The pages of the only surviving manuscript to contain Shakespeare’s handwriting are to be digitised by the British Library giving the chance to the public to see an impassioned speech in defence of refugees in London.
As Independent reports, the British Library has identified Shakespeare’s hand in the pages of the play ‘Sir Thomas More’ through the writing itself and the spelling, vocabulary, the imagery used and the ideas he expresses in the text.
Sir Thomas More’ focuses on Henry VIII’s chancellor and was originally written by Anthony Munday. Then, Shakespeare was asked to write just one scene but he ended up revising the whole script.
In the scene written by Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More defends French refugees who are about to come under attack from an angry mob.
As critic Jonathan Bate told the British Library, in this scene, “More asks the on-stage crowd, and by extension the theatre audience, to imagine what it would be like to be an asylum seeker undergoing forced repatriation.”
He says:
You’ll put down strangers, Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in lyam
To slip him like a hound.
Alas, alas! Say now the King
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
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, Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:
Why, you must needs be strangers.
