A witty, learned persecutor? The staged after-life of Thomas More

Abstract

In Acts and Monuments, John Foxe proposed a double vision of More – ‘witty and learned’ and, as Foxe is at pains to demonstrate, ‘a bitter persecutor … a wretched enemy against the truth of the Gospel’. This duality is expanded on the early modern stage. In a series of plays, we find a compartmentalised vision of More, one in which controversial aspects of his life and career are sometimes suppressed. The late Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences of these texts witnessed the overt reconstruction of More as judge and wit, and the covert appearance of More as traitor, martyr and persecutor.