For months Sir Ian McKellen has been treating various audiences (including Marc Maron, a comedian and podcast host, and the Savannah Film Festival) to a monologue from a minor Elizabethan play entitled “Sir Thomas More”. It was written in the 1590s by two moderately successful playwrights and later revised by several others. It is notable mainly because one of the revisers (the one scholars refer to as “Hand D” in the original manuscript, in the British Library) is believed to have been William Shakespeare. Presuming the attribution is correct, the folio is the only surviving example of text in Shakespeare’s own handwriting. Sir Ian has been reciting it not just because of who wrote it, but because of what he wrote. Hand D’s contribution to "Sir Thomas More" consists of a powerful scene in which More rebukes a xenophobic London crowd for trying to drive out a group of refugees—a strangely apt 16th-century touchstone for Europe's current migrant crisis.
The scene is based on a real historical event, the “Ill May Day” of May 1st 1517. A mob of working-class apprentices had gathered in London’s Cheapside district, planning to burn the houses of the city’s growing immigrant community. Many of these immigrants were political and religious refugees from France, Belgium and Italy. At the time, Thomas More was under-sheriff of London. (He later became Chancellor*, and was executed by his erstwhile friend King Henry VIII for his principled resistance to the latter's desire to break with the Catholic church in order to take a new wife.) On Ill May Day the widely respected More was brought in to enforce the sovereign's protection of the foreigners and calm the crowd. In the play, More asks one of the rioters what he hopes to accomplish; the rioter replies "Marry, the removing of the strangers, which cannot choose but much advantage the poor handicrafts of the city." More responds witheringly.
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….
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.
The description of the refugees here might as well be drawn from today's headlines. One argument for Shakespeare's authorship is the sheer excellence of the verse ("their babies at their backs and their poor luggage", "in ruff of your opinions clothed"). Another is the sophistication of the political analysis. Like nativist movements today, the apprentices in "Sir Thomas More" are driven by a mixture of rational and irrational fears. On the one hand, they worry that an influx of foreigners will drive up the price of food. On the other, they fantasise the strangers will "infect the city with the palsey" by bringing in strange vegetables, such as parsnips and pumpkins. An anti-immigrant populist whipping up the crowd demands: "Shall these enjoy more privilege than we in our own country?" He might be a candidate for UKIP, the Sweden Democrats, France’s National Front or any of Europe’s other anti-immigration parties.
Not all of the material is so up-to-date. Sir Ian pulls the Shakespearian actor's trick of skipping over the bits that make no sense to the modern audience. More's case that the apprentices must respect the sovereign’s grant of asylum to the foreigners rests partly on an appeal to the divine right of kings, an argument that might have been persuasive to a 16th-century crowd but that sounds absurd to a modern one. ("For to the king God hath his office lent of dread, of justice, power and command...what do you, then, rising ‘gainst him that God himself installs, but rise against God?") Yet here too, one can see the Shakespearian dramatic intelligence at work: later in the play, it is More who will "rise ‘gainst him that God himself installs" by opposing the king's will. We are not meant to take the view that kings are God's anointed representatives on earth at face value. The playwright inserts it here to raise the stakes of More’s downfall later on.
Unfortunately the rest of “Sir Thomas More” is not remotely as good as the part attributed to Shakespeare. (A sequence in which More’s friend Erasmus, the Dutch reformist theologian, drops in for a visit goes nowhere, like a pointless celebrity appearance in a bad biopic.) The Ill May Day scenes seem to be, as one scholar put it, a star turn by a script doctor brought in to spiff up a crucial section in a troubled script.
But right now these scenes are particularly compelling. Europe in Shakespeare's time similarly teemed with migrants fleeing wars of national liberation, dynastic oppression and religious and ideological persecution. The Wars of Religion (1562-1598) convulsed France, with atrocities such as the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre sending thousands of Protestant Huguenots fleeing abroad. The savage Dutch war for independence from Spain (1568-1618) drove an estimated half a million Flemish refugees northwards, doubling the population of what is now the Netherlands. Shakespeare depicts political refugees sympathetically elsewhere too, in "As You Like It" and "The Tempest" (a play to which Prospero is partial for obvious reasons). But none of those plays contains such a ringing patriotic statement of the duty to welcome asylum seekers.
Many in today's Britain worry that taking in immigrants threatens the national identity. No one played a greater role in creating that identity than Shakespeare: in the political language of his plays, one can feel the English people transforming themselves from the feudal subjects of a late-medieval kingdom into the citizenry of one of the world's first nation-states. It is striking that here, right at the birth of modern Britain, the question of refugees should become so central, and that Shakespeare seems to have made such a strong case that "the majesty of England" depends not on keeping them out, but on taking them in.
* This post originally stated, erroneously, that More became Archbishop of Canterbury.
-Courtesy : The Economist.
#KsRadhakrishnan #KSR_Posts #Shakespeare
No comments:
Post a Comment