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Wednesday
With Donald Trump promising “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” and calling for deportation camps that would hold a million people, we are sure to encounter much immigrant bashing in the upcoming weeks. Recall that Trump sabotaged a bipartisan Senate bill addressing immigration issues earlier this year so as to ensure the issue stayed hot and that delegates to last week’s GOP convention held up signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now.”
With this in mind, I share a Shakespeare passage on immigrants that my friend Russ Heldman alerted me to. It appears in the banned play The Book of Thomas More–written mostly by someone else—and shows More, then a London undersheriff, addressing anti-immigrant rioters.
On May 1, 1517—which became known as Evil May Day—apprentices claiming that foreigners were taking their jobs and changing the culture attacked immigrant residents and looted their houses. These foreigners, who made up around two percent of London’s population, ranged from “Flemish cobblers” to “French royal courtiers.”
No author has ever entered the minds of other people, including the marginalized, as fully as Shakespeare, and in this speech we see a character engaging in this very exercise: to talk down the rioters, Thomas More asks them to put themselves in the immigrants’ shoes.
The passage begins with More asking the rioters to imagine themselves in the place of a king who has sent the immigrants packing. They are to think of themselves “in ruff of your opinions clothed”—in proud majesty—watching these “wretched strangers” heading for the coast:
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?
More warns that if rioting (“insolence and strong hand”) should win out, then “not one of you should live an aged man.” Anticipating what Thomas Hobbes would write fifty years later (when there is no ruling authority, “every man is Enemy to every man”), More says that the rioters’ violence will boomerang. “Other ruffians,” he warns, will “shark on you and men like ravenous fishes feed on one another”:
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 reason, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Feed on one another.…
Although a number of the May Day rioters were hanged, Henry VIII pardoned a few at the urging of queen Catherine of Aragorn. More, however, points out that these lucky ones could face an ironic situation, becoming refugee immigrants in their turn:
Alas, alas, say now the King,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too 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, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers.
If they indeed become strangers, they will experience the same attacks that they themselves are directing against strangers. Would you want such “mountainish inhumanity” coming your way, he asks:
Would you be pleas’d
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
Owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But charter’d unto them? What would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
In having a character remind us that immigrants are God’s creatures and should not be spurned like dogs, Shakespeare is centuries ahead of his time. Then again, some people want to return to the bad old days.
