Sir Thomas More
Sir Thomas More.In the British Library is an undated dramatic manuscript, in several hands, catalogued as BL, MS Harleian 7368, and bearing the title ‘The Booke [i.e. playscript] of Sir Thomas Moore’. The general consensus among the many scholars who have studied this document since the 19th century is that the story behind it runs roughly as follows. In the early to mid-1590s Anthony Munday, assisted by Henry Chettle, composed an episodic play about the rise and fall of Thomas More, and submitted a fair copy of it (largely in Munday's hand) to the Master of the Revels, Sir Edmund Tilney. Tilney refused to approve it for performance as it stood, partly on the grounds that its depictions of rioting against foreign immigrants made it potentially inflammatory at a time when such disturbances were breaking out again, and he annotated the manuscript to demand revisions which would have involved losing as much as half of the play. Some time...
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