Shakespeare’s riot of humanity

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, released in July, puts xenia – the sacred bond between host and guest, which he renders plainly as ‘Zeus’s law’ – at the centre of his epic. The Trojan Horse gambit is a violation of Zeus’s law, one that unravels Bronze Age society. The film’s message? A society that cannot keep the law of hospitality will not survive.

The film was released amid a flurry of elections across the democratic world dominated by immigration and deportations. In September, Swedes narrowly ousted their centre-right government in an election fought over deportations and asylum caps – a vote that, some argued, was decided by migrant voters themselves. Americans go to the polls in November with immigration enforcement looming over almost every aspect of political debate.

Audiences even read the film in light of the present. In Slate, a teacher who had taught her student the lesson of xenia wrote about his arrest by ICE on his way to a college visit. Classicists and critics, in these pages and elsewhere, objected that the film was Nolan’s Odyssey, not Homer’s. They were right.

Nor has Homer been the only poet to have been drafted into this year’s migration wars. Shakespeare’s turn came on The Late Show, that lost inner sanctum of resistance liberalism, before it was cancelled in May. Stephen Colbert asked his guest Sir Ian McKellen about his claim to have ‘originated’ a Shakespearean role. Sir Thomas More, a play to which Shakespeare contributed a scene, was never performed in his lifetime, McKellen explained, ‘because it was thought to be a bit seditious’. Its professional premiere arrived in 1964, with McKellen in the title role.

McKellen obliged with a demonstration, asking Colbert’s audience to cry out ‘Let the strangers be removed!’ Then, as More facing the rioters of 1517, he declaimed with force and dudgeon:

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, with their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced 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 …
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? …
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…

The monologue ends, Sir Thomas slips from Sir Ian’s face, he smiles, and declares: ‘William Shakespeare, 400 years ago.’ The audience erupts, and the clip went duly viral. Sir Ian is one of the great actors of our time, and, at 87, has lost none of his potency.

The audience is invited to see that the Bard, that wise and humane genius who wrote for all time, already knew that xenophobia was abhorrent, and simultaneously that this bold pro-immigrant sentiment was what made the play ‘a bit seditious’ in tyrannical Olde England.

The manuscript of Sir Thomas More tells a very different story. What frightened the censor about the original play – principally authored by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle – was not its tolerance, but its sympathy for the xenophobic rioters. And the speech McKellen performed, read in full, is a sermon to promote obedience to the king. Benevolent tolerance, in Shakespeare’s London, came from above; violent intolerance from the lower orders.

There are further complexities within the text: how do you make a play celebrating a famous Catholic martyr – and infamous persecutor of Protestants – beheaded by the father of your current Protestant queen? More had a less politically charged side to him, as the scholar and intellectual who authored Utopia and befriended Erasmus. But it clearly was not enough: the play was never printed, and apparently never performed in its day.

We need not guess what bothered the authorities. Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, scrawled his orders across the first page: ‘Leave out the insurrection wholly and the cause thereof.’

The original play dates to the early 1590s, when London was seething at Protestant refugees from the Low Countries and France, whom English craftsmen accused of undercutting them. In May 1593, someone nailed a verse libel to the wall of the Dutch Church, accusing ‘ye strangers’ of beggaring honest Englishmen and ‘like the Jewes, you eat us up as bread’. A play that dramatised an anti-foreigner uprising was playing with fire.

Worse than that, the play gives the xenophobes easy targets. The ‘strangers’ we actually meet in Sir Thomas More are not sympathetic refugees with babies at their backs. They are rich and obnoxious Lombards, one of whom, as the play opens, is dragging an Englishwoman down the street. He tells her: ‘thou art my prize, and I plead purchase of thee’. When her husband intervenes, the Lombard threatens to call on ‘my lord ambassador’ to punish him for ‘this saucy presumption’. The rioters themselves are portrayed as hot-headed and a bit silly but fundamentally decent. Their wrongs are real.

The only three pages of the play that survive in Shakespeare’s own hand – Hand D to scholars – rewrite the climax of the riot. Shakespeare does not leave out the insurrection wholly, as Tilney demanded; he actually spices it up.

He gives the mob the best jokes. The rioters’ captain opens with a complaint about the cost of living: ‘he that will not see a red herring at a Harry groat, butter at elevenpence a pound, meal at nine shillings a bushel, and beef at four nobles a stone, list to me’. (The real 1593 libel made a similar complaint about rents: ‘Raysing of rents, was never knowne before.’) The clown Betts wants to know: ‘Shall strangers rule the roost?’ Not all of it is played for laughs. Their captain asks, with more venom: ‘Shall these enjoy more privilege than we / In our own country?’

Then comes More’s speech, which is moving, and Shakespeare deserves credit for it. More asks the rioters to imagine themselves banished to some foreign land that would spurn them ‘like dogs’, and lands the blow: ‘This is the strangers’ case, / And this your mountainish inhumanity.’

The empathy is a flourish, whereas the meat of the speech is an argument for obedience. The rioters’ sin is that they ‘sit as kings’ in their desires, with ‘authority quite silenced’ by their brawl. At its heart is pure Tudor political theology: ‘For to the king God hath his office lent / Of dread, of justice, power and command, / Hath bid him rule, and willed you to obey…’

The strangers are to be spared not because they are just like us, but because the king has chosen to shelter them – and to defy the king is treason and impiety. McKellen himself notes the speech’s two messages: an ‘appeal to their humanity’, and a blunter one: ‘You can’t riot like this, it’s against the law, shut up, be quiet.’

None of that makes Shakespeare a xenophobe, but it does make him a man very much of his time. In early modern Europe, the toleration of outsiders was usually a royal dispensation, granted by rulers who prized the skills, capital and taxes the strangers brought, and resented by those further down the ladder who had to compete with them. Edward VI chartered London’s first Stranger Church in 1550, and Elizabeth’s Privy Council shielded Dutch and French Protestants from the City’s guilds and apprentices.

In Sir Thomas More, the rioting Londoners speak for the street; More, as the king’s man, answers with hierarchy and divine right, and wins. (Ironically, out of the mouth of a man who disobeyed the king and lost his head for it.)

McKellen’s version is far from the first More revivified to make contemporary arguments. Robert Bolt’s 1960 play A Man for All Seasons makes More a noble martyr for individual conscience. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy re-centres the story on More’s enemy Thomas Cromwell, a brutally effective champion of proto-modernity. In her narrative, More is a joyless zealot whose only outlet for human feeling seems to be burning heretics.

The historical More was humanist, persecutor and martyr all at once. McKellen’s is a More who welcomed the stranger. The message he delivers to Colbert – himself weeks from being taken off the air – is that tolerance is a form of dissent, that Shakespeare and More are part of the resistance, standing with you, the audience, on the right side of history. The band plays, the curtain comes down, we can all go home.

The uncomfortable truth is that cosmopolitanism has often been unpopular and elitist, and nativism has often been popular, not just populist. Strangers have found themselves safest when authority found them useful. Even Homer knew as much. Xenia was never put up to a vote; it was the law of Zeus, handed down from Olympus. The king of the gods punished those who broke it.