Book i of Utopia (first published in 1516, in Latin) reports a debate between ‘More’ himself and Raphael Hythloday, a philosopher who, having returned from a visit to the island of Utopia, has a blueprint for the refoundation of western European societies. Despite his possession of this blueprint, however, Hythloday is unwilling to urge its application, since he has no faith in, and no time for, the machinations of political power. In particular, he has no time for rhetoric, since pure philosophy has a fundamental bias against rhetoric. Pure philosophy, that is, is disembodied and without place; it deals with abstract ideas, regardless of audience. Rhetoric, by contrast, is the art of persuasion: it urges the adoption of projects on specific, situated audiences, by specific, situated speakers. Rhetoric is intently focused on situation and place, whereas philosophy is utopian in the literal meaning of that word (‘no-place’).
In the course of the debate, which is itself very carefully situated in time and place (in the garden of the house where More stayed in Antwerp, during his embassy to Flanders in 1515), the question of rhetoric surfaces explicitly. Hythloday imagines a royal council session in which he would urge the example of the Macarians (neighbours of the Utopians): as a prophylactic against hoarding, the Macarians prohibit the King from keeping more than ?1,000 in his coffers at any one time. Counsel such as this, Hythloday rightly avers, would fall on deaf ears. More agrees, but proposes in response a modified, rhetorically situated philosophical practice. Pure philosophy might be appropriate for private conversation among friends, but it has no place in the councils of power. Pure philosophy, delivered without regard to the interests and capacities of its audience, would, More argues, be no less absurd than a philosopher’s appearance on stage in a comedy by Plautus. The slaves might be joking among themselves in a scene, when the philosopher suddenly, and absurdly, appears in the wrong place at the wrong time. There, even more absurdly, he declaims a philosophical passage from the pseudo-Senecan Octavia, about the Golden Age. Pure philosophy is almost by definition bad rhetoric, since it ignores what is perhaps the most fundamental rule of rhetoric, that of appropriateness, what rhetorical treatises called convenientia. A rhetorically inflected philosophy is aware of place and time. Generic decorum, and especially the decorum appropriate to theatrical performance, will be its model.
So the More figure rebuts Hythloday’s purist, a-rhetorical stance by arguing that, at the councils of kings, there is ‘no place’ (‘non est locus’) for the academic philosophy that thinks that everything is suitable to every place. But there is another, more civil philosophy (‘alia philosophia civilior’), more practical for statesmen, which ‘knows its stage, adapts itself to the play in hand, and performs its role neatly and appropriately’ (‘quae suam novit scenam, eique sese accommodans, in ea fabula quae in manibus est, suas partes concinne et cum decoro tutatur’; 1965: 99).
This section of the More-Hythloday debate is, then, about rhetoric versus pure philosophy. The terms of the debate might seem merely genteel: the unworldly, unrhetorical philosopher might seem ridiculous declaiming his speech among the servants, just as the rhetorically adept councillor might seem at best ineffective and humiliated, reduced as he is to playing, however skilfully, in base comedies. The worst that might befall either is embarrassment. The stakes, however, are very much higher than this would suggest, since both positions entail huge risks, and both court violence of one kind or another. Revolutionary Hythloday’s dismissal of rhetoric is correlative with his rejection of private property, since both rhetorical appropriateness and private property respect particular jurisdictions within the commonwealth. Hythloday would, instead, appropriate all private property for the state, an inevitably violent revolution.
The life of the rhetorically proficient philosopher advising the monarch is not without its own terrors: when More imagines the philosopher’s speech inappropriately declaimed in Plautus’ comedy, he refers to a specific speech, the ‘passage from the Octavia where Seneca is disputing with Nero’ (99). This reference is in fact chilling, since Octavia is a play bathed in blood, in which Nero, who has murdered his mother and will murder his concubine, arranges for the murder of his wife. Seneca’s part is nostalgically to remember the Golden Age as a time of ideal justice, just before his royal pupil Nero enters to order the heads of two ‘friends’. At the heart of More’s crucial argument for participation in government stands the example of the Stoic Seneca, whose suicide is the only viable response to his pupil’s violence (Simpson 2002:194).
The stakes in both ‘More’s’ and Hytholoday’s positions are high, and both positions had their historical fulfilment within half a generation of Utopias composition: the English state did violently appropriate private property on a massive scale between 1536 and 1539 (the suppression of the monasteries), and More, along with a number of other councillors, was executed by the very king who appointed them. More, who was considering entry into royal service as he composed Utopia, knew from early on that this was a dangerous game. According to William Roper’s biography of his father-in-law, The Life of Sir Thomas More (written c.1557, printed 1626), More often found himself on precarious ground from the moment he entered Henry’s service in 1518. Congratulated by Roper sometime around 1525 for his familiarity with Henry, More acknowledged the King’s singular favour, though also accurately predicted its distinct limits: ‘For if my head could win him a castle in France [...] it should not fail to go’ (Roper 1962: 208).
Rhetorical practice always implies social positioning, since rhetoric specifies the verbal rules for addressing and persuading particular groups, whether defined by age, gender, expertise, social class, religion, or any combination thereof. These social groupings produce a kind of theatricality in the speaker, whereby the orator plays certain roles for the time of the address. More, I argue in this chapter, is most at home in playing parts, exercising rhetoric from known positions to which he is certainly committed one way or another, but with which he cannot be wholly identified. He occupies positions, that is, each of which ‘knows its stage, adapts itself to the play in hand, and performs its role neatly and appropriately’ (More 1965: 99). He works best wearing the mask of the player. We enjoy his personality in the etymological sense of that word, which derives from the actor’s mask through which the voice resounds (per-sonare).
As we shall see, however, the possibilities for rhetorical play consistently drain from More’s position across his career. This is not so much because More himself takes on roles well outside the range of his position as secular lawyer, although he certainly does do that. It is rather because More experienced an increasingly menacing social environment, which demanded total, sincere, unequivocal, and consistent commitment to, and identification with, single positions. More was at his best in a culture of expert, shifting, rhetorical play, but found himself in a world that increasingly demanded unbending commitment. He ended up (or nearly ended up) the victim of unplayful philosophical and theological consistency under the punishing demands of ‘conscience’. This chapter is, then, less about the positions More adopted than the ways in which he adopted them; it is less about philosophy or theology than about rhetoric. Before we can understand the roles More played, however, it is first necessary to have some sense of the shape of More’s writing career, and the social and intellectual roles he might have been expected to play.
World History
