It’s ten years since I started blogging about Shakespeare and his world.

My first post? In the run-up to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, I was, to be honest, getting a little wound up by all the Shakespeare-deniers and conspiracy theorists. My response was, broadly, that ‘it is the tale, not he who tells it’.¹

I’m telling you this because today’s quotation, unusually, comes from a play to which Shakespeare is thought to have contributed only a part: Sir Thomas More. Collaboration was common practice in Shakespeare’s time, and whilst the current scholarly position attributes this passage to Shakespeare, I can’t understand how we would read these words differently were it suddenly revealed that someone else had written them. Their moral force would remain unchanged.

To this week’s Shakespeare Sunday theme – remember, I don’t set them, I simply look for an ‘angle’.

The theme is ‘Favourite Lines and Moments’.

Possibly the worst choice ever, with no beef towards the person who picked it. I would rather have a theme-free weekend. Why? Because (and I’m certainly not the only one) I’ve been playing #ShakespeareSunday for years. OMG: after well over 100 entries, which ‘Favourite Lines and Moments’ have I not touched on?

Enough moaning!

‘What would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case

And this your mountainish inhumanity.’²

Isn’t ‘mountainish’ the most glorious adjective! Stop and say it out loud – get the feel for it in your mouth. Absolutely delicious. I think I need to begin using it. 

It’s a little disappointing to think that neither mountainish nor inhumanity appears anywhere else in the plays. If I were close-reading this with students, I’d be talking about Shakespeare’s ‘budget’ of syllables per line of iambic pentameter, and enjoying these multisyllabic flourishes.

Today, though, let’s stick with the meaning.

In More’s speech, he roundly castigates the citizens who are abusing refugees (‘strangers’), asking them to pause and reflect on how they would feel if they had fled their homes and country only to be treated in the same way. More is angry and upset. That’s exactly what I felt, reading his speech. Actually I’m not sure More goes far enough. Who on earth has taught that blonde haired lad in the mob that this kind of intolerance is acceptable?

The closest parallel I can find elsewhere is Shylock’s moving ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ speech.³

They are doing slightly different things, of course: Thomas More asks his audience to imagine themselves in the strangers’ position, whilst Shylock challenges his audience to recognise the consequences of the way they treat him. But both strip away the artificial constructs we use to divide ourselves and speak to the essential common humanity that binds us far more than ‘accidents of birth’ such as nationality, first language, or religion.

‘Accidents of birth’ is one of my teacher sayings. Perhaps I use it so often because the older I get, the more conscious I become of how much we inherit without choosing: the circumstances into which we are born, the identities others assign us, and the assumptions we make about people we have never met.

Which brings me back to my original thoughts about the authorship question (not that I believe there is one). What we can say is that these lines were produced by a human being, not AI. Does it matter who? For questions of literary history and scholarship, of course it does. But the uncertainty over authorship does nothing to diminish the words themselves, or the challenge they present to us.

If this was one of the best goals ever scored in a football match, surely the scorer’s name would be secondary to the skill and beauty involved?

The older I get, the more reluctant I am to be judgmental (especially through unearned privilege), and the more determined I become to treat people as I would want to be treated in turn.

Perhaps that’s reason enough to keep reading Shakespeare.

References and Further Reading

1. Stephen King, Different Seasons (1982) ↩︎
2. William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, ed. John Jowett, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011). ↩︎
3. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010). ↩︎

Music: Radiohead, ‘Burn the Witch’ (2016), A Moon Shaped Pool.