"Strange Discourse": The Controversial Subject of Sir Thomas More

Executed for refusing to subscribe to an oath that gave Henry VIII (instead of the pope) spiritual authority over English subjects, Thomas More was the first Catholic layperson to act in a manner in which "Catholic" meant not "universal" but "papist" (i.e., in opposition to an English monarch). Sir Thomas More (written ca. 1592, revised ca. 1603) represents this refusal and concludes at the point of More's execution, thus making a plot and a character out of a liminal moment where Catholic difference first emerged.¹ Except that the play also represses the Catholic details of the plot and withholds the main character's theological difference. The manuscript in which the text survives bears the annotation "all altr" by Edmund Tilney (the master of the revels) next to a passage that forms the crux of the plot: More's resignation from office (and Fisher's impeachment) following the refusal to sign articles sent by the king (4.1.81-105).² But the dramatists seem to have already recognized that More's Catholic alterity needed alteration. The majority of Tilney's censorship concerns not religion but the play's vocabulary of and attitudes toward "strangers" (inflammatory in the context of the feverishly high anti-alien sentiment in 1590s London); there is virtually no visibly Catholic content available for removal. This is not surprising given the censorship of the public memory of the former chancellor: only More's humanist texts were legally published, his theological works had to be smuggled into England for the Catholic community, a community which also circulated accounts of his life in manuscripts that could not be printed at home. Much of the material found in the play seems to have come from a Catholic source: a manuscript life of More written by the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Harpsfield.³ It is possible that Anthony Munday (who probably wrote the original version of the play) came across the manuscript while working for Topcliffe: the copy at Emmanuel College, Cambridge is inscribed as "founde by Rich: Topclyff" in the study of Thomas More (Sir Thomas's grandson) "when Mr Moare was apprehended the xiijth of April 1582."⁴ Whether or not Munday did access this particularly illicit manuscript, it is striking that he saw dramatic potential in what was banned in prose manuscript form. Why write a play about a man whose story you cannot tell?

More's Catholic story was certainly well known in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was renowned not only for "being a Papist" but also as being definitively so, an accepted representative of the Catholic faith.⁵ Hence both Thomas Bell and John Donne scored polemical points by quoting More against Catholic arguments, as if confounding the denomination's theology at the very heart. Bell, with the zeal of a convert, sneered at this "famous popish so supposed Martyr"; whereas Donne, in his Protestant coming-out text that sorted martyrs from the misguided, maintained that of More's "firmenesse to the integrity of the Romane faith, that Church neede not be ashamed."⁶ Elsewhere, writers such as John Foxe castigated the papist More for "unnatural" religio-political disobedience, and illicit Catholic manuscripts agreed with the importance of More's denominational definition, even though their interpretation of it was obviously different. But outside of explicitly sectarian discourses, attitudes to More were not so polarized. More was also remembered with a real affection and admiration that saw nonpolemical writers omit reference to his religion and instead celebrate his authorial and civic status: Thomas Nashe listed "merry sir Thomas Moore" as one of "the chiefe pillers of our english speech," William Vaughan noted that his "Poeticall works are as yet in great regard," and Michael Drayton eulogized him as "that ornament of England and Londons more particuler glory."⁷ Nevertheless, that More's Catholicism was awkwardly unforgettable is clear in the qualifications that sometimes taint his praise: Ralph Robinson, translator of Utopia, is sorry "a man of so incomparable witte, of so profounde knowlege, of so absolute learning, & of so fine eloque[n]ce...