Transcription
In the British Library is a manuscript to the play about Henry VII's Chancellor, Sir Thomas Moore. It's partly in Shakespeare's own handwriting, and this is the extraordinary speech he wrote as Thomas Moore quells a race riot in the city of London on Mayday, appealing to the mob to consider the plight of the foreign immigrants.
"The strangers should be removed. Grant them removed, and grant that this your all noise have chown all Majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage plotting 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 rough of your opinions clothed. What have 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-reason, and self-right, would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes feed on one another. You'll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses, and lead the Majesty of law in lime to slip him like a hound. Oh, 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 unreversed your feet to kneel to be forgiven. Say, 'Ad the king, as he is Clement, if the offender might 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 harbor? Go you to France, or Flanders, to any German Province, Spain, or Portugal, and anywhere 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, wet their detested knives against your throat, 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 comfort, but charted? Answer them, what would you think to be thus used? This is the strangest case, and this your mountain is shin humanity." [Applause]