“You’ll put down strangers”

On Wednesday night’s episode of The Late Show , Ian McKellen gave an extraordinary performance of a speech from Sir Thomas More, a sixteenth-century play by many hands. The speech McKellen performed has been attributed to William Shakespeare and survives in what appears to be his hand.

Jason Kottke has done the work of establishing the context, reproducing the text, and embedding the video, so I’ll let his post do most of the work: The Strangers’ Case. But I’ll add the earliest definition of stranger from the Oxford English Dictionary:

One who belongs to another country, a foreigner; chiefly (now exclusively), one who resides in or comes to a country to which he or she is a foreigner; an alien.

The stranger is an immigrant, still subject to what Shakespeare called “mountainish inhumanity.”