Sir Thomas More (play) - Plot

Plot

The play dramatizes events in More's life, both real and legendary, in an episodic manner in 17 scenes, four of them cancelled, unified only by the rise and fall of More's fortunes. It begins with the Ill May Day events of 1517, in which More, as undersheriff of London, quells riots directed at immigrants living in London. (On Tylney's orders, the "foreigners" of the original draft were changed to "Lombards"—presumably because there were few Lombards in London to take offence at the reference.) In these scenes, More is made to express a doctrine of passive submission to civil authority which, while hardly appropriate to his fame, is pure late-Tudor orthodoxy.

The middle scenes of the play depict More as chancellor, and they are a medley of episodes taken from William Roper's biography and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. More is shown embarrassing a self-important judge, playing a practical joke on Erasmus, and encouraging an unkempt servant to cut his hair (Foxe ascribes the last episode to Thomas Cromwell.) The only unity in these scenes is that of character: each serves to illustrate More's wit and good sense.

The last group of scenes treats More's decline and death. Unsurprisingly for a play written when a Tudor still reigned, the king who has More executed is treated gingerly: the grounds of their dispute are not mentioned, and no one, including More, voices any direct criticism of the monarch. Instead, his fate is ascribed in the medieval manner to the inevitable turning of Fortune's wheel, and More himself accepts death with stoic resignation. In all, the authors seem to have gone to great lengths to make a play on this subject acceptable to a Tudor monarch; still, one can hardly be surprised that they failed.