1This paper will suggest that the partly Shakespearian play Sir Thomas More uses tropes connected with disguise and alteration of self as aspects of what is referred to in the play as Wit. These contribute to the portrayal of More’s character as a man of wit in all its early modern aspects. The play also articulates a series of phantoms, or gestic figures, that represent alternatives to the More that is literally portrayed, assertions of what More is also, might be, or, overtly at least, is not.

4The play follows up on the insurrection scenes and leads towards the moment of More’s arrest by showing three incidents similar in kind to Sc. 2. These might also be called “merry jests”. And it is these that form the copula between the two halves. I will be suggesting that this copula establishes a play structure that echoes the title of the play performed within the play (and indeed within one of the scenes in question), which is called The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom. This internal play title provides us with a vital link between structure and theme, structure and characterization. Ultimately, More himself embodies the marriage of Wit and Wisdom, just as More is the most important common element in the physical, energetic, and often witty insurrection episode and the calmer, more spiritually aware biography of More’s arrest and execution. And it is in the copula scenes that the dramatisation of More is consolidated in such a way that the dramatic role can be transported from the first section of the play to the last — consolidated, that is to say, on a conceit, in paradox, in witty playfulness — and so represented as a mobile subjectivity that moves between the poles of wit and wisdom.

A table beeing couered with a greene Carpet, a state Cushion on it,
and the Pursse and Mace lying thereon… (735-6)

6This insistent and ostentatious presentation of the symbols of office leads to the entry of what an audience would first see as apparently two Lord Chancellors:

Enter Sir Thomas Moore and his man Randall with him, attyred like him. (736-7)

7This is clearly a comic piece of staging, even before More speaks, and perhaps for the anticipated audience a momentarily disorienting one too.

8In the initial exchange between Randall and More, wordplay on clothing develops the idea of role-playing: Randall says that “I stand but vppon a fewe pointes” (739) and that he has “learnde your shift so well” (757). Points were also the laces that attached breeches to hose. The word shift here is a neat reminder of More’s newly elevated status, punning on the senses (a) device, trick; (b) set of clothes; (c) “Change or substitution of one thing for another of the same kind” (OED, 7). As if emerging from this wordplay on shift, the game-play with Erasmus will test out whether, if Randall can “act my parte” (748) and “dress thy behauiour / according to my cariage”, true “merit” can be distinguished from mere “outward ceremonie” (751-3). Like “act my part”, the phrase “dress thy behauiour / according to my cariage” is theatrical, as though More as a professional actor were training the journeyman, and Randall responds with this understanding when he says “if I doo it not in kew, let your Lordship bannishe me from wearing of a golde chaine for euer” (762-3), or, in the revised text, “If I doe not deserve a share for playing of yo^r Lo. well. lett me be yeoman vsher to yo^r Sumpter and be banisht from wearing of a gold chaine for ever” (Add. iv.21-2). This speech tellingly conflates the idea of the share-holding actor and the office holder. In both versions More responds “set thy countenaunce, act thy parte / with a firme boldnesse, and thou winnest my hart” (764-5), language that is theatrical at every point.

9In the event, Randall turns out to be a very poor actor, and Erasmus sees through the disguise without much difficulty. The role-playing breaks down when Erasmus addresses the supposed More in a short Latin speech, which to Randall is incomprehensible.

13The play-acting in Sir Thomas More creates repeated frissons relating to the serious aspects of More’s own identity and fortune. As Randall enacts More, in the Marriage of Wit and Wisdom scene More does no more than enact an aspect of himself when he takes on the role of Good Counsel. The Erasmus scene in particular trains the audience to read these episodic incidents as gestic emblems rather than for their contribution to a linear narrative, so that when we come to the Falkner episode we are already attuned to seeing the play’s most serious matter acted out playfully.

14My point is that More playfully constructs a mock crisis for Falkner that foreshadows his own unplayful dilemma when he is required to sign the articles. It has often been noticed that the play is cautiously evasive in its treatment of this key moment, More’s refusal to assent to the Act of Supremacy that set Henry viii at the head of the Church of England. Henry appears nowhere in the play, and the content of the articles falls under a conspicuous erasure. The censorship of the insurrection scenes that is so literally and destructively inflicted on the manuscript is palpable present here too, casting an oblique shadow on the text. The dramatists evidently avoided being explicit in an attempt to prevent censorship when the play came before Tilney. And so it entirely makes sense that the evasion in presenting the matter of the Act of Supremacy should result in displaced and comic eruptions of the key issue elsewhere.

15Having constructed Falkner’s dilemma as one of divided allegiance between God and state, More resolves it by insisting that Falkner should follow his conscience even if that means suffering secular punishment:

and Sir, you shall not say,
you were compelde by me to breake your vowe.
But till the expiration of the same,
because I will not haue ye walke the streetes,
for euery man to stand and wunder at,
I will cõmitt ye prisoner vnto Newgate.
Except meane time, your conscience giue you leaue,
to dispense with the long vow that you haue made
Away with him. (807-15)

16He prescribes to himself similarly later in the play: he acts on his conscience and suffers the consequences willingly.

17The Falkner scene thus anticipates his later course through play. The nature of the play is particularly clear in an exchange that is exclusive to the Original Text in Munday’s hand, in which Shrewsbury and Surrey are present during the initial exchange:

Faulk. My Lord, I weare my haire vppon a vow.
Shrew. But for no penaunce of your sinnes I feare.
Sur. No, hees no haire-cloth man, though he weare haire.
(799-801)

18And when More sends Falkner to prison Surrey comments, “A Cell moste meete for such a votarie” (816) — playing on the “cell” as place of imprisonment and hermit’s recluse, a votary being, of course, one who is bound by vows to a religious life. The terms of reference are specifically Catholic. A man with long hair might be a hermit. He might even be one of those disorderly plebeian prophets who deliver disturbing and antiauthoritarian messages to those in authority, such as Peter of Pomfret in Shakespeare’s King John. Such a figure would belong to the medieval Catholic world, or appear as a remnant of it in a more recent time. Such a figure might indeed grow his hair as an outward sign of his religious commitment. But, being as it is that Falkner is not a religious hermit, and that More is not Falkner, More does nevertheless have his own crucial affinities with the projected figure of the Catholic, the penitent, and the man who suffers at the hands of secular authority for his faith.

20More in this episode is himself, he is Cromwell read through the Protestant polemicist in Holinshed, as the effective restrainer of decadence, and he is also Falkner, in his fantasised capacity as the religious man whose holy vow leads him to be punished by the secular authority. Such is the ambiguity of role-playing—a point definitively established for us in the episode of Randall’s impersonation. More can occupy the position of both authority figure and its other, in this case the figure who represents the resistance to authority. Symbolically speaking, More will always be both hairy and clean cut — a point to which the play returns in the closing scenes.

21To leave the matter there would be to overlook an aspect of Falkner’s haircut that is crucial to the ludic quality of the hair-play. An offstage haircut is unlikely to involve the irrevocable cutting of actual hair. Instead, Falkner’s “lothsome excrement” (852) is likely to have been staged with the actor wearing a wig, which indeed was established normal playing practice for long hair, as in the regular example of the boy actor playing a woman. The point would scarcely be worth making, were it not that it establishes a strong line of connection between the haircut episode and the scene that immediately follows it in both versions: the scene in which More participates in the players’ production of The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom. If we think of this scene as offering a commentary on the Falkner episode, it does so by making manifest the theatrical foundations of removable hair, most overtly in the stage direction “Enter Luggins with the bearde” (1135).

24It is therefore the absence of a beard for the enacted play that makes More’s intervention necessary. Curiously, a point is made about More’s own beard being inadequate for the role: when he explains the delay to the Lord Mayor he adds, “Ide lend him mine, but that it is too thinne” (1026). The joke about the thin beard may or may not be designed as another metatheatrical touch, on the assumption that the actor playing More would need to wear a thin beard as a stage property. A stage-property beard can indeed theoretically be lent.

25Wit’s beard is presented as both a symbol of wisdom and a material object. More refers to Wit as being without “the commoditie of a bearde” (1055), with commodity meaning both “asset, advantage” and “object, article”. It is the commodity in the second sense that is manifested when the exhausted actor Luggins returns too late from his shopping trip, now finally beard in hand, though not beard on face. Time has run out, the banquet is ready, and the play proceeds no further. What I have called the jestbook episodes are as a whole coming to a close, and the beard, having finally made its appearance in Luggins’s hand, never makes it to young Wit’s face, remaining a token of a dramatic potential that is never realised.

26From the next scene the play resumes the historical account of More. The scene unfolds in what More calls the “serious square” of the Council chamber (1176), and in the same speech More refers to the Council’s heavy responsibility for “the health and preseruation of the land” which involves a mix of applying “choise diett” and “letting blood” (1178-80). And this is the very scene in which Palmer brings those unspecified articles for the Council to sign, and places More under house arrest when he refuses to do so. With the dismissal of the players the play takes a decisive turn towards More’s death, with the words “serious square” operating as a genre signal in much the same way as “merry jest” in the Lifter scene.

27But the play has not finished playing with hair. When More greets his wife and family in Sc. 11 he says:

wife, giue me kinde welcome, thou wast wunt to blame
my kissing, when my beard, was in the stubble,
But, I haue bin trimde of late, I haue had,
a smoothe Courte shauing, in good faith I haue… (1339-42)

28Are we to suppose that More’s thin beard has now actually been shaved off? Whether this is a purely allegorical court shaving or reflects a fact about his appearance is uncertain, but facial hair is still an issue, and indeed More’s joke about his beard is the very first manifestation of the survival of his whimsical humour in the face of his impending execution.

31It seems to me that this sort of played-out contradiction between the connotations of hair and beard works in much the same way as the ludic principle itself: acting, and specifically the putting on of stage properties such as wigs and beards, allows the actor to assume different and logically inconsistent roles, a principle that is extended both physically and symbolically to More himself. I would suggest, moreover, that the inconsistency arises most clearly in the scene that brings acting most obviously to the fore, the scene in which More participates in The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom. Here it is the beard of wisdom that is presented, not the long hair of the ruffian. The beard for young Wit represents an attribute of More’s character distanced from More’s body. It is also detached from its supposed wearer Wit. And it is alienated from its referent Wisdom, who is both female and absent from stage.

32This context both enables and qualifies the prominent treatment of the idea of More as a spiritual being in the closing passages. More will lose his beard by losing his head, and so his life. More’s meditations on facing the prospect of death are made up of grimly amused anatomisations of parts of the body and items of clothing that cover it. By this stage in the play, these are firmly established as the attributes of the actor. They are now presented equally as the mortal aspect of More as a human being. Divestment of garments becomes a Christian metaphor for relinquishing the mortal body. But so too does divestment of hair. More’s correlation of the barber who would remove his beard with the headsman who will remove his head affirms a combination of metonymy and metaphor as the principle that has underlain the references to clothes and hair: metonymy in that the beard, for instance, stands for the head and the head in turn stands for the body itself (hence “the headsman now shall cut off head and all”, 1128); metaphor in that these physical elements are figurations of the condition of mortal life.

33The symbolic narrative I have been tracing moves from the divestment of clothes to the removal of hair to decapitation. The human body becomes subject to conceits of vestment, alteration, supplementation, divestment, reduction, and even dismemberment. There is an overarching progress from wit to wisdom. Christian stoicism says that life is a brief episode, that the body is lent from God, that life is likely to involve suffering, and that death is a release from the physical confines of this earth. This is the view left when More finally renounces wit itself:

we goe to sigh, that ore, to sleepe in rest.
Heere Moore forsakes all mirthe, good reason why,
the foole of fleshe must with her fraile life dye.
No eye salute my trunck with a sad teare,
Our birthe to heauen should be thus: voide of feare. (1978-82)

34Wit, here “mirthe”, is forsaken insofar as it is the mere “foole of fleshe”; this aspect of wit, at least, belongs to the mortal body of the “fleshe” or “truncke”, and so “must with her fraile life dye”. In this formulation the soul as it passes through death is subjected to a curious negation of selfhood; it is “voide of feare” but also void of mirth, void of body, void of More: to quote More’s words a few lines earlier, he is “loathe to take more”.

35A play such as this is in itself a kind of conceit, or an emblem of Wit. Wit will gain a long beard and a wife, though this does not actually happen in the play as we see it; the mortal man of wit will progress to the state of states, but only at the cost of abandoning wit itself. Wit and Wisdom correlate with body and soul. It seems significant, then, that the play makes repeated wordplay on More’s very name as an adjective or adverb denoting the supplement or excess that is denoted by the word “and” itself. The joke on More’s name is, of course, in itself an example of wit, of supplementary meaning, whereby the word “More” becomes more than the name “More”.

36But the other, material, supplementation associated with Wit is all too vulnerable in ways some of which can be and are represented metatheatrically: fortune can and perhaps characteristically will be reversed, and a beard or a long head of hair or even the physical organ of the head can all too easily fall prey to the razor, the knife, or the axe.

His head was upon London Bridge: there goes this story in his family, viz that one day as one of his daughters was passing under the bridge, looking on her father’s head, said she, “That head has lain many a time in my lap, would to God it would fall into my lap as I pass under.” She had her wish, and it did fall into her lap, and is now preserved in a vault in the cathedral church at Canterbury. The descendant of Sir Thomas More, is Mr More, of Chilston, in Hertfordshire, where, among a great many things of value plundered by the soldiers (in the Civil War) was his chap, which they kept for a relic. Methinks ’tis strange that all this time he is not canonised, for he merited highly of the Church.

38The play shows a different process of remembering, in which the performative quality of wit is essential. I am struck by the complex poetic texture of this and other early modern history plays as acts of remembering, or re-membering. With reference to Sir Thomas More I would put it this way: drama is no miracle, because it depends on declared illusion: the illusion, to be precise, of one body taking on a wittily augmented existence as a representation of another body. The comic property of the long beard is emblematic, then, of acting in general, like the actor’s put-on deformity in a performance of Richard iii. And so: the beard is emblematic of this particular play’s project of remembering Sir Thomas More by presenting the actor’s bodily imitation of him before the eyes of the theatre audience, up to, but not including, the moment where he is made void of life by the cutting of his head. Thus the play’s martyrological theme can be articulated only insofar as it is both disguised and deconstructed by the metatheme of acting.