As we did not hear anything before about More’s death in the play, this may refer to the More theme which was left to a play of its own, to follow suit. It had to be constructed, as far as political situations were concerned, from what was left after the political circumstances of the times of Wolsey had been dealt with already in the plays on Wolsey and Cromwell.
§ 4. The Date
If these conclusions are accepted, we get a firm date for our play. The Oldcastle plays by Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathway date from 1599. The Wolsey plays, in which again Drayton and Munday were concerned, date from 1601. Cromwell used to be dated much earlier, but Streit already has made it plausible (The Life and Death of Th. Lord Cromwell, Jena, 1904) that it originated after Wolsey.[1] Sir Thomas More then must needs date from about the same time, 1601–2. That the play did not originate before that date I have formerly tried to show by a number of reminiscences which connect it with plays like Julius Cæsar and Hamlet (Engl. St. 46, 233 seq.). I cannot allow that they have been invalidated by R. W. Chambers. Chambers admits (l.c. p. 145) that there is “a real connection” between the scene in Julius Cæsar in which the masses are worked upon and won by Marc Antony and the similar scene in our play, but he explains it by assuming the authorship of Shakespeare in both cases. “We cannot argue,” he says, “that, because Antony did actually, as a matter of history, succeed in swaying the mob by his speech, whilst the success of More is fictitious, therefore the More fiction is necessarily an imitation of that historic fact. If the writer of the More scene needed any pattern to follow, he could have found it in the speech in which old Clifford equally wins the rebels under Cade to his side.” But how then does Chambers explain it, that the idea entered the mind of the man who made the plot of Sir Thomas More, to make the hero—contrary to all historical facts—from a comparatively unimportant position rise to a decisive one in the state by a miraculous rhetorical performance which alters the opinion of the masses and reverses the threatening current of public events? Chambers mentions the Clifford–Cade scene as a possible pattern.
- ↑ The idea to introduce a “motif of last tension” in making Cromwell's life depend on his reading a letter which is brought to him at the moment, which decides about his fate (V, ii), is possibly borrowed from Julius Cæsar, III, i.
