RSC Gunpowder Season - explosive Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas of dissent, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2005.

The incendiary story of Henry VIII's chancellor, Sir Thomas More, executed for failing to arrange Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon - in a version that shows the hand of Shakespeare, and yet was banned from performance in his lifetime.

In Thomas More, a play by Antony Munday, William Shakespeare and Henry Chettle, race riots flare up in London in response to the numbers of asylum seekers from Europe fleeing religious persecution. In an attempt to quell the uprising, Thomas More stakes all on a passionate plea for racial harmony.