Read Online The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd - Free Book Online Page B

private meanings and study of his style demonstrates how he establishes parallels and contrasts while simultaneously trying to resolve thematic oppositions. He will often jot down two alternative phrases to express the same meaning, and moves from legal nicety to rhetorical amplification. Cresacre More has reported how he would make a quick or funny remark while remaining apparently serious, and how he ‘spoke alwaies so sadly that few could see by his looke whether he spoke in earnest or in jeaste’. 27 This is the author of
Utopia.
    More completed the second book, the description of ‘no-place’, while still in the Low Countries and then on his return, according to Erasmus, worked on a section of preparatory dialogue
‘ex tempore’
28 in odd moments of leisure. It shows signs of being hastily written and was conceived and composed at a time when More was indirectly involved in great changes within the affairs of state. Thomas Wolsey was rising to pre-eminence in the months
Utopia
was being finished, and by the time it was completed he had attained a position of settled superiority. It might even be said that Wolsey helped to inspire the first book of
Utopia
, concerned as it is with the condition of England, and there are indications that More originally intended to dedicate the work to him.
    More introduces himself as a character within this first section, which is couched as a debate or argument between himself and Hythlodaeus; and, since it takes the form of a dialogue, he is able to make specific points without necessarily affirming any opinion of his own. The cloak of invisibility was useful at the time, since in this introduction to anideal commonwealth he dramatises the objections of Raphael Hythlodaeus to the current state of English life. In particular Hythlodaeus objects to the penalty of death meted out to convicted thieves, when some form of restitution or public service would be preferable as a punishment, and launches a wholesale attack upon the policy of land enclosure for the rearing of sheep, which had led to the removal of fields for cultivation, the destruction of houses and the eviction of tenants. The central point here is that Wolsey was known to More as a reforming chancellor—and that More had every reason to suppose that Wolsey was about to act upon the problem of enclosure. The arguments of
Utopia
, then, might easily find a willing and receptive audience. More also includes an encomium upon the sagacity and statesmanship of his old patron John Morton, one of Wolsey’s predecessors as an ecclesiastical dignitary and Lord Chancellor, which might plausibly be seen as another sign of tacit approval or even flattery. By attacking foreign monarchs for their policy of war and previous monarchs for their habits of taxation, More is also able (through the voice of Hythlodaeus) to suggest the standards of polity which the new king of England might reasonably adopt.
    So there are two distinct, and distinctive, narratives within the same book; one remains practical and conversational, while the other is wholly abstract and theoretical. We may again call upon More’s knowledge of Plato, and his commentators, to elucidate this Janus-like form. There seems little doubt that he had read that philosopher’s
Parmenides
as well as his
Republic
if only because it uncannily anticipates the method of
Utopia
itself. Plato composed the first section of his now lesser-known dialogue in the manner of a debate between Socrates and Parmenides; there then follows a second section, in which Parmenides launches into a long theoretical argument which seems to be riddled with incoherence and inconsistency.
    The two great interpreters of the
Parmenides
were Marsilio Ficino, whom Colet reverenced, and Pico della Mirandola, whose biography More had translated. Ficino celebrated
Parmenides
as a holy work, to be approached with devotion; Pico della Mirandola, however, considered it to be a theoretical exercise in dialectics