The Ambivalent Heart: Thomas More's Merry Tales

Abstract

1IT IS A CURIOSITY of Thomas More’s career that although his early writings include clever epigrams, translations from the satirist Lucian, and jouncing verses about a sergeant who would be a friar, most of his prose ‘‘merry tales’’ (although some might say Utopia is itself a merry tale) are found in the polemics penned in hot anger at heresy and in the more serene Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation written in the cold Tower of London. At the very end, according to the anecdotes that circulated after his death, More even performed ‘‘merry tales,’’ or at least the ‘‘quick answers’’ that also figured in jestbooks and in discussions of wit by Cicero and others. After stumbling on the scaffold steps, runs one story, More told the executioner that he could use a hand when going up—but could manage for himself when coming down. Moving aside his long beard as he positioned his head on the block, says another tale, More explained that it had grown since his indictment and so had to be innocent. More’s enemies, one of whom had called him ‘‘Master Mock,’’ might read such humor as evidence of spiritual frivolity; others could see it as a sign of inner peace.2 One reason for More’s jesting, aside from personality and talent, is familiar from authorities on clever rhetoric and behavior such as Cicero, Quintilian, Castiglione, and Thomas Wilson. To joke when facing juries, political opponents, courtly competitors, angry heretics, worrisome rulers, or even shrewish wives is to signal a smiling urbanity—eutrapelia, the Greeks called it—that Renaissance jest-collectors such as Poggio liked to contrast with their critics’ blockish rusticity and that More himself seems to have hoped his readers would contrast with heretics’ seditious irrationality and, later, with Henry