On the calendar for this week, you can see that we’ve come to the end of our history plays. I’ll do an intro for comedies soon, but in the meantime, we have a “break” week. However, I’ve also set up this week to be an optional week for exploring a forgotten history play: Sir Thomas More.

Sir Thomas More is such an interesting outlier in Shakespeare’s body of work. It’s not a play written by Shakespeare, but it’s also clear he helped with its revision. It’s not even in a finished form, but comes instead to us as a manuscript, covered in notes from the Master of Revels and written in multiple hands. As such, most “Complete Works” leave it out or make only a passing reference to it.

And yet, I can’t help but be fascinated by what it reveals to us about Shakespeare’s work as a playwright and about the contemporary process of writing for the theater in general. We see a play that didn’t pass muster—the Master of Revels censored several politically caustic moments in the play—and then that sat on the shelf for some time. We also see confirmed in the manuscript how communal and collaborative the writing and editing process could be, something the 18th-century “bardolators” refused to believe, claiming that Shakespeare was a solitary genius and therefore would never have deigned to share the process with anyone else.

Shakespeare was a working-class man, who certainly had a rich understanding of how to express human nature and had poetic genius, but who also liked to get paid for his labor. Over the years, scholars have found more and more precise ways to tease out exactly which parts were Shakespeare’s and which belonged to other writers. Some of it is common sense: when you listen to enough Shakespeare, eventually you get an ear for what feels true and what feels “other.” However, word combinations and unique pairings can hone down a passage’s origins in remarkably precise ways—something akin to the kind of software that can identify someone by analyzing their gait as they walk. (Okay, so, I actually don’t know if gait analysis is a real thing; I saw it on a spy show years ago.) In any case, much of this was done and done accurately by hand for years, but now with the computing and analysis power of our current age, it’s getting easier and easier to identify a writer by a passage of text.

If you like running down the rabbit hole of rich scholarship or if you are an ABSOLUTE COMPLETIONIST, then this play has a lot to offer you. It’s not the easiest one to find a good copy of, though you can find a free ebook version on Apple Books, which will work if you just want the experience of reading it and the tale of a good man who wrestles with the tension between his conscience and his submission to the state. I recommend getting an Arden copy if you want to appreciate the notes and annotations to understand the way it was written, censored, and rewritten.

And maybe you’d rather just take this week off and stick to the more established canon. Either way, I hope you enjoy your week! We’ll kick off comedies on Monday with The Comedy of Errors!