thomas More presents several problems for the casual reader. Damage over the years has rendered some passages unreadable. This play was never published or even likely performed in the era it was written. The play hops around between two important, wide-apart events with very minor connective tissue. The tone veers from comic to tragic; connecting scenes seem to have been tossed in rock-soup style by different writers. The lack of a printed copy suggests it was unfinished.
And if you came looking for Shakespeare, he is only sparingly present, having written just that one scene (scene vi) by current consensus. It is a striking scene, Sir Thomas warning the London population not to prey on immigrants or risk the loss of a social compact they hold dear:
MORE: 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 selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men, like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another. [scene vi, lines 91-98]
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| In sight of the steeple of St. Paul's Cathedral, a riot sparked by foreign tradesman broke out on the evening of April 30, 1517. It was known as Ill May Day. In Sir Thomas More we see More quell this demonstration before it gets out of hand, which may be an exaggeration. Image from https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/evil-may-day-1517 |
This is an important summation of Shakespeare’s baseline conservative political perspective that echoes across his greatest plays. His speech instantly quells the riot, with one London woman declaring More’s words “true as the Gospel.” Maybe too neat, but it makes its point.
But Shakespeare didn’t write the play’s opening scenes. He may not have even read them. The “Lombard” immigrants we meet there are not victims but bullies, assaulting women and stealing food from lower- and middle-class Londoners who are prohibited from resisting. When the riot does break out, you wonder what took the Londoners so long.
Later in the play More is put in prison by the king and threatened with death. The controversy of the English Reformation was still a matter of living history. The Tudor family under Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I was likely still enthroned during most of the period of its composition (she died in 1603). So the play treads very carefully.
How carefully? It doesn’t ever mention what the dispute was about, namely King Henry’s decision to defy the Vatican and kick off the English Reformation by marrying a second time. For his part, More takes the verdict without protest, no doubt as articulating any claim against Henry might have displeased his nasty, still-living daughter.
"What do you, then/Rising 'gainst him that God Himself installs,/But rise 'gainst God?" [scene vi, lines 118-120] Shakespeare's handwriting has been identified in several pages of the Sir Thomas More manuscript, including the above. It is the only known example from any play to survive.
Image from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/15/william-shakespeare-handwritten-plea-for-refugees-online-sir-thomas-more-script-play-british-library-exhibition
At one point, More even expresses appreciation for his dire sentence:
MORE: Why then, tis
thus: the King, of his high grace,
Seeing my faithful service to his state,
Intends to send me to the King of Heaven
For a rich present; where my soul shall prove
A true rememberer of his majesty.
Come, prithee, mourn not. The worst chance is death
And that brings endless joy for fickle breath.[scene xiii, lines 85-91]
That last item might be taken as an intentional paradox, a Protestant criticism meant to call out the flaw in More’s pious thinking. Yet the play tirelessly presents More as a man of virtue, more concerned with service to God than his life or career. He’s even declared a saint.
Thomas More with family, a copy of a lost 1527 original. More is at center in a black robe, a small dog nestled between his feet. In the play, More often interacts with his wife, two daughters and son-in-law, though he had four daughters in life.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Thomas_More_and_Family
A comment in scene vi foreshadows its ending:
MORE: My lord,
farewell. New days begets new tides.
Life whirls ’bout fate, then to a grave it slides. [scene vi, lines
254-255]
The play was an entirely collaborative affair. According to my Arden Shakespeare edition, its principal authors were Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, with supplementary authors Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood adding individual pages at different times. There was also a censor, Edmund Tilney, and an annotator or polisher, dubbed “Hand C,” who put the pieces together and added lines around the margins of the handwritten pages.
The Arden introduction notes the oddity of Munday’s authorship; he was a reputed intriguer against English Catholics and arranger of a few martyrdoms in his day. Just as strange a presence is Chettle, who had published and was suspected of co-writing the earlier “A Groats-worth Of Wit” which famously dubbed Shakespeare as an “upstart crow.”
However Shakespeare got involved, it seems impossible to deny. The scholarly consensus is that while the play is uneven, scene vi has language highly reminiscent of the Bard, and no one else. Whether other scenes in the play also show Shakespeare’s hand is less certain, though the Arden editors push hard for it, especially in scenes viii and ix.
For
my part, the play as a whole left me so cold as to wonder at the certainty of
Shakespeare’s participation. Not that I can analyze handwriting or word
choices, it’s just none of what I read coheres in a way I recognize as
Shakespeare, even bad Shakespeare like Troilus And Cressida. It has come
down to us a first draft, yes, absent of any polishing, but there is nothing in
the way of genius about it.
Contemporaneous paintings of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the marriage that made Great Britain Protestant. As a demonstration of the playwriters' caution, neither appears or is mentioned by name in Sir Thomas More. Both do appear as characters in the later Shakespeare history Henry VIII.
Image from https://ar.inspiredpencil.com/pictures-2023/anne-boleyn-and-henry-viii
Most scenes go nowhere, including one where More plays a trick on his Dutch friend and fellow Christian humanist Erasmus, disguising his servant as himself to see if his guest can spot the difference. A pickpocket is enlisted to lift the purse of a London official to expose the folly of convicting criminals. This is entirely comedic business, if of a labored sort. Many puns are made about making “more” of More.
The most enjoyable scene for me was in scene vi, not the part featuring More but rather a part before his entrance where we see the Londoners complaining about the foreigners in their midst. It’s like the Jack Cade scene in Henry VI, Part 2, with the complaints centering on the awful cuisine being brought to English shores:
LINCOLN: They bring in strange roots, which is merely to the undoing of poor prentices. For what’s a sorry parsnip to a good heart?
WILLIAMSON: Trash, trash; they breed sore eyes, and ’tis enough to infect the city with the palsy.
LINCOLN: Nay, it has infected it with the palsy; for these bastards of dung – as you know they grow in dung – have infected us, and it is our infection will make the city shake. Which partly comes through the eating of parsnips.
CLOWN: True, and pumpkins together. [scene vi, lines 11-21]
Is it great Shakespeare? No, but I was amused.
On July 6, 1535, Sir Thomas More was executed at London's Tower Hill. In the play he jokes his beheading will cure him of his kidneystones. "To live in prison: what a life were that?/The King, I thank him, loves me more than so." [scene 16, lines 79-80]
Image from https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/thomas-more-saint-or-sinner/
There are touching death scenes, More’s as well as Lincoln’s, the lead rioter in the opening scenes. Not Shakespeare’s work, but worth a read. I might have liked a complete play by that author, whoever he was:
LINCOLN: And now I can
perceive it was not fit
That private men should carve out their redress
Which way they list. No, learn it now by me:
Obedience is the best in each degree. [scene vii, lines 55-58]
Patchwork plotting is the core problem here. The scenes do not flow in any consistent way. The characters shift in manner and mindset, apparently to satisfy whatever plot dynamics are then in effect. Dialogue is very much on the nose most of the time, with scenes of common folk telling us how good a man More is, etc. etc.
I
never understood the purpose of the play, except perhaps to give witness to
More’s special legacy. Yet they tried much too hard to do it in a way not to
cause any offense. How did they write a play about Thomas More? Given the
result, you wonder why they ever bothered.
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