PETR OSOLSOBĚ
SIR THOMAS MORE:
LESS COLLABORATIVE, MORE SHAKESPEAREAN
Is Sir Thomas More, in all its fortuitous dramatic unity, the subtle
symmetries of its characters, and its network of cross-references a
collaborative work? As far as modern editors are concerned, there is a
measure of agreement that the original play was the work of Anthony
Munday and Henry Chettle, and was completed around 1592-94. Its
manuscript contains a number of rewritten and additional passages,
attributed to Chettle, Heywood, Dekker and Shakespeare. Gabrieli and
Melchiori, in their admirable 1990 Revels edition of Sir Thomas More,
support the assumption:
playwriting at the time, at least for the public stage, was a collaborative
practice between men of letters and actors and the men of the theatre,
frequently on the basis of a ‘plot’ devised by a single author[. Besides,] all
the extant or lost plays connected with Munday’s name [...] are written in
collaboration. (Gabrieli and Melchiori 1990: 13)
Munday’s claim to authorship is, furthermore, supported by his access to
Harpsfield’s Life of More as well as to other rare recusant literature used in
the play; Munday was the right-hand man of Richard Topcliffe, a
notorious priest-catcher under Queen Elizabeth, and his close
‘collaborator’ in arresting and executing Roman Catholic priests Edmund
Campion, Ralph Sherwin and Alexander Briant in 1581 (Gabrieli and
Melchiori 1990: 8). Moreover, Munday was familiar with Latin tags and
quotations which are abundant in the original text, always correct in
spelling, grammar and syntax, owing to his daily usage of Latin during the
months he spent as a spy in the Catholic English College in Rome from
February to May 1579. This period he vividly and boastingly describes in
his The English Romayne Lyfe of 1582.
The Revels editors substantiate their view of Munday as an original
writer reminding us of his reputation of being “our best plotter” in Francis
Petr Osolsobě68
Meres’ words from Palladis Tamia (1598).1
They repudiate W.W. Greg’s
observation (in Greg 1923) of a typical scribal error on fol. 21 (fashion >
fashis) as unpersuasive for the conclusion that Munday was a mere
copyist, and a careless one, of the crucial episodes of More’s
imprisonment and execution (manuscript Hand S); on the contrary, the last
minute changes prove “that the writer assumed the full rights of an author
to improve on his own or anybody else’s draft, and even impose, through
such changes, his ideological construction on the meaning of the play”
(Gabrieli and Melchiori 1990: 13-14).
The dramaturgical issue at stake in Sir Thomas More is the moral of
the story represented in the play. The protagonist, Lord Chancellor of
England, Thomas More, comes out as an admirably intelligent and witty
person, whose personal integrity, human compassion for the poor, and
love for his family are never questioned, and who, deliberately, with
religious resolution, and even with gratification, accepts death on the
scaffold rather than the monarch’s authority in matters of faith. How could
it be that Munday, the priest-hunter, accuser and spy, and a proud one at
that, in the service of the repressive apparatus, was ever able to write a
play that glorifies a Catholic hero and a ‘saint’? As the editors admit, this
issue is difficult to explain: probably, Munday’s views underwent a
transformation and, ten years later, he assumed a different view of More.
In the play, Munday avoids raising the question of the conflict between the
Roman and the English Churches,
replacing it with that of the freedom of the individual conscience [which
was] a question that interested the Puritan and non-conformist London
middle class even more than the Roman Catholic dissidents. (Gabrieli and
Melchiori 1990: 16)
From this starting point, I would like to present a handful of observations
of my own. First, I would argue that the figure of Thomas More as
represented in the extant text of the play accords merely with the Catholic
image of the saint, albeit truncated of many features we know from his
biographies, and that it was artistically shaped and intended predominantly
for those types of playgoers who were acquainted with and constant to the
old faith. Secondly, I would like to provide several parallels in words,
themes and imagery which I consider worth further examination; these
might suggest that Shakespeare wrote at least the whole of the second half
1
Could there not be, in Francis Mere’s list of the best Comedy authors, a hidden
double meaning of ‘intriguer’, ‘machinator’ in the description of Anthony Munday
as “our best plotter”?
Sir Thomas More: Less Collaborative, More Shakespearean 69
of the play, hastily rewritten by Munday or somebody else. A similar
claim has already been made by Richard Simpson (Simpson 1871),2
and,
recently, by Thomas Merriam on the basis of stylometric tests (see
Merriam 1987, and Gabrieli and Melchiori 1990: 33-34).
I doubt that “the puritanically inclined City middle class” (Gabrieli and
Melchiori 1990: 16) would have been eager to applaud a kind of cheerful
and amusing Lord Chancellor who retained so many features of his
religious identity along with John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, another
hero of the play. For instance, More’s way of prayer is depicted with those
significant details of the traditional ceremony deplored by Puritans: “he
kneeled and prayed before the image” (STM 11.39). Roper’s wife’s vision
of More’s prayer evokes an image of “the bare ruined choirs” with a clear
reference to the destruction of holy images and roods (the gallery over the
choir, housing the crucifix):
Methought I saw him here in Chelsea church,
Standing upon the rood-loft, now defaced;
And whilst he kneeled and prayed before the image,
It fell with him into the upper choir,
Where my poor father lay all stained in blood. (STM 11.37-41)
Because the destruction of images took place soon after More’s death, the
passage bore a rather prophetic savour of events which the Elizabethan
audiences already knew had taken place. The same prophetic undertone
could not be overheard in Catesby’s remark:
A dead man to the world, and given the axe his head,
But his sweet soul to live among the saints. (STM 15.38-39)
The remembrance of ‘communio sanctorum’ and of More’s future
‘sainthood’ again would have addressed more probably a viewer with the
old faith’s feeling, and the same is true for Lieutenant’s benediction to his
new prisoner in the Tower: “God and his blessed angels be about ye”
(STM 17.26). A listener who kept the older view of the auxiliary office of
angels and saints could also find more in More’s exclamation:
2
Simpson presented two sections of our play as in Shakespeare’s hand. He based
this claim mainly on the literary evidence, the Shakespearian flavour of these
sections, but also on the character of the handwriting, asserting that “the way in
which the letters are formed is absolutely the same as the way in which they are
formed in the signatures of Shakespeare.” In the history of the authorship debate, it
is necessary to mention the edition of papers by Alfred Pollard, W. Greg, E.
Maunde Thompson, J. Dover Wilson and R. W. Chambers, published in 1923.
Petr Osolsobě70
The best I can do to prefer you all
With my mean store expect; for heaven can tell
That More loves all his followers more than well. (STM 13, Add.
I.120-122)
That is to say, More pronounces an assurance that he who has reached the
‘state of states’ after all, is now living and will hear the prayer of his
clients. If it is so, the cultural paradigm of a religious drama offered a
more complicated and subtle way of perception. Every represented deed of
a hero had, for the audience, its historical ‘then’ as well as its mystical
‘now’, manifest in the immediate relationship of the audience with the
saint in heaven.
The usual pun on the name More, so frequent in the play, is echoed
also in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 23:
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that [M]ore hath more expressed.
O learn to read what silent love hath writ[…]
(Sonnet 23.11-13)
Recently, Clare Asquith (Asquith 2005) has deepened the interpretation of
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 23 with reference to More and explained the coded
political meaning which the sonnet itself yields and at the same time
professes. As an example of this ‘silent’ language, let us take the closing
quatrain of the play spoken by the poet Surrey, who was to ‘perfect his
unknown fate’ when beheaded in 1547 on a charge of high treason against
Henry VIII (as the audience undoubtedly knew):
SURREY
A very learnèd worthy gentleman
Seals error with his blood. Come, we’ll to court.
Let’s sadly hence to perfect unknown fates,
Whilst he tends progress to the state of states. (STM 17.125-128)
“Seals error with his blood” is a perfectly ambivalent statement. Its
interpretation depends on further qualification of the said fatal error.
Whose error? Henry’s, or his Chancellor’s? It provides an equally perfect
alibi for the author of this political play, who in the case of accusation can
prove his disclaimer.
Another expressive device of the silent language was homophony. The
pronunciation of Rome and room was alike. The pair occurs in Roper’s
praise of family contentment in More’s house at Chelsey: “O, what
formality, what square observance, | Lives in a little room!” (STM 13.12-
Sir Thomas More: Less Collaborative, More Shakespearean 71
13).3
It may be an allusion to recusant circles of London gentry, especially
women like Penelope Rich, Anne, Countess of Arundel, and namely
Magdalen, Lady Montague, whose house was so much frequented by
Catholic priests saying Mass that it was known in the country as “Little
Rome”.
Another related issue is the imagery associated with Rome and its
history in the play of Sir Thomas More. These allusions are always free
from dramatic necessity, and are apparently deliberate. They exceed a
historical narrative of events of the schism of 1533 and its immediate
consequences for life in England and More’s trial and execution. They
propose and display the philosophy of Christian history based on
Augustine’s City of God and on Virgil’s Aeneid in which the city of Rome
under divine guidance manifests and grants the permanence of the ecclesia
Romana against the transience of the imperium Romanum. How
fascinating the Virgilian tradition was for the recusant culture, has been
shown by Gerard Kilroy in his edition of Edmund Campion’s Vergilian
epic (Kilroy 2005).
Returning to Sir Thomas More we find the Roman allusion to the
attribution of the original building of the Tower to Caesar in the scene of
More’s arrest:
[I will] add
My bones to strengthen the foundation
Of Julius Caesar’s palace. (STM 13.176-178)
Similarly, in Shakespeare’s Richard III: “Did Julius Caesar build that
place, my lord?” (R3 3.1.69). And probably in order to enforce the
association (or under its suggestion) the author of Sir Thomas More has
put the following in the mouth of More: “More now must march” (STM
13.186; my emphasis) possibly alluding to Caesar’s murder on the ides of
March.4
Later, in the Tower prison, More remembers his lectures in the Church
on de civitate Dei by St Augustine5
: “You were a patient auditor of mine |
3
I am indebted to Gerard Kilroy for the notice of homophones Rome – room in
connection with the tormented “great reckoning in a little room” (AYL 3.3.11-12).
4
Other parallels in structure, imagery and vocabulary have been pointed out with
Clarence’s speech in R3 (1.4.9-63).
5
Cf. Harpsfield’s biography: “yet did Master More, being so yonge,… openly
reade in the Churche of St Laurence in London the bookes of the saide St
Augustine de Ciuitate Dei, to his no small commendation, and to the great
admiration of all his audience” (quoted in Gabrieli and Melchiori 1990: 201).
Petr Osolsobě72
When I read the divinity lecture | At Saint Lawrence’s” (STM 17.38-40).
This passing reminiscence has a special importance as a source of his
speech to London rioters in Act 2. It has gone so far unnoticed that More’s
argument for obedience is based on Augustine’s analysis of peace (pax)
from Book 19 of The City of God. The reference to Lawrence, the martyr,
was also topical. In England, Saint Lawrence’s Day was a popular summer
feast abrogated by Henry VIII and Cranmer in 1537 (Duffy 1992: 394).
There is also a parallel between Lawrence, a Roman diacon, popular
among the poor and martyred under the persecution of Valerian in 258,
and Thomas More.6
Another rather indirect but rather lucid hint, at least for the recusant
public habituated to read in the figure of Saint Peter an allegory of the
whole ecclesia Romana, consists in Thomas More’s words of invitation to
Palmer after receiving the order to stay in his own house in Chelsey
[PALMER] till you know
Our sovereign’s further pleasure.
MORE […]
My Lords, if you will visit me at Chelsea,
We’ll go a-fishing, and with a cunning net,
Not like weak film, we’ll catch none but the great. (STM 10.91-95)
One of Rome’s traditional attributes was that it was the seat of Fisherman;
at the same time, the passage may hint to the civil name of the Bishop of
Rochester who is present in this scene in person, which was John Fisher.
In addition, anyone in the 1590s who was brought up hearing the Gospel
could not fail to overhear an echo of the episode of the miraculous fishing
after Jesus’ resurrection narrated by Saint John: “Simon Peter saith to
them: I go a fishing… Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full
of great fishes, one hundred and fifty-three” (John 21:3-11). Fishes in the
net have traditionally been interpreted as those who were saved, and their
‘greatness’ emphasized here by More has been connected with Matthew
(5:19): “he that shall do and teach [commandments], he shall be called
great in the kingdom of heaven”.7
Another group of poetic images and rhetorical devices concerns
More’s repentance, consolation and religious faith. The speeches in prison
might be compared to those of Posthumus in Cymbeline and of
6
Ambrose relates (De officiis min. xxviii) that when St. Lawrence was asked for
the treasures of the Church he brought forward the poor, among whom he had
divided the treasure, in place of alms.
7
This agrees with Saint Augustine, Sermo 248 and 270.
Sir Thomas More: Less Collaborative, More Shakespearean 73
Buckingham in All Is True (Henry VIII); to name a few analogies, the use
of oxymoron for prison’s description, as in More’s “Fair prison, welcome”
(STM 14.58), “a goodly scaffold” (STM 17.50), and Posthumus’ “Most
welcome, bondage” (Cym 5.5.97); the identification of death with a
physician (STM 16.27; Cym 5.5.101); the act of execution compared with a
seal: “seals error with his blood” (STM 17.126); “I now seal it, | And with
that blood…” (AIT 2.1.106-107); and – most strikingly – the discourses
about the weakness of our worldly eyes and elevation through death
“’bove sight” (STM 17.109-111; Cym 5.5.266-278), connected with the
religious symbolism of the East side as the direction from which
resurrection in the second coming of Christ will come:
HANGMAN
To the east side, my lord.
MORE
Then to the East. (STM 17.119)
A parallel passage is in Cymbeline, in the burial of ‘Fidele’: “Nay,
Cadwal, we must lay his head to th’east. | My father hath a reason for’t”
(Cym 4.2.256-257). As for Cymbeline, moreover, there are many
similarities with Sir Thomas More in diction and imagery as far as the
Roman Empire is concerned. In Sir Thomas More Charles V is called “the
good Emperor” by More himself (STM 10.54), and England’s
appurtenance to the universal empire is expressed by the same emblems:
Let German flags wave with our English cross. (STM 10.67)
let
A Roman and a British ensign wave
Friendly together. (Cym 5.6.480-482)
Also the dramatic usage of divinatory dreams and portents in Sir Thomas
More bears some similarity to Shakespeare’s Lady More, who after having
had a prophetic dream, asks Roper: “You are a scholar. | I pray ye tell me,
may one credit dreams?” (STM 11.5-6; my italics). In the same way,
Marcellus asks Horatio to speak with the ghost: “Thou art a scholar –
speak to it, Horatio” (Ham 1.1.40; my italics).
In addition to the number of references to various works by
Shakespeare already noted in the modern editions of Sir Thomas More by
Jenkins and by Gabrieli and Melchiori, the above coincidences are so
numerous as to make it impossible to deny Shakespeare’s hand in the
Petr Osolsobě74
overall design of the play, whatever questions may be raised as to the
authorship of its individual parts.
Even though the author(s) of Sir Thomas More intentionally neglected
to express the dangerous political motifs involved in the controversy
between Henry VIII and his Lord Chancellor – royal divorce, supremacy
and schism – and only depicted More and the Bishop of Rochester
refusing to subscribe unspecified “royal articles”, the London audiences
were hardly ignorant of the fact that when, on 6 July 1535, Thomas More
went to the block, he asked the crowd “to bear witness with him that he
should now suffer in and for the faith of the holy Catholic Church” (Haigh
1993: 120). The public under the reign of Elizabeth was still well-aware
that the execution of Thomas More was no longer just a matter of the
king’s marriage; it was the matter of the traditional religion in England
now banned and persecuted. And this, again, makes Anthony Munday’s
authorship so improbable.
In his “The Misunderstanding of Munday as Author of Sir Thomas
More”, Thomas Merriam (Merriam 2000) offers another solution to the
difficult question of Munday’s authorship. As the Archbishop of
Canterbury’s chief pursuivant and Topcliffe’s right-hand man, Munday
knew in advance that Sir Thomas More should be censored by the Master
of Revels. He copied the work of another author (or authors) so as to set a
later trap for those involved, or more likely as agent provocateur, to
encourage them to incriminate themselves by facilitating the play.
Merriam’s solution fits well to the style and the methods of Walsingham’s
ministry and of Munday’s own confessions.
If the composition of a play about Thomas More in the middle of the
1590s had been Munday’s provocation, Shakespeare and other
collaborators were aware of this and used a coded language which, on the
one hand, could be interpreted quite innocently but which, on the other,
secretly addressed that part of the Elizabethan audience which would have
been sympathetic to More and invigorated by his words:
More loves all his followers more than well. (STM 13, Add. I.122)
In Shakespeare’s plays we often find the type of a good chancellor
suggesting Thomas More, be it Gonzalo, Helicanus, Camillo or Escalus,
who, at the end of Measure for Measure, merits Duke’s praise and thanks
with the somewhat enigmatic compliment:
There’s more behind, that is more gratulate. (MM 5.1.528)
Sir Thomas More: Less Collaborative, More Shakespearean 75
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of William Shakespeare. New York: PublicAffairs, 2005.
Duffy, Eamon (1992). The Stripping of the Altars. New Haven and
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Haigh, Christopher (1993). English Reformations. Oxford: Clarendon
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Gabrieli, Vittorio, and Melchiori, Giorgio, eds. (1990). Sir Thomas More.
A play by Anthony Munday and Others. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1990.
Greg, W. W. “II. The Handwriting of the Manuscript.” Shakespeare’s
Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More. Collection of papers by Alfred
Pollard (ed.), W. Greg, E. Maunde Thompson, J. Dover Wilson and R.
W. Chambers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923: 41-56.
Kilroy, Gerard (2005). Memory and Transcription. London: Ashgate,
2005.
Merriam, Thomas (1987). “Was Munday the Author of Sir Thomas
More?” Moreana XXIV: 94 (Jun 1987): 25-30.
—. (2000). “The Misunderstanding of Munday as Author of Sir Thomas
More.” Review of English Studies 51 (2000): 540-581.
Simpson, Richard (1871). “Are there any extant MSS. in Shakespeare’s
Handwriting?” Notes and Queries Vol. viii (4th
series): July 1, 1871.