Writer in Residence: World Refugee Day

Shakespeare and The Strangers’ Case

Mr Jackson, Writer in Residence

This year, Monday, June 20^th is World Refugee Day, and I thought I would take the opportunity as Queen Anne’s Writer in Residence to raise some awareness about this important date.

The theme for this year’s event is ‘The Right to Seek Safety’ and so, as ever, I have turned to Shakespeare for inspiration.

Those familiar with the works of the great Bard, may appreciate his unique gift at giving voice and rich characterisation to all manner of marginalised figures across the sweep of his plays. He writes of aliens and outsiders, of immigrants and refugees, of the vulnerable and abused, of the lonely and the dispossessed. As a result, Shakespeare, in many ways, is deemed one of the greatest humanitarian writers of all time; if not the greatest.

The elite scholar Harold Bloom, in his ground-breaking text Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, even makes the claim that it is Shakespeare who paved the way for modern human psychology in the profoundly rounded characters of the plays. Bloom’s studies into dramatic figures like Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra and Sir John Falstaff (to name only a few) are insightful, arguing that a vital spirit exists in such characters so that they each ‘live’ beyond the words of the page and beyond time too.

For Bloom, Shakespeare does not imitate life; instead he creates it, bringing about a ‘human inwardness’ in his dramatis personae. Bloom even goes so far as to claim that Shakespeare ‘invented our feelings’, describing in new ways what it is to feel complex emotions like sympathy, grief, compassion, rage, love and jealousy.

A good example is in an early work like The Merchant of Venice, where we see Shakespeare addressing issues of racism through the outsider figure, the Jewish moneylender, Shylock, who is victimised by the Christian community of Venice. Speaking out on the Rialto against his personal mistreatment by the merchant, Antonio, Shylock’s words serve as an important humanitarian reminder:

                                           He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die?

Shylock’s rhetoric is a powerful reiteration both to the listening Christians on stage and to the attending audience that all people, regardless of their faith or nationality, are human – that we all feel and suffer in the same way. That our humanity, derived from our mortality, is our common bond.

Shakespeare uses a similar trope with the marginalised character of Emilia in Othello. She is an abused wife, mistreated, disregarded and subject to the tyranny of her husband Iago. In an echoing of Shylock’s words, she speaks out against her husband and all men of his kind:

                                                 Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is't frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

Again, like Shylock’s speech, the words come from a victimised and vulnerable figure, from someone who suddenly seeks to fight back and speak out. Accordingly, both speeches have frustrated, angry tones, yet, both speeches respectively seek to remind that we, as people, regardless of race or gender, have the same emotions, affections and desires.

And this prepares the way for what might be deemed Shakespeare’s greatest humanitarian speech; one which is timeless and topical in its addressing of the plight of the refugee.

Here we are talking about the famous ‘The Strangers’ Case Speech’ from the revised Elizabethan play The Book of Sir Thomas More - a political drama, highly controversial (it was censored by the Master of Revels and never officially completed), describing the events of the infamous May Day riots in London in 1517.

Although Shakespeare is not the chief author of the work, he was a frequent collaborator, and it is widely accepted that it is he who contributed a number of speeches for the title character, Thomas More.

This is important as the lines which have become known as  ‘The Strangers’ Case Speech’ are not only some of the most brilliant in all stage theatre – but some of the most valuable in terms of our literary heritage; for they are in fact the only extant literary manuscript (currently held in the British Library archives) in Shakespeare’s own handwriting!

The scene which Shakespeare describes transports us back to that ‘Evil May Day’ of 1517 and the moment when the rioting crowds, hungry for the deportation of the immigrants living and working in the city, are accosted by the then under-sheriff of London, Thomas More.

Shakespeare reimagines More addressing the crowd in scolding style:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
 

As the speech starts we should note More’s use of the word ‘grant’ (meaning ‘allow’ or ‘accept’) in the powerful parallelism to warn these rioters of the consequences of their actions. He reminds them that if the immigrants were to be deported because of such a violent and noisy protest, the reputation of the nation itself would be shamed by association. In other words, More wants these self-professed “patriots” to consider at least how their ‘barbarous’ behaviours will make their majestic England barbarous accordingly.

He proceeds by forcing the crowd then to imagine the plight of the immigrants they so hate:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got?

The phrase ‘wretched strangers’ is central to the speech overall and highly emotive. The adjective ‘wretched’ as used in Shakespeare’s time would have meant hateful or loathsome; and the word ‘stranger’ was a widely-used pejorative – a label given to non-natives, derived from the word ‘strange’, or the Italian word stranieri, meaning foreigner.

Here, More uses the term with bitter irony, for he qualifies it with a series of sympathetic descriptions, where suddenly the refugees he describes become pitiable figures: mothers, parents, laden down, back broken and struggling under the burden of their luggage, desperate and tired as they are herded to the ports for transportation away from England’s shores.

This all builds to the first, damning rhetorical question: ‘What had you got?’. (To paraphrase, he asks the crowd: ‘What will you have achieved by the deportation of these refugees?’.) And the brilliance of the question is that the obvious answer is nothing, quite simply.

But Shakespeare’s More does not leave it here; instead he proceeds to elaborate in graphic and threatening detail on the consequences which will lie ahead:

                                       I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another….

This little passage has a karmic force as More, addressing this gang of ‘ruffians’ and bullies, turns bully himself in an attempt to teach a stark lesson in social responsibility; to remind how these present predators, one day, will be preyed upon; how these strong-armed practitioners will be practised upon, teaching bloody instruction by their own bloody instruction.

This again, reminds us of Shylock and Emilia. In Othello Emilia speaks for all mistreated wives to all abusing husbands at the end of her speech: “let them know, / The ills we do, their ills instruct us so’. Well, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice utters the same sentiment to the Christian persecutors:

                                                 The villainy you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

For Shakespeare, it appears, hard lessons are often needed to teach those who are lacking in compassion the necessity of human empathy. The threat in each instance is that those who have forgotten what it is to be vulnerable, weak and scared – in other words, to be human – will find a time soon when they themselves will be vulnerable, weak and scared too.

And so More continues his address to the mob:

                                                           Say now the king
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers:

Here, he forces the crowd to imagine their own powerlessness and to confront what it would feel like to be banished suddenly from their own homes by the king. The eminent Shakespearean scholar Sir Jonathan Bate explains: ‘More asks the on-stage crowd, and by extension the theatre audience, to imagine what it would be like to be an asylum-seeker undergoing forced repatriation.’

We see this as More asks the members of the crowd another pointed question: ‘whether (where) would you go?’

The rapid listing of options and the series of unlikely possibilities which follow (to France or Flanders… Germany… to Spain or Portugal) show how bewildering and panicking it must be to be left with an uncertain future, to be left to the mercy of someone else, some other nation, with only the hope of human charity as a saving grace.

In More’s timely and important statement – ‘Why, you must needs be strangers’ – each member of the mob becomes the stranger, the outsider, the immigrant, the frightened, the vulnerable, the one no longer belonging to a fixed home or place.

The irony is pure and the lesson in human empathy has been forced upon the ugly, baying crowd. As a final flourish, More holds the mirror up, hoping that they will see themselves in the reflection:

                                           Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used?

The description is unflinching: of ‘barbarous temper’; ‘hideous violence’; ‘detested knives’. He asks a final direct question to the mob about how they would feel to be treated the way that they are treating the immigrants: ‘what would you think / To be thus used?’

And this is Shakespeare’s ultimate point in the key humanitarian speeches of More and Shylock and Emilia seen in this essay – that to think of others and to treat others as we wish to be treated is a human necessity. It follows the golden rule of the Bible found in Matthew’s Gospel: ‘therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’. This is an enduring message and one which Shakespeare reinforces: to walk around in another person’s skin, a stranger’s skin, and to try to see the world from their perspective is the key to human compassion and empathy and understanding.

And as More has the mob’s attention, he reminds them:

this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity. 

What a judgement! What a criticism! ‘Mountainish inhumanity!’. He shames the crowd before him, addressing their xenophobic behaviour as something elemental, inhuman, primitive, monstrous.

The fact that a speech like ‘The Strangers’ Case’ can capture for us in a few dramatic lines the whole gamut of human feeling involved in the plight of the refugee is staggering. In More’s speech, we learn about the dangers of mob mentality; about the consequences of racism and xenophobia; we learn too that there are progressive thinkers in our lives, brave people who are willing to speak out and defend the weak and vulnerable; ultimately though, we learn what it is like to be a ‘stranger’ – someone who is in need of the kindness of other strangers too. These are important things to consider in our modern age, when there are life-changing political decisions going on about us and where there are refugee crises taking place around the globe as we speak.

To conclude, the great Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson’s enduring praise of Shakespeare is an important reminder here. Jonson stated famously that Shakespeare was ‘not of an age, but for all time’, and the fact that the work Shakespeare was producing over four hundred years ago is still deemed topical, relevant and revelatory to modern audiences today is remarkable.

For example, we can think about his influence on a poet like Emma Lazarus, a political activist and advocate for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Tsarist Russia in the 1880s. Her much anthologised sonnet ‘The New Colossus’, addresses the issue of the large number of immigrants who were arriving in the United States at the turn of the 19^th Century and champions their right to safe asylum. In the poem, Lazarus uses the great symbol of hope and freedom – The Statue of Liberty – as its central image, channelling Shakespeare’s humanitarian sentiments directly in some fitting and memorable allusions. As we read we find  that Shakespeare’s description of refugees as ‘wretched strangers’ is turned potently to the dehumanising and emotive ‘wretched refuse’ by Lazarus.

We also see how she uses the chaotic image of ‘tempest-tossed’ seas (which comes direct from Shakespeare’s Macbeth) in the final lines to describe the terrifying sea-journeys the refugees have to undertake. However, the conclusion of the poem is uplifting an inspiring, and the personified Liberty, the maternal figure, the ‘Mother of Exiles’ welcomes the ‘homeless’ to her, to America’s ‘golden door’, as a relief from the torment of such uncertain and terrifying travel.

Here is the poem:

The New Colossus

By Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name                                 5

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbour that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,                        10

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

With all of this in mind, we can argue that great literature like Lazarus’s sonnet or a speech like Shakespeare’s ‘The Strangers’ Case’ can do much for us all, to help us think deeply and to commemorate important events like World Refugee Day in a sensitive and contemplative manner. To read speeches and poems like these, and to give them a bit of time and consideration might appear to be a small and seemingly simple thing, but it does much to help us to understand better the suffering of the refugees in the world and the need for human empathy in our lives.