by Thomas More
Utopia: Interpretations
The debates about Utopia for the greater part of the twentieth century centred around its Communist or Catholic implications. Karl Kautsky’s Thomas More and His Utopia trans. H. J. Stenning (New York: International Publisher Co., 1927), was the first to see Utopia as a proto-Communist community; Chambers’s biography (for details of which see above) saw its moral as a Christian one. Russell Ames’s Citizen Thomas More and His Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949) was, like Kautsky, influenced by Marxist and socialist theory, while J. H. Hexter’s More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), attempted to mediate between the interpretations of the political left and right by proposing that a Christian humanist perspective generated Utopia, and that its main target is the sin of pride. See also Hexter’s The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli and Seyssel (London: Allen Lane, 1973). Extracts from all except the last of these are reprinted in the Norton edition of the text (for details of which see above), as is an extract from C. S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1954), which characterized Utopia as a jeu d’esprit, and Elizabeth McCutcheon’s ‘Litotes: Denying the Contrary’, which first appeared in the journal Moreana, 31–2 (1971), 116–21, and which is reprinted in R. S. Sylvester and G. P. Marc’hadour, (eds.), Essential Articles For the Study of Thomas More (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977). The journal Moreana itself is not very useful: it is hagiographical in its approach to More and his writings, and the articles which it prints are generally, although not always, uncritical. For a succinct discussion of approaches to Utopia prior to the publication of the Yale edition, see Quentin Skinner’s review, ‘More’s Utopia’, Past and Present, 38 (1967), 153–68.
The most influential account of Utopia in recent years has been Louis Marin’s, in his Utopiques jeux d’espaces (Paris: Minuit, 1973). For a brief synopsis of Marin’s general approach see the introduction to the present volume. To a greater or lesser degree, all of the following discussions of the text utilize the insights of Louis Marin: Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Christopher Kendrick, ‘More’s Utopia and Uneven Development’, boundary 2. 13.2–3 (1985), 233–66; Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). All are well worth reading.
A selection of other works of interest to the student of Utopia might include: Arthur Blaim, ‘The Text and Genre Pattern: More’s Utopia and the Structure of Early Utopian Fiction’, Essays in Poetics, 6 (1981), 18–53; John Freeman, ‘Discourse in More’s Utopia: Alibi/Pretext/Postscript’, ELH 59 (1992), 289–311; A. R Heiserman, ‘Satire in the Utopia’, PMLA 78 (1963) 163–74; A. Kenyon, ‘The Problem of Freedom and Moral Behaviour in Thomas More’s Utopia’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 21 (1983), 349–73; John N. Perlette, ‘Of Sites and Parasites: The Centrality of the Marginal Anecdote in Book 1 of More’s Utopia’, ELH 54 (1987), 321–52.
Francis Bacon, New Atlantis
Other Editions
The standard edition of the New Atlantis appears in volume 3 of The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. A. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (London, 1857–74). J. M. Robertson’s edition of the Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon (New York: Routledge, 1905) reproduces from the Spedding/Ellis edition a selection of the most important works, including the New Atlantis. Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), also includes a good selection of material. J. Weinberger’s edition of the New Atlantis contains a few textual inaccuracies, but includes a stimulating and unusual introduction to the text which is well worth reading: see J. Weinberger (ed.), The Great Instauration and New Atlantis (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1980).
Biographies and General Studies
William Rawley’s short Life of Bacon (in Robertson, above) was the first biography of Bacon; John Aubrey also has an essay on Bacon in his Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1987). A voluminous account of The Life and Letters of Bacon was published, in seven volumes, by James Spedding between 1861 and 1874. Anthony Quinton has a short chapter on Bacon’s life in his Francis Bacon for the Past Masters series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), and a clear account of the major presuppositions behind Bacon’s thinking, and the shifts in his reputation through the ages. Another good general account is provided by Mary Hesse in A Critical History of Western Philosophy, ed. D. J. O’Connor (London, 1964).
General Criticism, and Criticism of the New Atlantis
There are a number of accounts of Bacon’s contribution to scientific thought. Paolo Rossi’s Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. S. Rabinovitch, (London: 1968) treats his separation of science and religion. Antonio Perez-Ramos’s Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) is perhaps the most influential modern treatment of the subject. For discussions of the gendered nature of Bacon’s discourse on science see: Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Science and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); and Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983). Brian Vickers’s Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1968) includes two good introductions to Bacon’s scientific project: ‘Francis Bacon’s Philosophy of Science’, by Mary Hesse, and ‘Bacon’s Man of Science’, by Moody E. Prior. Essential Articles also includes three essays on Bacon’s power as a rhetorician. Other works treating of this aspect of his writing are: Stanley Fish’s Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Lisa Jardine’s Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: CUP, 1974); Brian Vickers’s Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: CUP, 1968); and W. A. Sessions (ed.), Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts (New York, 1990). On rhetoric and power, see Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric from the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). On Bacon as a politician, see the chapter on Bacon in John Michael Archer’s Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Finally, in Francis Bacon: History, Politics and Science, 1561–1626 (Cambridge: CUP, 1993) W. H. G. Wormald addresses Bacon’s conception of the relationship between nature and policy.
On the New Atlantis itself, the best contemporary article I know of is Denise Albanese, ‘The New Atlantis and the Uses of Utopia’, ELH 57 (1990), 503–28. Also interesting is J. Weinberger’s introduction to the text in his edition (see above). See also his ‘Science and Rule in Bacon’s Utopia: An Introduction to the Reading of the New Atlantis’, American Political Science Review, 70: 3, 7 (1976), 865–85. The following remain informative studies of the text and/or its relation to other early modern utopias: J. Bierman, ‘Science and Society in the New Atlantis’, PMLA 78 (1963), 492–500; E. Blodgett, ‘Campanella and the New Atlantis’, PMLA 46 (1931), 763–80; R. L. Colie, ‘Cornelius Drebbel and Salomon de Caus: Two Jacobean Models for Salomon’s House’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 18 (1954), 245–60.
Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines
Very little has been written on Henry Neville; still less on The Isle of Pines. Readers should be aware that some of the material on The Isle of Pines is written by people who have only read Pine’s narrative, and not Van Sloetten’s.
Other Editions
Two editions have been issued in English this century. The first is Worthington Chauncey Ford’s edition of the complete text, in his The Isle of Pines: An Essay in Bibliography (Boston: The Club of Odd Volumes, 1920). This was a very limited edition, and is hard to come by
. The other, easier to find, is in Philip Henderson’s Shorter Novels: Seventeenth Century (London: Dent, 1967), which prints only Pine’s narrative, and has misled some readers into thinking that this is the complete text.
Background and Criticism
A good introduction to English republicanism, which includes some material on Neville, is offered by Blair Worden in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought (Cambridge: CUP, 1991). Also relevant in this volume is J. P. Sommerville’s introduction to ‘Absolutism and Royalism’, and especially the section on patriarchalism. For more information on patriarchalism in the period, see Gordon J. Schochet’s Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975); for more on republicanism, see Perez Zagorin’s History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 1954); and for more on popular politics, see David Underdown’s Revel, Riot and Rebellion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
C. Robbins edited a reprint of Neville’s best known tract, Plato Redivivus, in Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge: CUP, 1969). Christopher Hill has some pages on Neville and his relation to the republican thinking of James Harrington in The Experience of Defeat (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), but mentions The Isle of Pines only to describe it as ‘a jovial glorification of polygamy’. This assumption that the text is a masculine fantasy is also held by James Holstun in his A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), and by Michael McKeon in The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). By far the best essay on the text that I know of, which argues against the commonly held assumption that The Isle of Pines is merely pornography, is Susan Wiseman’s ‘“Adam, the Father of all Flesh”, Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory In and After the English Civil War’, which appeared in the special issue of Prose Studies devoted to ‘Pamphlet Wars and Prose in the English Revolution’ (Prose Studies, 14 (1991), 134–57.
Other Utopian Literature
There is a vast range of texts which either are utopias or have utopian leanings: I list here only a few, which are either precursors of the early modern utopias included in this volume, or other examples of early modern utopian discourse. Two classical sources are Ovid on the Golden Age, in Metamorphoses, Book I; and Plato’s Republic. Augustine’s City of God may well have influenced More’s Utopia. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of the Caniballes’, influenced Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and can be found in good selections of Montaigne’s Essays. Tomaso Campanella’s La Città del Sole (City of the Son) is most closely related to, and possibly an influence on, Bacon’s New Atlantis. Neville may have had a hand in James Harrington’s Oceana—see The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: CUP, 1992).
On the Utopian Genre
Definitions of the utopian genre range from the extremely general to the very particular. Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel’s Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979) includes in its definition almost any printed text which invokes the possibility of a better world. Robert C. Elliot’s The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970) argues that utopia is a ‘secularization of the myth of the Golden Age’, which ‘entails a negative appraisal of present conditions’ and is inseparable from satire (p. 24). Elliott’s emphasis on the importance of reason and will in the construction of the utopia is adopted and elaborated by J. C. Davis, whose theory regarding the nature of the utopian genre is described at more length in the introduction to the present volume. See J. C. Davis, ‘The History of Utopia: The Chronology of Nowhere’, in Peter Alexander and Roger Gill (eds.), Utopias (London: Duckworth, 1984), 1–18, and, at greater length, in his Utopia and the Ideal Society: a Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700 (Cambridge: CUP, 1981). Darko Suvin argues that the utopia is a ‘verbal artifact’ located in this world, characterized by its manner of functioning as a literature of historical and cognitive estrangement. See Darko Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, in Mark Rose (ed.), Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1956), 57–71, and his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). ‘Estrangement’ is also a crucial term in Peter Ruppert’s Reader in a Strange Land (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1986); for Ruppert, utopian literature ‘works’ by initiating a hermeneutical dialectic between reader and text. The most influential modern critic of utopian literature is Louis Marin, whose claims are, like Davis’s, detailed briefly in the introduction to this volume. See Louis Marin, Utopiques, jeux d’espaces (Paris: Minuit, 1973). Marin’s ‘Theses on Ideology and Utopia’ are translated by Fredric Jameson in Minnesota Review, 6 (Spring 1976), 71–5, who also reviewed Utopiques in his ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’, Diacritics (June 1977), 2–21.
Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics
An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman.
An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman.
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Other Writings, ed. Paul Salzman.
John Bunyan, Grace Abounding and Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. John Stachniewski with Anita Pacheco.
—— The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble.
Plato, Republic, trans. and ed. Robin Waterfield.
William Shakespeare, TheTempest, ed. Stephen Orgel.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones.
CHRONOLOGIES OF THE AUTHORS
Thomas More
1478
6 or 7 February: born in Milk Street, Cheapside, London, second child and eldest son of Agnes, daughter of Thomas Graunger, and John More, gentleman and later (1520) judge of the King’s Bench.
1483
Edward IV dies; Richard III usurps throne. Luther born.
c.1485
Attends St Anthony’s School at Threadneedle Street, London, where fellow pupils include John Colet and William Latimer. Richard III defeated and killed at Bosworth Field; Henry VII becomes King.
1490
Apprenticed to the Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, John Morton (later Cardinal Morton), where he serves as a page for two years.
1492
Sent by Morton to Canterbury Hall, Oxford (later Christ-church), where his Greek studies are tutored by Thomas Linacre. Christopher Columbus discovers the New World.
1493
The Pope publishes a bull dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal.
1494
Enters New Inn (affiliated to Lincoln’s Inn) to train as a lawyer.
1495
Parliament passes act against vagabonds and beggars.
1496
12 February: admitted student of Lincoln’s Inn.
1497
Defeat of Cornish rebels at Blackheath, with huge loss of life.
1499
Meets Erasmus, then 30 years old. According to Roper, More considers priesthood, living as a brother (but without having taken vows) of London Charterhouse (the Carthusians, a very strict order; More wears a hair shirt and scourges himself). After about four years he decides against priesthood. Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci begin.
1500
Called to the Bar. Erasmus’s Adagia published.
1501
Made reader at Furnivall’s Inn. Lectures on Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (City of God)
1504/5
Marries Jane Colt of Newhall in Essex. Summoned as burgess to Parliament, where on several occasions he resists King Henry VII’s demands for new subsidies; in revenge (according to Roper) More’s father is fined by the King and imprisoned in the Tower of London. More travels abroad. Accounts of Vespucci’s voyages begin to appear in print.
1505
Daughter Margeret born. Erasmus visits More as his
guest.
1506
Daughter Elizabeth born. Publication of More’s translation (with Erasmus) into Latin of Lucian’s dialogues Cynicus, Philopseudes, and Menippus.
1507
Daughter Cicely born.
1508
Visits Universities of Paris and Louvain.
1509
Son John born. Death of Henry VII and accession to the throne of Henry VIII who marries his deceased brother’s wife, Catherine of Aragon. Beginnings of the slave trade. Erasmus writes The Praise of Folly.
1510
More made Under-Sheriff of London, at a salary of about £400 p.a. Publishes translation of Gherascho’s Life of Pico della Mirandola and some other pieces.
1511
Jane Colt dies. More married again, to Alice Middleton, widow with one daughter, one month after Colt’s death. Made Bencher of his Inn and called as reader there.
1512
Serves in Parliament as minister for London. War with France begins.
1513–18
Writes History of Richard III.
1515
15 May: sent on delegation to Bruges to negotiate on behalf of the King in a dispute concerning the wool trade. Continues to Antwerp. Whilst serving on this delegation, meets Peter Giles and composes Book 2 of the Utopia.
