The world-famous Shakespearean actor Ian McKellen would have you think so. But his take misses a lot.
Jeremy Egerer | April 19, 2026 www.americanthinker.com
William Shakespeare is the greatest poet in English history — but if you don’t know English history, you can easily be made to think he’s the worst.
To prove this, Sir Ian McKellen says, in a recent monologue on The Late Show with Steven Colbert,
It’s all happening 400 years ago, and in London there’s a riot happening — there’s a mob out in the streets. And they’re complaining about the presence of strangers in London. By which they mean the recent immigrants who’ve arrived there. And they’re shouting ... and complaining and saying that the immigrants should be sent home wherever they came from.
And the authorities sent out this young lawyer, Thomas More, to put down the riots, which he does in two ways — one by saying, you can’t riot like this: It’s against the law, so shut up and be quiet. And also, being by Shakespeare, with an appeal to their humanity. And in order to set it up, I’m going to have to ask somebody to shout, “The strangers should be removed.”
Somebody shouts it, and then he launches on a beautiful monologue from Sir Thomas More — which you really should see for yourself.
It goes,
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.
He goes on later, with an appeal to The Golden Rule,
You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip him like a hound.
Say now the king (As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
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.
Here is the greatest case in the English language, I think, for helping refugees, and a reminder that in the majority of men, the love of justice is simply the fear of suffering injustice.
But there’s just one problem.
What Colbert and Sir Ian McKellen missed here — probably on purpose — is that Shakespeare was writing about Evil May Day. This was May 1st, 1517, when English rioters, impelled by jealousy and greed, went around town, dragging lawful German and Flemish business owners out of bed, smashing up their shops, and beating them up. Some sources estimate that around a dozen victims died.
In Shakespeare’s time (almost a century after the riots), this monologue would have been relevant — so relevant, in fact, that the royal censor banned it. Over the past generation, the Huguenots had fled France and settled in England. There was a religious war raging between the Catholics and Protestants across the continent, and one that was so sanguine that Catholics had gotten up in the middle of the night in France, formed into mobs, and proceeded to kill as many Protestant neighbors as possible. This was known as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, now inconceivable in Europe. We have a hard time imagining our ancestors doing it.
During this period, there weren’t just “hard times” in Paris. The likelihood that Protestants would be jailed or murdered (or worse) was extremely high. And they had no legal recourse, because the violence wasn’t only supported by the government, but many times instigated by it.
What this means is that most of the refugees in Shakespeare’s day were families. They were of the same religion as the English — and almost guaranteed, due to persecution, to be sincerely religious. They shared a common enemy with the English. There was no modern welfare system in Shakespeare’s England, so they couldn’t be coming to leech off the system. Thus, the English weren’t upset about an influx of criminals; they were worried about being outclassed by an influx of skilled and religious artisans. This would be almost comparable, in our day, to an influx of Ukrainian doctors, engineers, MBAs, and techies. In Shakespeare’s day, there was grumbling, but the royal censor made sure nobody acted like his grandparents. He commanded Shakespeare to “leave out the insurrection wholly and the cause thereof.”
Thus, though Colbert’s and McKellen’s timing draws an obvious parallel between Shakespeare’s rioters and Republicans, the difference between Shakespeare’s day and ours couldn’t be more stark. First of all, a large chunk of our immigrants today came against the laws. We’re getting not families, but hordes of single, military-aged men. Most of our migrants are coming from the poorest and least educated classes of the poorest and least educated nations. We don’t share a border with the great majority of illegals. We don’t share a common race or heritage with the great majority of legal immigrants, either. We don’t have a common enemy, and in fact, according to our leftists, the common enemy of the new foreigners is white Americans and Republicans. Oh, and Venezuela emptied its prisons and sent all its rapists to us.
We are currently housing large chunks of illegal aliens in our prisons — according to the Bureau of Prisons, foreign nationals make up around 16% — and the riots we see happening are mostly by Democrats to keep foreign criminals in house. Due to our laws, migrants get access to food stamps and social security, and many illegal aliens get free medical care — adding time to wait lists and driving up the prices drastically for natives. News about immigrants raping children, or drunk-driving over pedestrians, or butchering innocents, is routinely and notoriously buried. And finally, it can be proved that no mass violence — ever, during my entire life — has ever been staged by our natives against immigrants. To put it simply, we’re on the receiving end of a beating, not in the process of dishing one out.
Not only does this make Sir Ian McKellen’s parallel slanderous; it makes it stupid. It’s an abuse of Shakespeare one could expect from an American ignoramus, or maybe from one of Shakespeare’s villains — maybe Macbeth’s wife or Othello’s Iago. But certainly not from a Shakespearean actor. And certainly not from the man who played Gandalf — a wise, noble old wizard who drove invaders back to Mordor and sent even more of them to meet Jesus.
Shakespeare’s play was banned by the law because it hit too close to home. If Shakespeare were to live here a few years and see McKellen’s monologue, I doubt he’d know which home Colbert’s show was trying to hit. But it’s apparent that with our home, Colbert doesn’t really know it; and if he does know it, it’s pretty clear he doesn’t love it. Two things nobody could say about Shakespeare in his day without getting hooted off a soap-box.
