This month, as we transition from the good work of poetry editor Mike Liaw, and before we enjoy the good work of new poetry editor Amy Katherine Cannon, we will be pulling poems from the public domain and sharing them with you every Friday. Today’s selection is drawn from the play The Book of Sir Thomas More, which had a half-dozen authors working on it in the late 1590s as it made its way to production. The section below, edited from two different parts of More’s speech and omitting some of the crowd’s response, has been widely attributed by scholars to Shakespeare. (The manuscript from which it’s drawn contains the only known example of Shakespeare’s
handwriting.Sir Ian McKellen made the speech famous a few years back. You can watch McKellen perform it here.)
The context is that a mob of Londoners with nativist sympathies wish to drive out them immigrants living among them. Some in the mob want the military to corral and expel the foreigners, while others want to burn the immigrants’ homes themselves. More arrives on behalf of the king to talk sense to the people, who agree to listen to what he has to say. The “them” in the first line refers to the immigrants.
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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 silent 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 reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another….
You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king
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 harbour? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
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
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
[Image: “Meeting of Sir Thomas More With His Daughter After His Sentence of Death” by W.F. Years, 1872.]
