All over the world the problems created by asylum seekers, and the hostility aroused by legal and illegal immigrants, grow more acute. Shakespeare dramatized these problems – the anti-alien feeling that flared up at various times in London, and a wonderfully compassionate statement on behalf of refugees, in a scene of three pages that he added to the play of Sir Thomas More. As a former asylum seeker, some of whose relatives perished in concentration camps, I would like to comment on the originality of a scene that is sometimes described as hastily written, ‘with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise employed’, to explain why Shakespeare wrote it and why no one else could have written it.

Let us consider first how Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas rebukes the anti-alien rioters in London, remembering that his speech ‘was intended to reflect the crisis over aliens that was troubling the City’ at the very time (1593) when the play is thought to have been composed.