Shakespeare contra Trump

As we embark on week two of this bizarre, pseudo-North Korean political experiment, with our maximally moronic Maximum Leader (call him Kim Jong Don) governing by Orwellian lies, psychotic delusions, and diktat-signing photo-ops, with a Constitution-shredding de facto 'Muslim ban' already being enforced at our airports, with the ridiculously hypocritical 'conservatives' of the now thoroughly fascisized Republican Party donning MAGA hats and goose-stepping into a Busby Berkley chorus line behind the Mustard-Headed One...in the midst of all this insanity, it's a kind of comfort to discover that we need not compose an angry-eloquent protest letter to the Trump Administration, for William Shakespeare wrote an incomparable one four hundred and some years ago.

Here's Ian McKellen introducing and reading Thomas More's speech to an anti-immigrant mob, from Shakespeare's contribution to the Sir Thomas More manuscript. (Transcript below.)

 

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

Hath chid down all the majesty of England;

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 silenced by your brawl,

And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;

What had you got? 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...

                                 ...O, desperate as you are,

Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands,

That you like rebels lift against the peace,

Lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees,

Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven...

                             ...You’ll put down strangers,

Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,

And lead the majesty of law in lion

To slip him like a hound. Say now the king

(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)

Should so much come to short of your great trespass

As but to banish you, whither would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbor? 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. 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 elements

Were not all appropriate to your comforts,

But chartered unto them, what would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case,

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

--William Shakespeare, et al., Sir Thomas More, Act 2, Scene 4, (extracted from a manuscript in the British Library)

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Copyright © 2016 by PlayShakespeare.com.
Visit http://www.playshakespeare.com/license for details.

Copyright © 2016 by PlayShakespeare.com.
Visit http://www.playshakespeare.com/license for details.