The Stranger’s Case

This summer, we saw a production of Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, Minnesota.

Inserted into the comedy, at the very end, was a speech from a different Shakespearean work—Sir Thomas More—that was not published or performed during his lifetime. Inspired by the anti-immigration riots that took place on May 1, 1517, Shakespeare penned a scene in which the sheriff Sir Thomas More attempts to quell the rioters by asking them to imagine themselves as foreigners, or “strangers,” in an inhospitable land.

If you had to flee your homeland, he says, “whither would you go? What country… would give you harbor?” What would it feel like to find yourself in a nation “of such barbarous temper” that they threatened you with violence?

We’ve thought a lot about that speech in the ensuing months, and wanted to share it with you here. Above, you’ll find a recorded version produced by Shakespeare’s Globe Theater for Refugee Week in 2018. (The speakers include refugees from Syria, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan.) Below, you’ll find the text itself.

Although the speech is a reminder that many of our worst impulses—xenophobia, racism, paranoia, and fear—have persisted across the centuries, so, too, have our best qualities: creativity, compassion, empathy, and hospitality.

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? 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….

Say now the king
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 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: 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? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

You might consider a donation to:

The American Civil Liberties Union to support immigrant rights, among other civil liberties.

Public media such as NPR or PBS to combat the presidential propaganda machine.

Local grassroots organizations advocating for immigrant communities, such as Unidos MN.