Shakespeare’s Censor, the Reformation, and the Book of Sir Thomas More

ABSTRACT Between 1581 and 1610 Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney (c 1536–1610) was authorized to license plays. The only evidence we have of his actual practice is the Book of Sir Thomas More, several pages which are thought to be in the hand of William Shakespeare. This essay is concerned with Tilney’s suppression of the twenty-four lines in which More and Rochester refuse to sign articles sent to them by the king. Tilney’s censorship can be better understood from the views he expresses in the confidential intelligence manual he wrote for Elizabeth I. It includes a humanist history of the papacy that reveals his understanding of the Reformation. While Tilney was a sophisticated enough courtier to allow a play on the controversial subject of More’s career, he would not allow a passage that might be interpreted to undermine the constitutional right to overrule papal objections that Henry VIII claimed in the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals. As Tilney’s research showed, that right derived from Constantine the Great, the half-British King of Britain who as emperor legitimized Christianity and became patron of the primitive Church and the Bishop of Rome.