ABSTRACT
In 1516 Sir Thomas More (1480–1535), later Lord Chancellor of England and in due course beatified and canonized saint, whom John Colet called “the one genius which Britain possesses,” wrote his Utopia. Significantly, it was published, not in England, but in Latin at Louvain. It is the last authentic production of the Respublica Christiana, “the saddest of fairy tales,” comparable to Gulliver’s Travels. It is one of that series of imaginative sketches, since Plato “painted” his Republic, that includes Campanella’s City of Sol (1623) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), as well as more practical Tudor tracts, and that ends in the “Persian Letters,” and stories of “the Chinese” which were the delight of the eighteenth century. It was a Platonic exercise in the days of the Platonic Renaissance. If, however, Plato never intended his Republic as a Utopia but as a practicable scheme, More never intended his Utopia as a republic, although “like to Plato’s city,” but as a satire on contemporary perversities of government and manners, cloaked from the suspicious eye of absolutism by the charm of its story and literary style. Essentially it is a morality play.
I doubt not that either the respect of every man’s private commodity [utility] or else the authority of our Saviour Christ … would have brought all the world long ago into the laws of this weal public, if it were not that one only beast, the princess and mother of all mischief, pride, doth withstand and let it. She measureth not wealth and prosperity by her own commodities, but by the misery and incommodities of other (Robinson’s trans., 1556).
