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.)
Exactly 500 years ago this spring More, not yet Sir Thomas, went as undersheriff of London to prevent an incipient riot on May Day 1517, a day known since as Ill May Day. The resentment of apprentices and guildsmen for what they saw as job-usurping immigrants, in particular, the skilled craftsmen and money lenders come from Flanders, had been fanned into flame by the usual sort of demagogic blowhard with an economic interest he thinks is jeopardized, inciting the populace “to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal”
In real life, and in the play, More met the mob as it approached the “liberties” neighborhoods in which foreigners were allowed to live. The play presents his speech on immigrants as successful in dispersing the mob; in real life the episode was somewhat rockier, with a period of stone-throwing and window-breaking, though no loss of life.
But it’s fascinating history isn’t what caused the Shakespeare speech, known as the “strangers speech,” to circulate this difficult weekend on Twitter and elsewhere. And it’s not because of its echoes in the plays Shakespeare was yet to write.
The “strangers speech” has been making the rounds because it puts into words the very opposite of the solipsistic hatred of the Charlottesville crowd; it calls into question the easy reductionism that demands “what about?” even in the face of murder.
It challenges the mind-set that makes political problems a matter only of the balance sheet, and it demands the recognition of the consequences of individual action. At its heart, there is precisely the right sort of “what about?”—the what-about we usually call the Golden Rule. It’s expressed here in its negative form: Don’t do to someone else what you wouldn’t want him to do to you. It is an exhortation to virtue and an admonition against wrongdoing. And it’s the simplest what-about: What about if it were you who were the other?
Here is Sir Ian McKellen with the “Strangers Speech” from The Book of Sir Thomas More. Read the whole speech here.
