'Strangers' and Sanctuary in Sir Thomas More

I focus on the increasingly well-known immigrant speech, or “the stranger’s case,” in the play Sir Thomas More, widely agreed to be in Shakespeare’s hand. In its depiction of “Evil May Day” in 1517, Sir Thomas More stands before the gates of St. Martin Le Grand sanctuary space—home to a thriving migrant labor community—and dissuades xenophobic rioters from entering.<br><br>This passage has recently received extensive coverage. But no one has yet explored thoroughly its crucial sanctuary dimensions. More makes “the stranger’s case” at St. Martin’s threshold, a privileged zone protecting those taking formal sanctuary, and many foreigners (sometimes refugees) practicing their craft exempt from oppressive municipal and guild regulation. I read the speech and play in deep historical context, discussing sanctuary-dwelling immigrant communities through leases (in Westminster Abbey’s Muniments Library), crown licenses, and patents. I also make use of Shannon McSheffrey’s ongoing pioneering research.<br><br>The stranger’s case’s hypothetical energy—envisioning one’s own possible future as a stranger—was very much in England’s cultural bloodstream. Drawing on archival research, I analyze sixteenth-century legal and political defenses of sanctuary that employ proleptic and substitutional logics similar to More’s plea. More’s speech offers a key to understanding Londoners’ long-conflicting orientations toward sanctuary. <br><br>The stranger’s case emblematizes Shakespeare’s imaginative enterprise: to inhabit roles of others, to trade places. It is no coincidence that a sanctuary, foregrounded in the play, explicitly allows for this quintessential work of the theatre. The refuge protects other people, other possibilities, other plots. But Shakespeare emphasizes asylum’s vulnerability: it must be defended. Sanctuary’s boundaries here are ultimately only as strong as More’s speech. Sanctuary and drama mutually implicate and protect one another—extra-jurisdictional space is to thank for English theatre; drama, in turn, comes full circle to make the case for the specialness of such exempt spaces.