Shakespeare and Thomas More

Résumé du livre

The thesis of this book is that Shakespeare knew the works and the life of Thomas More much more than has been imagined, and that Shakespeare transformed this awareness, with salient effects, into much of his own writing, including the play about More to which he is now thought to have contributed.

The project involves looking for signs of what Shakespeare read and wrote, and therefore for his memories of texts, as he recollected his own words and those he had found in the writings of More and More’s early biographers. The idea that Shakespeare had a special curiosity about More, which he satisfied by reading and perhaps in other ways, has never previously been seriously entertained. It is assumed that the dramatist wrote some lines for the More play for business reasons, not because of a special interest in the subject. But the author offers considerable evidence that there was such interest, that it was intense, and focused on more than More’s creations of Utopia and the History of Richard III. Shakespeare read widely in More’s works of religious controversy and in hagiographies of the martyr. Since this sectarian material was mostly proscribed in Shakespeare’s own day, how it became available to him requires an explanation, which the author provides. The process of determining literary “influence” involves not only the discovery of parallel language and meaning but interpretations of influenced effects.