Long before Starmer and Powell used “strangers” as a synonym for unwelcome migrants, William Shakespeare was dealing with the same racist nonsense. Ian McKellen, who once had the good fortune to meet me, has frequently delivered Shakespeare’s appeal for solidarity and welcome at public events. The audio in this clip is from when I heard him perform it.

On May 1^st, 1517 a crowd of hard working English people armed with stones, bricks, bats, and boiling water attacked immigrants in London and looted their homes.

Thomas More, author of Utopia and a Catholic saint whose story is told in the film A Man for All Seasons, was the deputy sheriff of London and tried to calm the crowd down.

Shakespeare collaborated with other writers to tell the story in The Book of Sir Thomas More, thought to be written between 1596 and 1601. The play was banned by the state censor who it thought might provoke riots as large numbers of French speaking Protestant asylum seekers from France, Belgium and the Netherlands were arriving in London.

The manuscript of the text below is in Shakespeare’s handwriting, so we can be confident the words are his. He has More tell the crowd to think about what could happen to them if the king agrees to expel the strangers, or migrants. It would legitimise anyone who wants to terrorise people out of their homes; the king would be free to get rid of anyone who disagrees with him, and they would be forced to wander Europe looking for somewhere they can be safe, all due to their “mountainish inhumanity”.

McKellen delivers the speech at 2 minutes 15 in the video below.

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another
Say now the king
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
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,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

— The Book of Sir Thomas More, Act II scene 4.