Shakespearean hospitalities in Sir Thomas More

Abstract

The manuscript play Sir Thomas More contains three pages that may be in Shakespeare’s hand. It is a play replete with instances, and the language, of hospitality. Beginning with the titular character’s plea for universal hospitality to a group of rioting Londoners seeking the removal of ‘strangers’, I trace how the play is pulled between contemporary hospitable discourse’s collapse of the difference between host and guest and the necessity of recognizing the host’s authority. Such a model of competing commonality and sovereignty may offer a ground for rethinking the supposed discontinuity of Shakespeare’s part in the play’s revision.