Sir Thomas More (play)
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Sir Thomas More is an Elizabethan play that depicts the life of Thomas More. It survives only in a single manuscript, now owned by the British Library. Its main claim to fame is that two pages of it may have been written in William Shakespeare's hand.
The manuscript is a complicated text containing many layers of collaborative writing, revision, and censorship. It is believed that it was originally written between 1592 and 1595 by playwrights Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle. Then, several years later, the play was heavily revised by another team of playwrights, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker and, perhaps, William Shakespeare. The manuscript also includes comments by the censor, who found fault with the play's depiction of anti-government protests and demanded that several sections be rewritten.
The manuscript thus contains the writing of several different men. The different hands have been given letters, as follows:
- HAND A - Anthony Munday
- HAND B - Thomas Heywood?
- HAND C - A professional scribe who copied out a large section of the play.
- HAND D - William Shakespeare?
- HAND E - Thomas Dekker
- HAND S - Anthony Munday at a later date.
The possibility that Hand D is Shakespeare has been raised because several quirky spellings and word choices are characteristic of Shakespeare. If this is correct, then these two pages represent the only surviving examples of Shakespeare's handwriting, aside from a few signatures on documents. The manuscript, with its numerous corrections, deletions and insertions, enable us to glimpse Shakespeare in the process of composition. However, there is no absolute proof that Hand D is Shakespeare, and the identification remains debatable; John Webster has often been suggested as an alternative.
References
- Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori, eds. Sir Thomas More (Manchester University Press, 1990)
External links
- Sir Thomas More eText (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1547) at Project Gutenberg