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Satire in the Utopia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Fifth Dealer: And now, what are the main features of your philosophy?
Socrates: Ideas and types of things. All that you see, the earth and all that is upon it, the sky-each has its counterpart in the invisible world.
Fifth Dealer: And where are they?
Socrates: Nowhere. Were they anywhere, they were not what they are.
—Lucian, Sale of Creeds
Some admirers of More's Utopia have used the term “satire” to prove that it is essentially a jeu d'esprit. Others have used it to contend that Utopia is essentially a serious didactic argument. But while both schools of criticism use the term “satire” to wrestle with the problems presented by Utopia's form and technique, neither has employed it consistently to resolve the major problems raised by More's little book. How is one to reconcile More's “real intention” (however defined) with his “manner of alternating seriousness and parody?” Why should a canonized Lord Chancellor ever have constructed an “ideal” commonwealth so manifestly antithetical to his orthodoxy? Can the textual and personal sources of More's ideas explain Hythloday's arguments in Book I, or the institutions of Utopian society? These questions remain after half a century of intense scholarship and impassioned appraisal. The latest and most exhaustive study of More's book, having explicitly separated Utopia's “matter” from its “style and form,” concludes that “dashes of wit, satire, and irony add zest to [Utopia's] perusal but make its interpretation intriguing and perplexing … Utopia, it seems almost futile to say, is a complex and enigmatic book.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963
References
1 H. W. and F. G. Fowler, trans., The Works of Lucian of Samosata, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1905), I, 198.
2 See Claude Jenkins, Sir Thomas More (Canterbury, 1935), pp. 19–20; Christopher Hollis, Sir Thomas More (London, 1934), pp. 73–83; H. W. Donner, Introduction to Utopia (London, 1945), pp. 16–17.
3 Satire usually being considered as a protective disguise. See Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York, 1927), pp. 246–249; Russell Ames, Citizen Thomas More and His Utopia (Princeton, 1949), pp. 4–5; Theodore Maynard, Humanist as Hero: The Life of Sir Thomas More (New York, 1947), p. 85. Others deny that Utopia is a satire: E. M. G. Routh, Sir Thomas More and His Friends (London, 1934), p. 67; J. H. Hexter, More's ‘Utopia’: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton, 1952), p. 63.
4 Donner, p. 57.
5 Following R. W. Chambers' Thomas More (London, 1935), many scholars have answered this question by treating the work as “essentially a document of the English Renaissance of the Pre-Reformation” (Edward Surtz, S.J., The Praise of Pleasure, Harvard, 1957, p. 3). See also Hexter, pp. 55 ff; Robert P. Adams, “The Philosophical Unity of More's Utopia,” SP, XXXVIII (1941), 45–64.
6 Surtz, pp. 192–193.
7 Sir Philip Sidney uses Utopia to distinguish poetic from philosophical teaching, comparing it with the Aeneid. (The Defense of Poesy, p. 277, in Hebel and Hudson, Prose of the English Renaissance.)
8 The Epistles of Erasmus, F. M. Nichols, trans. (London, 1904), ii, 503, Epistle 519. Hereafter referred to as Nichols.
9 Nichols, ii, 611, Epistle 596.
10 The Praise of Folly, Hoyt Hudson, trans. (Princeton, 1941), pp. 3–4.
11 Nichols, iii, 398, Epistle 585b.
12 Praise of Folly, p. 4.
13 Ibid., p. 3.
14 Nichols, Epistle 317. See Leonard F. Dean, trans., The Praise of Folly (New York, 1946), p. 2.
15 Praise of Folly, p. 4.
16 Erasmus distinguishes good satire from such works, ibid., pp. 2,4.
17 More's epistolary allusions to Utopia betray the double anxiety felt by Erasmus—that his work might be misunderstood, and that it is comparatively speaking a minor matter (Nichols, Epistle 471).
18 See Craig Thompson, The Translations of Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca, N. Y., 1940), pp. 24–27.
19 Edward Surtz acutely analyzes this letter in “More's Apologia Pro Utopia Sua,” MLQ, xix (1958), 319–324.
20 All references are to The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, J. H. Lupton, ed. (Oxford, 1895), with page numbers in parentheses in my text. Lupton prints the Basel edition with Robynson's translation.
21 See J. F. Duff, Roman Satire (Berkeley, Calif., 1936), pp. 11–14.
22 This letter to Lupset (Lupton, lxxx-xcii) is preceded by a note from Erasmus (lxxvii-lxxix), in which Erasmus praises More and commends himself to the family of his addressee, Froben.
23 Lupton, xcii-iv [my translation]. Such riddles were common in earlier attacks against the follies of the times. See my Skelton and Satire (Chicago, 1961), Ch. iv.
24 Hexter's excellent analysis of Utopia's history and structure owes much to this tradition, which also derives from Erasmus' saying that More “had written the second book at his leisure, and afterwards, when he found it was required, added the first off-hand. Hence there is some inequality in the style” (Nichols, in, 398). Whether More's leisure was at Antwerp or London he does not say.
25 John Skelton defends his own satiric style by explaining that it is neither aureate nor rude but plain and truthful. See Skelton and Satire, Ch. v.
26 Authors who report the journeys of travelers (Walter Map, Langland, Chaucer, Skelton, the anonymous satirists) take special pains to define their styles as lowly. Ibid.
27 As do John of Salisbury, Map, Alain Chartier, Aeneas Sylvius, Skelton. Ibid., Ch. ii.
28 Busleyden's letter, which was placed after Book n in the Basel edition (313–319), praises More's condemnation of courts, laws, private property, the times, etc.
29 Nichols, iii, 398.
30 The circular arrangement of the interlocutors in The Courtier, and the coming of a dawn at the end of Book IV, express the dialogue's themes. The dramaturgy in satiric colloquies by Lucian and Erasmus is not so subtle.
31 This outsider was one of the most common characters in earlier dream-visions and satires: Map's Bishop Golias, the Dreamer in Piers the Plowman, “Geoffrey” in Chaucer's Hous of Fame, the lollard priest in the fifteenth-century Plowman's Tale, Drede in Skelton's Bowge of Court. See Skelton and Satire, Chs. ii and v.
32 Most early complaints against the times are couched in riddles and prophecies. Lydgate's The Cok Eath Lowe Shoone and Skelton's Speak, Parrot are centered on nonsense-babbling birds.
33 Hythloday's observation that “shepe … eate up and swallow down the very men themselves” had long been a staple joke. Map varied it early by complaining that the clergy feed upon their sheep rather than feed them.
34 Skelton and Satire, Ch. v.
35 See F. W. Fairhold, ed., Satirical Songs and Poems on Costume (Percy Society, vol. XXVII, 1849).
36 Like the Utopians, the Polylertians are isolated, are governed by natural law, are content with “lyffe… commodyous rather than gallawnte, … happye … then notable.”
37 Both question and answer are like those in Skelton's Why Come Ye Not to Court? Skelton's righteous conservatism is also futile in the reign of Wolsey's wilfulness.
38 The Cardinal quotes scripture, but so does the friar, twisting terms with the casuistry attacked by anti-clerical satires.
39 Skelton worked with the former genre in his Bowge of Court, with the latter in Magnyfycence.
40 Skelton's Speak, Parrot condemns wide-spread disorder, while his Colyn Cloute ascribes that “hoder-moder” to a proud prelacy.
41 Surtz has revealed the sources of these ideas in political and ethical doctrines. The Praise of Pleasure, Chs. xiv and xv.
42 Nichols, iii, 398.
43 We can sometimes see their attempts to clarify their attacks without destroying their fictions. The MS version of Skelton's Speak, Parrot contains a series of envoys written “off-hand” which attack more and more plainly the objects condemned by “deliberate confusion” in the first half of the poem.
44 It is a sort of democracy, though it precludes that disordered pursuit of gain and freedom which characterizes Plato's democratic state.
45 George B. Parks, in “Utopia and Geography,” JEGP, xxxvii (1938), 224–237, makes a good case for More's placing Utopia in a position directly antipodal to Europe and perhaps even to England.
46 368D-369A. (B. Jowett, trans., Modern Library, pp. 58–59.)
47 Ibid., p. 360.
48 For Plato's deliberate absurdities, which reveal the inherent disorder of the Atlantean state, see R. S. Brumbaugh, Plato's Mathematical Imagination (Bloomington, Ind., 1954), pp. 47–59.
49 Or it may derive from the fifty-two shires of England and Wales, plus Richmond and London (Lupton, p. 119). Like Utopia, the Magnesian colony is based on the principle that “friends have all things in common”; it is like a family; not even eyes are private; its population surplus forms new colonies; gold and silver used only for foreign trade, never in the colony; travel abroad only with permission of the magistrates; infrequent legal actions; no wealth or poverty; main city is walled and in colony's center; and the Athenian Stranger, like King Utopus, laments that harbors admit depraved manners into the state (Laws, 729–745).
50 At the maximum, and leaving out the harbor which extended forty miles inland.
51 Even the frontispiece of the first three editions seems to portray Atlantis rather than Utopia. It shows an island cut into concentric circles by a river, not the circular yet crescent-shaped island described by More (p. 115).
52 Thus, oxen are work-animals in Utopia because they can be eaten “when they be past labour” (p. 123).
53 So exact and antipodal is Utopian rationality that their chicks follow men rather than hens (p. 122).
54 Amaurote's broad streets, well-tended gardens, carefully constructed houses with glass windows, and its city-stream as clean as the Fleet is filthy, all make these contrasts.
55 His description of well-conducted Utopian councils (pp. 137–138) attacks the disordered councils of Europe with the same technique.
56 The starved slavery of laborers and the idle luxury of gentlemen, for example, are not merely effects of a “new capitalist system of economics” (Donner, p. 59), but of More's generic object, private property.
57 The Utopian employment of gold for chamber-pots, toys, and chains for prisoners (pp. 171–176) reveals the topsy-turvy values of Europe. But money is so important in More's satire that he invents anecdotes, bringing on ambassadors from Windy (Anemolia) to mock perverted love of gold and jewels (pp. 177–181). Humanists would appreciate that the homogeneous purity of the Utopian language (pp. 183–184) would reflect the natural order of their state, and would enjoy the Utopians' natural dislike of abstruse logic (the Small Logicals is a specific object here (pp. 184–185)) and astrology.
58 The Utopian facility in learning (pp. 211–219) is also meaningful in that it attacks the pride which preserves ignorance (p. 220).
59 Utopian criminals have few excuses (p. 222), instigators as well as committers of crimes are punished (pp. 225, 231), and bondage is not only just but profits the commonwealth (p. 230)—all in contrast with Europe.
60 In Europe premarital and adulterous liaisons are rife but go unpunished; in Utopia they are infrequent and heavily punished. In Europe marriage is begun and preserved blindly; in Utopia fiancés can prevent mistakes by viewing one another's naked bodies and can separate for just cause.
61 In Utopia natural fools are treated humanely and their mockers condemned, while in Europe they are treated cruelly and their mockers applauded (pp. 231–233).
62 More uses this device of diction sparingly in Utopia because his via diversa makes it unnecessary. Cf. Leonard F. Dean, “Literary Problems in More's Richard III,” PMLA, Lviii (1943), 22–41.
63 To populate wastes, to punish unjust enemies, to destroy tyrannies (pp. 243–246). See the illuminating discussion in Edward Surtz, S.J., The Praise of Wisdom (Chicago: Loyola Univ. Press, 1957), chs. xvii and xviii.
64 What results are some practices which More may later describe as “very absurd” (p. 307): bribery, mercenaries, assassinations, feints, raising up pretenders, etc. (pp. 248-255). But not only do Utopian ends justify these means, so do More's subordinate satiric intentions: European deceits differ from those of the Utopians only in that they are hypocritical and employed for irrational ends; the bestiality of Swiss mercenaries (Zapoletes) extends to selling their lives for pennies (pp. 252–255), etc.
65 See Skelton and Satire, Ch. v.
66 Grace and Christ's communism attract many converts to Christianity; but even a Christian preacher is punished “as a rayser vp of dessention amonge the people” (p. 27) when he grows fanatical.
67 By this method More also attacks fear of death (Utopians who fear it are shamed, those who rejoice in it are praised) and auguries (pp. 276–279).
68 It is perhaps to enforce these satiric inversions that he invents a few female priests for the Utopians (p. 285).
69 Some details—the lunary calendar (p. 289), churches without images or sacraments to express one divinely revealed dogma (pp. 291–292)—preserve the logic of his fiction. Other details, showing that all aspects of Utopian churches conduce to prayer (pp. 289–298), continue the attack.
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