The Strangers' Case

Glow-in-the-Dark Gel on paper, glass, frame, light and shadow

26 x 32 x 3,5 cm

2024

TEXT: Excerpts from

"The Strangers' Case" Speech from Sir Thomas More" (1st May 5017)

"[...] Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper,

That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth...

[...]

To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

CONTEXT:

On May 1, 1517 — now referred to as Evil May Day — riots broke out in London as a response to an influx of immigrant workers. Eighty years later, a play was written that includes some of these events. The play, called Sir Thomas More, wasn't published or performed at the time, quite possibly because it was censored. This speech from the play is delivered to the rampaging crowd by Thomas More, who was sheriff of London at the time. Thomas More asks the rioters to imagine themselves in the shoes of the immigrants they're attacking. The manuscript shown in the video is an original version of the speech and was very likely written by William Shakespeare.