Two Tudor Witnesses to “the Corps of Christendom” – More and Shakespeare

In the literary history of Tudor England, I venture to propose two names as standing out and claiming comparison with each other as witnesses to the ideal and reality of Christendom – those of Thomas More in the reign of Henry VIII and William Shakespeare in the reign of Elizabeth I. In the case of More, little needs to be said, it is so obvious that he bore witness to the ideal and the reality, even to the shedding of his blood as a canonized martyr. But in that of Shakespeare, much more has to be said in view of the seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For this purpose it is necessary to take account not just of the dramatist’s indebtedness to More’s Life of Richard III in his history play of that title, nor just of his contribution to the MS Book of Sir Thomas More, nor of the one explicit mention of More in the play of Henry VIII, which is commonly attributed to John Fletcher, but of the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s plays in their chronological order as bearing witness in their totality to what More called in his last speech at his trial in Westminster Hall “the whole corps of Christendom”

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