Sir Thomas More.
Edited by John Jowett.
Original Text by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle.
Censored by Edmund Tilney.
Revised by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, William Shakespeare, and the scribe "Hand C".
The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series.
London: Bloomsbury Press, 2011.
Book Information: Publisher;
Google Books;
Wikipedia;
Amazon.com.
Book Series: The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series.
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Editor: John Jowett
- Professor John Jowett, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.
- John Jowett, Wikipedia.
- John Jowett, OCLC WorldCat Entities.
- Jowett, John, The Library of Congress, LC Name Authority File (LCNAF).
- Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
[Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- John Jowett. Shakespeare and Text, Revised Edition. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
- Jowett edited Richard III and Timon of Athens in The Oxford Shakespeare series.
- Jowett was an editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare (2017).
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Wikipedia Articles, etc:
Thomas More, the man:
- Thomas More (1478–1535).
- Evil May Day or Ill May Day, 1517.
This was an event of apprentice and artisan unrest and anti-foreigner riots in London. In 1517 Thomas More was a Privy Counsellor; More had previously served as one of the two undersheriffs of the City of London.
Note that 1517 was also the year of Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses, a major step in the Reformation.
Is it too much to see some symbolism or parallels in the play's use of this event? A lower class rebellion against foreigners in their midst could represent local secular rulers and lower level priests objecting to the authority in their locality of the (foreign) church in Rome. Thomas More supported both the submission of riotous London artisans to the King's peace / authority and Henry VIII's submission to the Roman Pope's authority.
(How else to understand the large fraction of the play's text devoted to this otherwise minor event? It is a massive distortion to attribute More's rise as a government official to this one event, as is done in the play.)
- Alice More (1474–1546 or 1551), second wife of Thomas More.
- Margaret Roper née More (1505–1544), daughter of Thomas More and his first wife Joanna.
- William Roper (c.1496-1578), husband of More's daughter Margaret; author of a biography of Thomas More.
- Thomas More: Indictment, trial and execution.
- Henry VIII (1491–1547), King of England 1509–1547.
- William Roper (1496-1578). The Life of Sir Thomas More. London: Burns & Oates, 1905.
[Archive.org.]
- Peter Ackroyd (b.1949). The Life of Thomas More. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. New York: Anchor Books (Penguin Random House), 1999.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
Sir Thomas More, the play:
- Sir Thomas More (play).
- Chronology of Shakespeare's plays: Sir Thomas More (1592–1595); Shakespeare's involvement, 1603–1604.
- Anthony Munday (1560?–1633), playwright, miscellaneous writer.
- Henry Chettle (c.1564–c.1606), dramatist, pamphleteer.
- Edmund Tylney (1536–1610), courtier, Master of the Revels 1579–1610.
- Thomas Dekker (writer) (c.1572–1632), dramatist, pamphleteer.
- Thomas Heywood (early 1570s–1641), playwright, actor, author.
- William Shakespeare (1564–1616).
- Alexander Dyce (1798-1869), editor. Sir Thomas More: A Play. London: The Shakespeare Society, 1844.
[Archive.org.]
- W. W. Greg (1875-1959), editor. The Book of Sir Thomas More. London: The Malone Society Reprints, 1911.
[Archive.org.]
- Alfred W. Pollard, editor. Shakespeare's Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923.
[Archive.org.]
English Renaissance Literature, Drama:
England during Shakespeare's Time:
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Jowett writes in the concluding paragraphs of his Introduction to
Sir Thomas More (page 120):
"It is perennially 'new' to the Shakespeare canon, yet perennially unconvincing as a Shakespeare play when ranked alongside the accepted oeuvre."
At best Shakespeare (along with three others) revised limited portions of somebody else's (Munday's and Chettle's) play.
Shakespeare's contributions consist of:
- Scene 6, the first 165 of 255 lines (More calms the rebellious artisans); manuscript Addition II; this is the Hand D manuscript now recognized as Shakespeare's handwriting; discussed by Jowett in Appendix 2 pages 378-383 and Appendix 4 pages 437-453.
- The opening monologue of Scene 8 (More reflects on his rise as a government official); 21 lines; manuscript Addition III transcribed by Hand C; discussed by Jowett in Appendix 4 pages 454-456.
- Part of the opening monologue of Scene 9 (More reflects on the recent visit and departure of Erasmus); manuscript Addition V transcribed by Hand C; discussed by Jowett in Appendix 4 pages 456-458. On page 457 Jowett demonstrates how removing the incorporated lines by Heywood from this text more clearly shows a residual core of 12 lines probably by Shakespeare.
These contributions show Shakespeare as a working professional dramatist, collaborating with others on a play that, despite the efforts of four playwrights, was never put into a form that would be licensed for performance. This shows Shakespeare in a different light when contrasted with his reputation as the intimidating monolithic
First Folio author.
If one looks beyond the nearly 200 lines of text now attributed to Shakespeare, should the remainder of
Sir Thomas More be of interest to general readers?
There is no evidence that
Sir Thomas More was ever performed during the Seventeenth Century. The play was revised after the censor made his notes; after the revisions were made there is no evidence that a final manuscript was ever licensed for performance. The unfinished manuscript was set aside and forgotten. The play was first printed in 1844; the identification of Shakespeare as a contributor to the play (Addition II / Scene 6) was first made in 1871 and 1872 (Jowett page 437); the play was first performed in 1922 as an academic curiosity.
Consider the fate of
Sir Thomas More in its context: during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Shakespeare and his contemporaries (Kyd, Marlowe, Dekker, Heywood, Jonson, Marston, Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Beaumont, and Ford to name only eleven) wrote and
successfully staged many tens, even hundreds, of plays that
were printed during or shortly after their authors' lifetimes and then remembered across the centuries.
If one's interest is the historical person Thomas More, one could read (a) several of his own works instead of a play that ignores the philosophical and theological topics that made him memorable; (b) works in history and biography that explore his life and times with more detail and accuracy than the dramatization presented in
Sir Thomas More.
If a reader is interested in Shakespeare then perhaps that reader should read and study all of the works in the universally acknowledged Shakespearean canon first before thinking about spending one's limited time on
Sir Thomas More.
In my opinion, only after exhausting your time and attention on these three categories of topics (Shakespeare, Shakespeare's contemporaries, Thomas More), only if you are really interested in the mechanics of how playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean England revised a never-performed and forgotten manuscript, only then should you consider
Sir Thomas More.
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