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In this work a broad distinction is made between natives and denizens (naturalized foreigners) on the one hand, and aliens (non-naturalized foreigners) on the other. Natives are words of Old English origin, denizens are borrowings from foreign languages which have acquired full English citizenship, aliens are words that retain their foreign appearance and to some extent their foreign sound. --The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1933) (1) worst [work of the disintegrators], however, amounts to an alien invasion. --E.K. Chambers, The Disintegration of Annual Shakespeare Lecture (1924) (2) Shall strangers rule the roost? --Clown, Sir Thomas More (2.1.2; 69.2) (3) A. WHEN WE WANT More in a Complete Works edition of Shakespeare, what do we want? I refer to Booke of Sir Thomas More, the complexly collaborative, revised, possibly Shakespearean, and therefore controversial manuscript that has been on the margins of the canon since the first decades of the twentieth century. Wanting More in these editions is linked to our desire for more and more Shakespeare; thus the seemingly escalating race to add to our volumes: more Lear in the Oxford and still more in the Norton; the Funeral Elegy; the arrival of Two Noble Kinsmen in the updated fourth edition of Bevington's Longman edition; Edward III in the second edition of the Riverside, and so on. But with Booke of Sir Thomas More, it is also clear that less is taken to be more: more Shakespeare, but less of his apparent collaborators. stance of the editions that include the play--(currently the prominent one-volume editions that do so are the Oxford, the Norton on which it is based, and the Riverside) is to include not all of More, but less: the parts of the manuscript that are Shakespearean; the part of the manuscript, that is, written in Hand D, or, in the case of the second included bit, a part that seems more Shakespearean, even though it is written in another hand, C. (4) I point this curious fact out in part because it seems to have gone largely unremarked: unlike the other possibly collaborative texts printed these editions (The Two Noble Kinsmen, for example), part of More is all we (and our students) get. While Two Noble Kinsmen has been aggressively divvied up between writers at least since Cyrus Hoy's linguistic tabulations of the 1950s, (5) and there are confident attempts to do the same with Pericles and Henry VIII, no one has apparently yet decided to publish only those scenes deemed in volumes comprising his works. But with More, we read in the Riverside only The Additions Ascribed to and in the Oxford and the Norton only Attributed to (6) (Even the Passages disappear from the Norton's second table of contents, arranged by genre, though Lost Plays are nonetheless included.) (7) More, already excluded in the Longman edition because Shakespeare's contribution to it is fragmentary, (8) is in the other editions made incomplete (is editorially incompleted) in order to produce a Works that is Complete. Though it does not exist incompletely (9) (McMillin and Gabrieli/Melchiori argue that the play is complete and performable), More is nevertheless presented as a less-than-complete work--no work, in the conventional sense of the term, because not completed Shakespeare, or not completely Shakespeare. first and (thus far) last one-volume complete-works edition to include all of More was Sisson's in 1954; (10) the only recent full (and teachable) text, Gabrieli and Melchiori's Revels edition of 1990, is apparently now so far out of print that St. Martin's and Manchester University Press were unable to determine who owned the rights the last time I taught the play. If one wants to read more More than is currently published in the Riverside or Norton, and seeks to reassemble it from the pieces scattered in complete-works editions, there are thirty-one more lines to be found (only thirty-one lines, Hand E's) in the first volume of Bowers's Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. …
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