Remarks by Ambassador Samantha Power Remarks on “The Strangers’ Case”: The Power of Empathy in Art and Diplomacy, at the Lincoln Center Global Exchange

Watch Speech

Four hundred and ninety-nine years ago, in April 1517, a local broker named John Lincoln posted a xenophobic manifesto on the door of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London – blaming foreigners for many of the city’s problems and calling for their mass expulsion. Days later, at Lincoln’s urging, a vicar preached an Easter sermon to a large audience in an open field alongside the cathedral. He called on “Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves, and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal.” It wasn’t long before Englishmen were regularly attacking foreigners in London’s streets. A rumor took hold that on May 1, all non-natives would be driven from the city. That day, a mob of at least a thousand men and boys took to the streets who, according to an account written at the time, were armed with “clubs and weapons, throwing stones, bricks, bats, hot water, shoes, and boots,” and who set out “sacking the houses of many foreigners.” As the rabble grew, a young deputy sheriff went out into the streets to try to talk them down. His name was Thomas More – one day to be knighted Sir Thomas More – lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and, for a time, lead counselor to King Henry VIII – until the king executed him, of course.

The riot, which would come to be known as Evil May Day, is one of the scenes of a play based on Thomas More’s life, which was written around 80 years after the events I’ve just described. At least three playwrights were brought in to rewrite the play, in part or in full – including one whose hand would be recognized centuries later as that of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s major contribution was in the part of the play where the young More tries to quell the mob, not through the threat of force, but rather through appealing to their sense of empathy. It is a remarkable monologue – not only for its elegance, but also from its persuasiveness.

We are extremely fortunate today to have a great American Shakespearean, Jay O. Sanders, here with us to perform the monologue. As many of you know, Jay has been a regular presence – the most regular presence, I think it’s fair to say – at the Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park since his debut there back in 1976.

Before Jay joins us to perform, let me set the scene. The young deputy More has just put himself in the way of a rampaging, rabid horde – one that could easily turn on him. They will hardly let him or any other official speak, and cry out that all foreigners should be thrown out. Here is what More tells them:

SANDERS (READING FROM “SIR THOMAS MORE”):
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding tooth ports and costs 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 to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where 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 claimants
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 mountanish inhumanity.

[Applause.]

AMBASSADOR POWER: Jay O. Sanders – the man! [Applause.]

So, I wanted to reflect on Thomas More’s address today for two reasons. The first is because of the enduring relevance of his message. More implores the members of the xenophobic mob to ask themselves: How would you want to be treated if what he calls the “strangers’ case” were to be your own? If the people with “babies at their backs, with their poor luggage, plodding into th’ ports and coasts for transportation” were your loved ones, your community, how would you hope to be received? As More asks, “Whither would you go?”

As was so often the case, Shakespeare was writing not only about London in the time of Thomas More. He was also writing about the England in which he himself was living, at the turn of the seventeenth century – when again Londoners were blaming foreigners for all the country’s problems and attacking them in the streets. Only in Shakespeare’s time, the mobs’ targets were not the “Lombards” of Italy, but the Huguenots, who were then fleeing to England in large numbers to escape persecution in France. Shakespeare knew that the words he put into Thomas More’s mouth would be heard by audiences as speaking to the climate of xenophobia that they were experiencing in real time; he counted on it.

And More’s speech is, of course, relevant to this day, as we are experiencing the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War. More than 65 million people are currently displaced by war and persecution, half of them children. More than 21 million people are refugees who have crossed international borders looking for help. The displacement crisis that we are living has many, many causes, including a growing number of violent conflicts, which are lasting longer; a global crackdown on civil society activists like journalists, human rights defenders, and even artists; the rise of terrorist groups like ISIL and Boko Haram; and more and more natural disasters caused by climate change.

To Sir Thomas More’s question to the mob – “What country, by the nature of your error, should give you harbor?” – the answer today is very few countries indeed.

At the end of 2015, just 10 developing countries were hosting nearly 60 percent of the world’s refugees. The average GDP per capita of those 10 countries: around $3,700; the United States’, by comparison, is approximately $54,600. In Lebanon today, one in five people is a refugee. In Nigeria, where more than 2 million people have been driven from their homes by Boko Haram, some 90 percent of the displaced are being hosted by communities – by friends, by families, by neighbors. At a university I visited earlier this year in northern Nigeria, a single security guard had hosted more than 50 members of his extended family in his humble home.

And yet it is in wealthier countries – which have taken in far fewer refugees – that we are often seeing the most rampant xenophobia. Like the billboards that appeared in the run up to the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote, which simply superimposed the words, “Breaking Point” over a photograph of long lines of non-white migrants waiting in an open field. Or the recent media campaign by Hungary’s government, built on the slogan, “Did you know?” – which blames immigrants for many of the country’s ills and stokes fears, often relying on inaccurate and misleading information. “Did you know that since the beginning of the immigration crisis the harassment of women has risen sharply in Europe?” one advertisement reads. We know here at home, the United States is no exception, sadly. More than 30 U.S. governors have said publicly that they do not want to resettle any Syrian refugees in their state.

We have seen the consequences of such xenophobic rhetoric and fearmongering. In the days after the Brexit vote, for example, a Muslim butcher shop in Birmingham was firebombed, and a Polish neighborhood in London was blanketed with fliers that read, “Leave the EU – no more Polish vermin.” After admitting more than a million asylum seekers in 2015, Germany was the site of more than 300 attacks on refugee shelters the first quarter of 2016 alone. That’s around three attacks per day. Even the theatre has become a target. In April, at a performance in Vienna of a play about the hardships faced by Austrian asylum seekers, in which all of the actors were themselves refugees, members of a nativist group stormed the stage and threw fake blood onto the performers and the audience.

In this context, Thomas More’s speech to the mob is as relevant as ever. The “wretched strangers” have changed, of course – from the “Lombards” targeted in 1517 in those riots, to the Huguenot refugees in Shakespeare’s time, to the Syrians, Iraqis, Eritreans, South Sudanese, Afghans, and others fleeing deadly conflicts and repressive governments in our time. But the questions More puts to the mob are the same ones we must ask ourselves and our communities today. If, as More asks, “you must needs be strangers, would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper?”

To More and Shakespeare, the answer was obvious. They believed – as I suspect most of us do – that from behind that veil of ignorance regarding our own fate, we would never argue for sealing off our borders to people fleeing harrowing violence and abuse. If we didn’t know whether we were the receiving country for refugees or a family ourselves fleeing violence, barrel bombs, chemical weapons attacks, what would we want the rules of the road to be? We would never, wearing that veil of ignorance, attack people whose only so-called crime was fleeing places where their lives or the lives of their loved ones were at risk. And if we share those beliefs – if that is what we would want for ourselves if similarly situated – then we have a responsibility to do more to help the tens of millions of people worldwide who find themselves in that situation.

That brings me to the second reason that I wanted to focus on Sir Thomas More’s speech, beyond its relevance to the current refugee crisis and the isolationist backlash that that crisis has helped spark. And it is the way that art can help overcome what is often the greatest challenge to building more just and compassionate policies toward people in faraway places, and that obstacle is a lack of empathy. To Shakespeare, so much of people’s “mountanish inhumanity” was rooted in their inability to see themselves in someone else’s shoes. Art has the power – arguably, the unique power – to help us do this. It helps us imagine, if only fleetingly, what it would feel like to be the mother who is forced to load her children onto a packed rubber dinghy with a smuggler; or to be the young man who watches as his village is burned and his parents are killed simply because of the tribe to which they belong; or the young girl who is forced to choose between surrendering her body or surrendering her life.

We all know what it feels like when we experience genuine empathy. I’ve not only experienced it myself, but I’ve seen it happen to people in one of the most thick-skinned and cynical professions out there. I’m speaking, of course, of diplomats. [Laughter.] Let me give you just one example. Of the 193 Member States at the United Nations – where I have the privilege of representing the United States – only 37 of that 193 are represented by women. Last year, I invited the women ambassadors to come with me to see the play “Eclipsed.” As many of you know, the play is set during Liberia’s civil war, and it tells the story of a group of women and girls forcibly taken as wives by a ruthless militia commander. Some 20 women ambassadors from different countries at the UN came along with me to see the show, then at the Public.

Now, these women ambassadors are used to dealing with weighty and at times gut-wrenching topics. They have sat through meetings at the UN on topics like sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers, mass atrocities, gender-based violence of an epidemic scale against young girls. Many of them pore over their daily briefs containing harrowing details of humanitarian and man-made catastrophes. But even for them, even with their day job and the work that causes them to confront these crises daily, there was something different and transformative about seeing even a sliver of these experiences portrayed up close through the stories of individuals. Giving these ambassadors a human face; showing them a human face and a voice peeled back the layer of abstraction that often prevents diplomats – and all of us, for that matter – from stopping to think about the individuals affected by the problems that we are working every day. So every one of the ambassadors in that audience – if only just fleetingly – imagined herself in the place of those Liberian women who were enslaved and subjected to sexual violence. That’s not a place one tends to go in one’s day job. You don’t tend to put yourself in the shoes of those individuals. But up close and personal with all of the universalizable traits and instincts and forms of humor that we have in common, the divide was bridged.

The most striking reaction – just to prove this point – actually came from the Liberian ambassador, who is now her country’s foreign minister. Now, keep in mind: she’s Liberian; she knew people who had suffered horrors like the ones depicted so vividly on the stage. And yet she said to me after the performance, “I knew this was happening in my country; these are my people. But because I didn’t experience it myself, I don't think I really understood what my people and my country went through before I saw this play.” In her eyes, she was able to get closer to the war and the suffering it caused in that theater than she could from living it. And I’m convinced that – like the other women ambassadors there that night, myself included – she understands the searing impact of sexual violence differently, and is a more empathetic diplomat for having seen Liberia’s story told in that way.

So what can we draw from this experience? Well, for one, if diplomats were to spend more time at the theater, and in museums and cinemas, we may well have a more just, peaceful, and humane world. Maybe. But it’s really that if we – as diplomats, advocates, artists, and simply citizens – wish to persuade people to stand up for the basic dignity of others, even people in faraway places, we’ve just got to find fresh ways of getting them, getting us to see the “strangers’ case” as our own.

And in that sense, the fate of the monologue that Shakespeare wrote for Sir Thomas More is both troubling and, in its own way, inspiring. In the same manuscript that led to the discovery of Shakespeare’s contribution, there is a short, handwritten note in the margin. Although this note was not written by Shakespeare, but rather by Queen Elizabeth’s Master of Revels, Edmund Tilney, whose job it was to review all plays before they were performed, and who had the power to censor work he deemed a threat to the crown. Next to More’s speech to the mob, Tilney wrote in the margins: “Leave out the insurrection wholly.” Instead, the censor Tilney instructed, the play should begin after the Evil May Day riot, and only mention the violence briefly. Now this edit would have cut from the play the monologue that Shakespeare wrote. Tilney warned in his note that anyone who attempted to perform that part of the play did so, as he put it, “at [their] own peril.”

According to historians, Tilney feared the scene itself would only add to unrest at a time of growing hatred of foreigners. But Tilney missed the point. He believed that most people would identify with the rabble, with the mob. But Shakespeare, like Thomas More, believed that if only people could be made to see the strangers’ case as their own, their perspective would be changed. The mob could be quelled; xenophobia moderated; dignity defended. And so Shakespeare’s monologue, which would have spoken to rising hatred of London’s present as well as its past, was never performed in the playwright’s lifetime. We will never know what impact it may have had in making people see the strangers, the refugees in his time with greater empathy.

But without a doubt, Shakespeare got the last word. The monologue he wrote for Sir Thomas More is now being displayed in its original handwritten form in the British Library, which is drawing thousands of visitors; and more importantly, it is being disseminated and performed around the world – as it was here today – as a response to xenophobia and isolationism that we are once again seeing rise up in so many parts of the globe. Let it be a challenge to us all to find new ways of using the power of art to push back against such “mountanish inhumanity” and help people see that the case of so many “wretched strangers” could just as easily be our own. Thank you.

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