The Strangers' Case

On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Sir Ian McKellen shared a monologue that some believe Shakespeare may have written. The speech, known as The Strangers’ Case, comes from an Elizabethan play, Sir Thomas More.

McKellen sets the scene:

It’s all happening 400 years ago. In London, there’s a riot happening. There’s a mob out in the streets and they’re complaining about the the presence of strangers in London, by which they mean the recent immigrants who’ve arrived there. And they’re shouting the odds and complaining and saying that the immigrants should be sent back home wherever they came from. And the authorities send out this young lawyer, Thomas More, to put down the riot, which he does in two ways. One by saying that you can’t riot like this. It’s against the law. So, shut up, be quiet. And also, being by Shakespeare, with an appeal to their humanity.

Click the image of Sir Ian on the Instagram post to hear the speech.

But what is Sir Thomas More? And how did Shakespeare come to be part of this story?

What is Sir Thomas More?

From Shakespeare Documented: 

Sir Thomas More is a collaboratively written play that survives only in a single manuscript. The play is thought to have been written primarily by Anthony Munday, perhaps, some scholars think, aided by Henry Chettle, in the 1590s, with somewhat later contributions from Thomas Dekker, perhaps from William Shakespeare, and just possibly from Thomas Heywood. Politically controversial passages have been censored by Edmund Tilney, a government official known as the Master of the Revels.

What is Shakespeare’s connection to it?

Shakespeare Documented continues:

On the basis of poetic style, many scholars believe that a three-page revision to the play is in Shakespeare’s handwriting. However, we don’t really know what Shakespeare’s handwriting looks like. Six signatures of Shakespeare, found on four legal documents, are the only handwriting that we know for certain are his. This is too small a sample size to make any sort of reliable comparison.

Scholars have assigned letters to the various styles of handwriting found in this play. Hand D has been associated with Shakespeare; Hand C, an unidentified professional scribe, has made corrections to Hand D’s contribution. Hands A, B and E have been linked more or less persuasively with Chettle, Heywood, and Dekker, respectively. Hand S belongs to Anthony Munday.

Despite the many changes made perhaps to satisfy the censor, the play was never printed, but neither were more than eighty percent of the plays from this period. And despite the stage directions added by a theatrical employee known as a “bookkeeper” writing Hand C, there is no record of the play’s having been performed during this period, again as is the case with a great many plays that are widely presumed nonetheless to have seen the stage.

The whole manuscript can be viewed in cover-to-cover images on the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts site.

Learn more about the authorship of Sir Thomas More

What is the Strangers’ Case monologue?

The riot that the play references took place on May 1, 1517 and is referred to as Evil May Day. Thomas More, the then under-sheriff of London, was sent to calm the rioters and persuade them to go home. According to the chronicler Edward Hall (c. 1498–1547), a fortnight before the riot an inflammatory xenophobic speech was made on Easter Tuesday by a preacher known as “Dr. Bell” at St. Paul’s Cross at the instigation of John Lincoln, a broker. Bell accused immigrants of stealing jobs from English workers and of “eat[ing] the bread from poor fatherless children.” 

From Act II, Scene 4 of Sir Thomas More:

You’ll put down strangers,
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 and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent 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,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an agèd man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another…

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 harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
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,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

The text of the full play, Sir Thomas More, is available on Project Gutenberg.

What is Sir Ian McKellen’s connection to Sir Thomas More?

Sir Ian McKellen first played the role of Sir Thomas More in the 1964 Nottingham Playhouse production of Sir Thomas More. He became renowned for his powerful delivery of the Act II, Scene 4 “strangers” monologue. He has continued to share the monologue, including on the Marc Maron podcast in 2015 and during his visit to the Oxford Union in 2017, glossing before each reading the text’s “strangers” as “immigrants.” Most recently, McKellen shared “The Strangers Case” monologue on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to highlight modern refugee crises. McKellen has also performed in a radio play of Sir Thomas More in 1983 for BBC Radio 3.

From McKellen’s website:

“1964 was Shakespeare’s quattro centenary and Nottingham Playhouse’s contribution was to un-earth this play containing a scene indisputably by Shakespeare (the hand-written manuscript survives in the British Library). John Neville was to have played More until he fell out with his co-artistic director, Frank Dunlop, who re-cast me in the part. I relished embodying a Shakespeare hero in the first-ever professional production of the play. I have often re-called this production when speaking the More speech about “strangers” in my solo shows Acting Shakespeare and A Knight Out.”