THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

playing the role of a sophisticated and elusive ‘fool’. It is both an experimental intellectual exegesis in the manner of
Plato and a ballon d’essai, which has since managed to appeal to an extraordinarily wide range of political opinion
(always excepting the Machiavellian). It functions on the principle of juxtaposed and often antithetical ideas, not as a
blueprint for future social experiment. During the years 1514-18, when More was at work on Utopia, he was also
engaged on what proved to be an unfinished History of King Richard III (a text which after its belated publication in
1557 helped shape the prejudices of Shakespeare’s play). This History, written in parallel English and Latin texts,
suggests that More was a careful student of the techniques of ancient Roman historians as well as an assembler of
anecdotes drawn from contemporary witnesses, prominent amongst whom was his boyhood patron, Cardinal Morton.
For More, Richard III is the type of the tyrant, a man physically and mentally corrupted, ‘close and secrete, a deepe
dissimuler, lowlye of counteynaunce, arrogant of heart, outwardly coumpinable [friendly] where he inwardely hated,
not letting to kisse whome he thoughte to kyll’. Richard embodies the shortcomings of a monarchic government and
twists the web of loyalties centred on the person of the king for his own benefit. Utopia, initially set in the semiautonomous
cities of the Netherlands, speculates about a form of government alien to most other European states of
the early sixteenth century. The island which Hythlodaeus describes is a loosely decentralized kingdom ruled by a
shadowy, elected monarch who governs with the consent of a council of the great and good. Personal property, money,
and vice have been effectively abolished and the root-causes of crime, ambition, and political conflict have been
eliminated. It has several religions, all of them officially tolerated, and all of them dominated by the principle of a
benevolent Supreme Being. Its priesthood, which includes some women, is
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limited in numbers because it is open only to the exceptionally pious, ‘which means there are very few’. It is a proto-
Welfare State in which the old are honoured and the young are taught to be conformist and respectful; dress is
uniform and meals are served in communal canteens. The more we know of it, the more Utopia emerges as a society
of improbable virtue and equally improbable high-mindedness. It is in fact controlled by a self perpetuating oligarchy
which ultimately functions with the consent of the acquiescent mass of the population and with the forced labour of
slaves, disfranchised dissidents, and convicts. Utopia’s political and social blessings are countered by its uniformity
and its timelessness. It is a place which has abolished original sin, the prospect of redemption, and the idea of history.
Nothing changes because its ideology insists that it has fulfilled all human aspirations. For a Christian reader of
More’s own historical period this ‘ideal’ must have lain in the realm of the purest and most secular fantasy. Utopia
should in fact be considered in terms of its exclusive address to a highly educated Renaissance élite. More’s ‘folly’
ended bloodily when he attempted to define Europe according to historically Roman and Catholic boundaries and his
King according to the frontiers of national sovereignty; by 1535 the un-placed Utopia must have seemed little more
than whimsical speculation.
Although More personally fostered the education of his daughter Margaret, he saw the constitution of Utopia as
founded on the rule of the oldest male in each household and on the due submission of wives to their husbands. Few
humanists were prepared to contemplate the removal of social and educational discrimination against women. Certain
well-placed women, notably Henry VIII’s daughters Mary and Elizabeth, and their cousin, the brief pretender to
Mary’s throne, Lady Jane Grey, were given broad and sophisticated educations as a preparation for their public lives,
but relatively few other women, even those born into aristocratic households, progressed beyond the acquisition of
literacy and the rudiments of Latin. A challenge, led by Erasmus, to older aristocratic prejudices about the instruction
of boys, and a desire to extend learning beyond the confines of the clergy, remained, however, one of the central
pillars of humanist, and later both Protestant and Jesuit, educational thought. In a society which, with the exception of
the persons of the two Tudor Queens, was exclusively dominated by men, the attention of humanist educators was
focused on the creation of a cultivated male élite, a ruling class mentally equipped to rule.
The literate and moderately well-educated Henry VIII was the first king of England to write and publish a book - a
Latin attack on Luther, known as the Assertio septem sacramentorum -which earned him and his successors the papal
title of ‘Defender of the Faith’. Henry was also, in a self consciously political way, a patron of literature, which was
recognized and honoured in the formal dedications to him of reprinted English classics, of geographical and
topographical treatises, and of certain offshoots of the new learning, such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s pioneer Latin-
English Dictionary of 1538. In 1531 Elyot
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(?1490-1546) had also inscribed the ‘Proheme’ of his most influential work, The Boke named the Governour, to a
King noted for his ‘benevolent inclination towards the universall weale’ of his subjects. The chief concern of Elyot’s
book was to demonstrate to a ruling aristocracy that the common good of the realm depended on the proper education
of a male upper class. He did not dispute the inherited principle of a single ‘soveraigne governour’ from whom