Thank you for posting this. I just saw Sir Ian perform this during the Fathom live (well - taped) performance of the Shakespeare festival and it was one of the most incredible pieces of the whole night. This should be played all over the world to remind everyone of what it is to be human, and to possibly face what so many are going through -- the loss and displacement and uncertainty. It's easy to judge from confort and security, but what if the situation was reversed.
We saw McKellen performing this as part of Shakespeare Live last night. The pictures and films I've seen of desperate immigrants popped right into my head. Not much progress by humans toward humanity in 400 years...
Sir Thomas More is actually not a very well written play, so it's not done very often. That may be why it's so rarely used to make a point regarding immigration. However, this scene that Shakespeare contributed is absolutely wonderful and should be known just as well as many of his famous works. It's really a shame it hasn't gotten much attention or praise in the last few centuries.
All the feels IWish trump Could hear this and maybe He would think differently about the strangers in our midst both immigrants Migrants and refugees and asylum-seekers It gives me all the emotions of this moment in time even 400 years later still just as relevant as ever I just have a strong desire to welcome immigrants, migrants refugees and asylum-seekers.
Sadly Rudyard Kipling was an apologist for the British Empire - which had no reservations about entering OTHER countries and using industrialized warfare to subjugate disparate peoples in order to extract goods and treasure. Moreover The British, particularly post WW1 dominated Middle eastern countries through its controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company totally controlled Persia (Iran) and through its controlling interest in the Turkish Petroleum Company in Mesopotamia (Iraq) assisting in the domination of those regimes. So apparently it is OK for the Brits to invade and dominate (with bribes and cold steel) other countries in the earlier forms of globalization - Rapacious Greed - camouflaged by Kipling's phrase ""The White Man's Burden"".. But perish the thought that the coloured people should come to the Green and Pleasant Land
You know the full tally of woes against benefits? Did India land on the moon last month by affirming ‘Suti’ against imperial forbiddance? Do you have full knowledge of the quotient of love contained in the old empire and of successful stiffening of undeveloped tribes and peoples into inevitable ways and principles of defence as for some Pacific Islanders against later and barbarous Americans and Japanese? This is a great speech and a superlative delivery. Do not know the context but just hope it is not in defence of a commie takedown of nation by mass insemination of an alien and rebarbarative culture labelled as refugee to take in the cerebrally weaker sort and hideously destroy the children in the northern towns.
It''s a nice piece of verse and well rendered by Sir Ian, but what does it prove in the end? One can adduce great poetry to defend just about political viewpoint! In contrast to the idealistic Gandalf, I am AGAINST mass immigration, so I hereby call upon RUDYARD KIPLING to help make my case: "THE STRANGER WITHIN MY GATES" The Stranger within my gate, He may be true or kind, But he does not talk my talk- I cannot feel his mind. I see the face and the eyes and the mouth, But not the soul behind. The men of my own stock, They may do ill or well, But they tell the lies I am wanted to, They are used to the lies I tell; And we do not need interpreters When we go to buy or sell. The Stranger within my gates, He may be evil or good, But I cannot tell what powers control- What reasons sway his mood; Nor when the Gods of his far-off land Shall repossess his blood. The men of my own stock, Bitter bad they may be, But, at least, they hear the things I hear, And see the things I see; And whatever I think of them and their likes They think of the likes of me. This was my father’s belief And this is also mine: Let the corn be all one sheaf- And the grapes be all one vine, Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge By bitter bread and wine.
Shakespeare having made his case on the basis of humanity and common sense, having noted that were you in the position of the wretched strangers asking for little more than food and shelter, you too would hope that the shores upon which you washed were full of a kind and generous people; you have chosen to rebut Shakespeare's case by citing a worse poet, whose main point is that the stranger is not like him, does not speak his language, may yet be loyal to the evil emperor across the sea? I tell you, the presence of two languages spoken within a country is a security risk that can be quickly reconciled by having children grow up speaking both languages, within a generation to develop a new one! To say that the stranger is not like him, is that any excuse to treat the stranger with such unkindness as to see him shiver in the cold before your gates? It is your responsibility as a human to at least see him clothed and fed, and, if you are so worried of his presence, see him sped on his way to a new land with reassurances that you mean him no harm, and will not send him to a land where people are cruel! That is the very least you must do, and it is what Mexico does with the many passing through their lands, in the expectation that my country is led by people who are not so cruel as to let innocent strangers perish! Yet the case of the stranger being himself an inherent danger, without reference to what weapons he carries, the idea that his very presence is dangerous, even if he be a good man? What a pile of filth that Rudyard Kipling has heaped up and called a poem! What wretched cowardice, what base laziness that he would not even try to reconcile the stranger with the land he wishes to adopt! I thought of Kipling merely as a man so misguided as to believe that Europe was some paternalistic do-good organization in the midst of being a murderous empire, but to read this poem, in which he abdicates his responsibility to make a neighbor out of a stranger? Can this be the same man who wrote such a work of sophistication as "Kim?" Did he become wiser after writing this poem? What a pity that he chose to write this. I say without pause that this is the worst poem Kipling ever wrote. As for the case of the stranger, I will ask you: in all of recorded history, what people ever managed to change and overthrow the natives of a country without resorting to violence? Is there anywhere, anytime? Of all the subversions wrought by immigrants that I can think of, the Goths, the English colonists in America, the Saxons, the Spanish colonists in America, among the many, all of these were achieved with force of arms -- and Kipling wants me to believe that a singular immigrant may be a danger, as if he would remain loyal to the very emperor he fled. How likely is that? In recent days we have seen Kipling's fears come to light, in the case of immigrants BY ONES AND TWOS OUT OF MILLIONS. Do you really think they were motivated by loyalty to the old ways? I tell you, the sort of men who would do what they had done would have found any stupid excuse for it, for violent cruelty is done by men suffering humiliation who decide on their course first and then find an excuse. It is the child who is most honest when he proclaims to not know why he struck someone; it is the man who dissembles and comes up with some hoary nonsense like "he deserved it". And grant that these brutes are among the immigrants you let in. You think it unlikely that your own people harbors no men of the same description? What would you think, if your people were driven out of your own homeland by a disaster none of them could withstand, only to be told by residents of the land you fled to that you deserved no aid, no comfort, because there were one or two hideous fiends among you? The people who told you such a thing would, themselves, be the sort of people who visit violent cruelty upon other people, and then say to themselves, "surely they deserved it." How would you feel, to be thus used? As a final point I must note that the riot in question was the result of about sixty-four thousand people arriving in London over a period of more than two hundred years. That's roughly 320 people per year. If London can't handle that few immigrants per year, the fault lies with the character of its people, not the infrastructure of the city.
An Anglo-Indian-a stranger within India's gates-who worries that he cannot read the people he grew up around? I have an affection for Kipling, but let's not kid ourselves about the limits of his East-is-East-etc. mind. Ask Orwell: Imperialism makes Imperialists spend all their time trying not to be laughed at.
bullshit. This is not shakespeare. The speech is rather crudely written and does not have the ambiguity of shakespearean dialogue. It presents explicit statements that cannot be interpreted with layers of interpretation. This makes its literary style totally unlike anything in shakespeare’s plays. talented hackwork.
@@MrYorickJenkins No, it makes him look like a human being. Also, liberals aren't the left. Liberals would say it's a shame that people are suffering but unfortunately we can't do anything to help, but we will wear a rainbow badge while not doing anything to help. It's not a Shakespeare play. It's a bit written by Shakespeare as part of a collaboration. And your objection to it seems to be based on the idea that it expresses opinions you disagree with, which makes your objection very unreliable. Are you a Shakespeare expert, by the way? Because the people who said this was written by Shakespeare are.
