Sir Thomas More (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series) - Hardcover

It is an impressive piece of scholarship, surpassing its predecessor edited by Gabrieli and Melchiori in attention to technical detail, and in tackling the complexities of what some have considered the most politically incorrect Elizabethan play that we possess... The Arden edition succeeds in opening a can of worms which challenges contemporary critical thinking. * Notes and Queries, OUP, September 2011 * Just as Jowett's introduction provides an account not of a play, but of the incomplete making of a play, so his edition ambitiously presents the play text not so much as an outcome as a collaborative process. Consequently, the edition is visually unlike other Arden texts and unlike any other edited text in existence... It comes with a handy reader's guide explaining how to use it. -- Laurie Maguire * Times Literary Supplement *

This edition of Sir Thomas More is the first to bring the play into the context of a major Shakespeare series, to provide a substantial critical analysis, and to offer a comprehensive modern stage history. The introduction deals with issues such as the strange involvement of the anti-Catholic spy-hunter Anthony Munday as chief dramatist, the place of Sir Thomas More as a Catholic martyr in Protestant late Elizabethan culture, and the play's representation of a multi-cultural London.The text itself, supported by a searching and detailed commentary, adopts a distinctive presentation that enables readers to keep track of the manuscript and the hands that produced it, whilst engaging with the play as a fascinating theatrical piece. Sir Thomas More deals with matters so controversial that it may never have reached performance on stage. The authors' determination to deal with rioting and religious politics led to a play that is compelling in its own right but also intriguing as a document of what could, and could not, be articulated in the early modern public theatre. Surviving only as a manuscript text on which Shakespeare was thought to have worked, it can be considered to be the most important play manuscript of the period, owing to its highly complex witness to collaboration between dramatists and to censorship.