Thomas More—knight and saint—is a familiar figure in the popular imagination. His speech to William Roper about giving even the devil the benefit of law—”What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? … And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”—is famous enough that we forget Robert Bolt put the words into More’s mouth in A Man for All Seasons.

Bolt’s not the only one to have done so, by a long chalk. William Shakespeare himself, in 1603, wrote a speech for More, which survives in the only remaining script written in his own hand. The Book of Sir Thomas More, not performed until the 20th century, was a joint project of several people, including such well-known writers as Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood. (Sir Ian McKellen has compared the undertaking to the sort of multiple-writer set-up common in movie or TV scriptwriting.)