'Marked Down for Omission': Censorship and The Booke of Sir Thomas More

63 "Marked Down for Omission': Censorship and The Booke of Sir Thomas More Tracey Hill The Booke of Sir Thomas More is a play-text with a peculiar history. Probably never performed on the early m o d e r n London stage, apparently never printed, largely absent from collections of the plays of Shakespeare or any of his contemporaries, one might have expected it to disappear from modern view as so m a n y works of the period have done. The poorly-preserved manuscript copy of the play which is all w e have left of it would have languished in the archive for good were i t not for a nineteenth-century supposition that 'Hand D', one of the seven different hands that contributed to the text, might have been that of Shakespeare. Not surprisingly, the scholarly equivalent of all hell broke loose: 'no one paid attention to [the play] until... two scholars . . . gave some reasons to believe that one or more of the added pieces was in the hand of Shakespeare. It was likefiringa pistol at the top of 2 a snow-laden mountain.' 1 The suggestion was first made by Richard Simpson in 1871. See Source Four Plays Ascribed to Shakespeare, ed. by G. Harold Metz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), p. 143, and Judith Doolin Spikes, "The Book of Sir Thomas More: Structure and Meaning', Moreana, xciii (1974), pp. 25-39 (p. 25). For an early dismissal of the now-hegemonic view of Shakespeare's authorship, see Felix E. Schelling, The English Chronicle Play (London: Macmillan, 1902), pp. 214-15. 2 Clarence H. Miller, 'Thomas More: a M a n For All Seasons: Robert Bolt's Play and the Elizabethan Play of Sir Thomas More', Moreana, 27.54 (1990), pp. 101-10 (p. 104). Miller calculated that the bibliography of work on this play (the vast majority of which concentrates on Shakespeare's authorship) had by 1982 amounted to some fifty pages. 64 Tracey Hill Subsequently, the scholarly consensus has been overwhelmingly that Sir Thomas More is only of interest because of Shakespeare's putative involvement: a very recent example of this tendency might be the reproduction in the magisterial Norton Shakespeare of solely those 'Passages Attributed to Shakespeare'. The play-text has gone from from its previous position of only antiquarian interest to become 'perhaps the most famous — or notorious — manuscript .'.. in the whole of English literature'. This has occurred almost entirely on the basis that the text might contain samples of Shakespeare's handwriting — or 'handwrighting' perhaps, since this would be Shakespeare's hand in a play, unlike his few extant signatures to legal documents. A classic expression of this sentiment can be found in A.W Pollard's 1923 edition of essays on the play: the writers [in the volume] are interested in the old play of Sir Thomas More mainly because . . . they believe that part of a scene [3 pages of the text]... was composed and written with his own hand by Shakespeare. Yet the play has some interest in its own right and the section in which the three pages occur makes a very popular appeal. As one might expect, many commentators on the text were unable to avoid melding critical commentary and Bardolatry. For example, by Pollard's account, the 'interest in its o w n right' which the text manifests just happens to be confined to the three 'Shakespearean' pages. The easy elision of 'and' in his last sentence naturalizes his manoeuvre of 3 See The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard and Katherine Eisamen Maus (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 2011-2019. 4 Giorgio Melchiori, "The Booke ofSir Thomas Moore: a Chronology of Revision', Shakespeare Quarterly, 37 (1986), pp. 291-308 (p. 296). 5 Shakespeare's Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, ed. by A.W. Pollard (Cambridge: CUP, 1923), p. 1: m y emphases. The title ofthe book encapsulates its approach, as does a much later collection, Shakespeare and 'Sir Thomas More': Essays on the Play and its Shakespearean Interest, ed. by T. H. Howar Hill (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), although Howard-Hill does at...