Thomas More's Richard III: probing the limits of humanism

Abstract

The paper examines the ambiguous relation of Thomas More's The History of Richard III to humanist thought. My central contention is that the work reproduces the presuppositions of humanist discourse but at the same time challenges and subverts them. First I analyse the content of the text – its argumentation and its moral and political lessons – to demonstrate that it may legitimately be read in two contradictory ways. Richard III can be read as an unequivocal condemnation of an ‘external’ evil that overturns the natural order of things. This reading neatly places the text in the mainstream of didactic and moralistic humanist history. When, on the other hand, Richard III's more sinister passages and equivocal moments are highlighted, the text's implied message is that human politics are irredeemably corrupt, a message that contradicts the basic assumptions of humanist ethical and political thought. Secondly, in order to account for this ambiguity, I examine the text against the background of the conventions of the humanist genre of history. I try to demonstrate that while Richard III usually obeys the technical rules of the genre, it defies the genre's more basic assumptions. In particular, it undermines the humanist notion of rhetoric – the presiding idea of humanist history – and thus subverts the basic epistemological presuppositions of humanist discourse.