The Stranger’s Case

Being older has advantages and disadvantages.

There is the experience, obviously. The perspective. The accumulated wisdom.

There is also waking up and immediately trying to remember where you put the paracetamol. Because your knees, legs, back or head already ache, this simple act of remembering can become the morning’s first major undertaking.

After more than fifty years, though, there is a growing appreciation of Shakespeare.

I may still need a guide to help me understand some of it, but I now get that there is elegance and power in those words. More than that, I am beginning to understand why the work remains relevant after four hundred years.

Take the current, uncomfortable issue of immigration. Shakespeare—or, more accurately, a contribution widely believed by scholars to be his—had something to say about it in Sir Thomas More.

The play survives as a collaborative manuscript. The passage known as the “Strangers’ Case” is written in what scholars call Hand D, probably Shakespeare’s own hand. It imagines Thomas More confronting a crowd demanding that immigrants be expelled from England.

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs and their poor luggage, plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation. What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught how insolence and strong hand should prevail, how order should be quelled.

Then the argument turns. What if the crowd themselves were banished? Where would they go, and what welcome would they hope to receive?

Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper that would not afford you an abode on earth? What would you think to be thus used? This is the strangers’ case.

That was written four centuries ago.

Have we changed very much? We have nicer houses and, perhaps, more understanding of other people. But has our nature changed deep down?

The biblical guidance is not especially vague. Leviticus says of the foreigner living among you: “Love them as yourself.” Hebrews calls for hospitality to strangers. In Matthew, Jesus says: “I was a stranger and you invited me in.” Romans simply tells us to practise hospitality.

The thread running through them is love and compassion offered without first demanding proof that somebody deserves it.

All of this made me think about the welcome we afford people—and the factors that determine when that welcome runs out.

As somebody setting out on nomadic journeys, I will often be a stranger in a strange place. I may stop or park the van somewhere its presence is questioned or openly objected to. That makes me wonder about the limits of welcome and the acceptance of even a short-term presence.

I am not running from persecution. I am mostly running from normality, which may be equally unacceptable to some people, though the consequences are clearly not equal.

Councils and other landowners increasingly try to prohibit even an overnight pause by people in vans, whether in car parks or other accessible places. Meanwhile, some pubs are returning to a role they held years ago as hostelries: places offering travellers food, rest and a safe place to stop for the night.

That contrast interests me.

Are van dwellers freeloaders who leave a mess behind them, party into the night and disturb everybody nearby?

Some are. A minority.

Most are looking for something else in this world. What they are looking for is as diverse as the people who already inhabit a place: quiet, movement, recovery, adventure, escape, focus—or simply somewhere to sleep before carrying on.

Hospitality does not mean abandoning boundaries. A welcome can still come with expectations: respect the place, leave no trace, keep the noise down and move on when it is time.

But perhaps the starting point matters.

Do we begin with the assumption that the stranger is a threat, a nuisance or somebody trying to take advantage? Or do we begin with curiosity and compassion, then judge them by what they actually do?

One day I will arrive in a place where I am not known, in a van that may not be wanted, hoping to be allowed a small patch of ground for one night.

That will be the stranger’s case.

And I wonder what sort of welcome I would give if the positions were reversed.

Further reading: The British Library on the manuscript of Sir Thomas More and the Folger Shakespeare Library on the Strangers’ Case.