Since no manuscripts survive for any of Shakespeare’s printed plays (they were probably thrown out or used as waste paper after the printers had set the plays into type), the four handwritten pages that he contributed to a play entitled Sir Thomas More rank among the most important dramatic manuscripts extant. One page of the manuscript is reproduced in the plates section, and we here present an exact transcription (based upon fresh examination of the manuscript in the British Library) followed by a modernized version.
The original script of Sir Thomas More, written by Anthony Munday in the early 1590s, was rejected by the Master of the Revels, the government censor, who instructed the acting company to “Leave out the insurrection wholly and the cause thereof and begin with Sir Thomas More at the mayor’s sessions with a report afterwards of his good service done being sheriff of London upon a mutiny against the Lombards only by a short report and not otherwise at your own perils.” In the wake of the censor’s objections and threats, it appears that the manuscript was shelved until nearly a decade later when a number of dramatists—including Shakespeare, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood—were called in as “play doctors” to revise the original.
Shakespeare’s participation in the project was not particularly interactive: it seems that he did not even know the names of the characters in the play, for he uses the place-holder speech heading “other” in several places, and the individual characters’ names were subsequently inserted by a theatrical scribe. Shakespeare apparently regarded his scene as a rough draft, known in the period by the descriptive term “foul papers.” The draft ends abruptly on the final page with a single speech heading “all” but no further dialogue.
As the unique example of a Shakespearean rough draft, the More manuscript offers a fascinating view of the playwright at work. Heminge and Condell’s claim in their preface to the First Folio that “we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers” is called into question by the many instances here of Shakespeare changing his mind in the act of composition: altering “watrie” to “sorry” (line 9), “theise” to “the” (63), “helpe” to “advauntage” (67), “and” to “wt” (71), “warrs” to “hurly” (109), “sayeng” to “alas alas” (118) and “their” to “yor” (133). Shakespeare’s figurative fingerprints, if not his literal ones, appear throughout: the unusual spellings “a leven” (1–2), “argo” (5), “scilens” (46), “deule” (49), “adicion” (114) and “elaments” (132) are found in the manuscript and in Shakespeare’s printed texts but rarely elsewhere in the literature of the period. Interestingly, the phrases “peace scilens” (46), “bloody tymes” (62) and “woold feed on on[e] another” (83) are also unique to Shakespeare.
The More manuscript provides the opportunity for analysis of Shakespeare’s handwriting, through which several anomalies in the early printed texts can be resolved. For instance, an examination of “nature” in line 122 (see Plate) reveals Shakespeare’s tendency to close up his manuscript u, making it indistinguishable from his manuscript a. This explains why Gertrude is spelled “Gertrad” in the Second Quarto Hamlet. Moreover, the u/a confusion combined with Shakespeare’s idiosyncratic spelling of “devil” as “deule” explains the curious line in the Second Quarto Hamlet: “The spirit that I haue seene may be a deale, and the deale hath power t’assume a pleasing shape.”
Unfortunately, a nineteenth-century attempt to preserve the manuscript by pasting tracing paper over it backfired: the tracing paper darkened with age and now obscures much of the first page. In places where the manuscript has deteriorated, the present transcription relies upon a transcript made in 1844, and brackets those readings; boldfaced readings are alterations introduced by the theatrical scribe.
Eric Rasmussen
AUTHORSHIP: The first draft of the play was written by Anthony Munday, perhaps in collaboration with Henry Chettle, and the original sixteen-page manuscript is in Munday’s hand. Paleographic and stylistic analysis suggests that the playwrights who worked on the revised version included Chettle, Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood.
PLOT: The apprentices of London are up in arms against foreigners in the city—who they believe have been accorded preferential treatment—and plan to massacre the “aliens” on May Day. A Sergeant-at-Arms, the Lord Mayor, and the Earls of Surrey and Shrewsbury have little success in their attempts to calm the mob, but the insurgents are prepared to listen to Sir Thomas More, the Sheriff of London, who appears to have established himself as a popular figure. More’s eloquent arguments ultimately succeed in stemming the tide of the insurrection.
DATE: The original play was probably composed in 1592–93, the years in which “libels” against foreigners were frequently posted throughout London in an attempt to incite violence against them. (The playwright Christopher Marlowe was suspected by the authorities of having written one of these libels.) Stylistic evidence, and the contribution of the younger dramatists Dekker and Heywood, suggest that the revisions date from around 1600–04. Thomas Goodale, an actor named in one of the other “additions,” was with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men by 1597–98.
SOURCE: Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) provides an account of the May Day riot of 1517. Although the historical More failed to quell the insurrection, he did petition King Henry VIII to obtain a pardon for the insurgents.
[Folio 7v]
Enter Lincoln · Doll · Clown · Georg betts williamson others
And A sergaunt at armes
[Folio 8r]
Enter the L maier Surrey
Shrewsbury
Shrewsbury shr
[Folio 8v]
wt
[Folio 9r]
&
in in to yor obedienc
tell me but this
n
alas alas
yor
[Folio 9v]