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(More customer reviews)(I wrote a review of this back in early April, but for whatever reason it has not been posted here. So I'll resubmit it.)
"Sir Thomas More" is a play originally written by Anthony Munday about 1594, but it failed to pass the censors; accordingly, in c. 1600-02 the play was reworked, and some scenes occasionally rewritten, by Thomas Heywood, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and William Shakespeare. It is for Shakespeare's involvement in this play, consisting of no more than one scene and a short soliloquy, that "Sir Thomas More" is really remembered at all.
The first two acts of the play are, as a whole, strong and dramatically effective. As the play opens long-simmering resentment of native-born Londoners against foreign French "straungers" living in the town is boiling over, and the mounting tension leading up to rebellion is well-executed, leading up to the climactic "Ill May Day" scene, written by Shakespeare, in which all the tension is diffused by More's pacificating address to the rebels (and Shakespeare's passionate plea for the common humanity of the "straungers," reminiscent of Shylock's "Hath not a Jew"). The rabble-rousing revolutionary John Lincoln cuts an attractive figure, despite his xenophobia, and Doll Williamson is a feisty and entertaining character that a modern actress could have great fun with.
After Lincoln's execution at the beginning of Act 3, the play loses its dramatic thrust and goes all over the place in search of a plot, in a hit and miss fashion. The most noteworthy scenes of the latter half of the play are the episode of Jack Faulkner and his "shag hair," Lady More's graphic and poignant dream of the "whirlpool," and when More speaks "like Moore in melancholy."
"Sir Thomas More" is not a masterpiece, but it's worth reading and probably ought to start being printed complete in collections of Shakespeare's work. In every collection I know of, Shakespeare's "Ill May Day" scene is printed alone, but I never fully appreciated it until I read it in its context in "Sir Thomas More": there is great tension in that scene, which Shakespeare masterfully diffuses with humanity and the voice of sanity, but that tension can only be appreciated if you read the non-Shakespearean scenes which came before it and set it all up.
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"Sir Thomas More" is especially valuable for the light it throws on the doctrinal issues that were at the center of the Reformation. This is a detailed, well-researched and thouroughly conventional biography of the life of Thomas More. To put it succintly, this biography is more a discussion of ideas than of events of that time, since More was a rather second-rate political figure.
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