Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T08:46:21.942Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Literary Problems in More's Richard III

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Leonard F. Dean
Leonard F. Dean*
Affiliation:
The Tulane University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Sir Thomas More's History of Richard III has been adequately studied as an historical document, but not as a work of literature; and yet since the time of Ascham it has been praised chiefly and properly for its literary qualities. It is the purpose of this article, therefore, to discuss some of the important literary problems presented by Richard III. An attempt will be made to show how closely More's narrative conforms to classical theory and to what extent it is imitative of classical histories. Of chief concern, however, will be More's use of irony. It will be evident throughout that his approach to history writing was that of a Christian humanist.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 1943 , pp. 22 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1943

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 By A. F. Pollard, “The Making of Sir Thomas More's Richard III,” Historical Essays in Honour of James Tate (Manchester, 1933), pp. 223–238.

2 Ascham, Works, ed. J. A. Giles (London, 1864), iii, 5–6: a letter to John Astley, 1552. Ascham predicates that a history should be a true, orderly account of events and their causes, that the historian should comment upon the merits of motives, counsels, and actions, should note general lessons “of wisdom and wariness,” and should stress “the inward disposition of the mind” as did Thucydides, Homer, and especially Chaucer. More's Richard III, concludes Ascham, “doth in most part, I believe, of all these points so content all men, as, if the rest of our story of England were so done, we might well compare with France, or Italy, or Germany, in that behalf.” One notices the presence of Homer and Chaucer among historians, and wonders also whether Ascham was thinking of the similarity between More's and Chaucer's use of irony in character portrayal.

Even Pollard (op. cit., pp. 230–231) admits that since More's purpose was to write dramatically, criticism of his factual errors is sometimes irrelevant. Yet he comments sarcastically, for instance, upon the improbability of More's dramatic version of Edward's dying speech.

3 This is the date given by Rastell for the Latin version. Internal evidence indicates that neither the Latin nor the English version could have been begun before 1509, and that they may have been worked on as late as 1517. Cf. R. W. Chambers, “The Authorship of the ‘History of Richard III’,” More's English Works (London, 1931), i, 34 and 37.

4 In 1501. Stapleton states that “he did not treat this great work from the theological point of view, but from the standpoint of history and philosphy; and indeed the earlier books … deal with these two subjects almost exclusively….” The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, tr. P. E. Hallett (London, 1928), p. 9.

Augustine's greatly influential statement of the providential theory of history is interesting in connection with More's treatment of the de casibus example.

5 In 1505? More's purpose, according to Stapleton (op. cit., pp. 9–10), was chiefly self-guidance. He had just decided against becoming a priest, and Pico appealed to him as a man who successfully combined “encyclopedic knowledge and … sanctity.” The preoccupation with the task of harmonizing the Christian and classical attitudes is evident in Richard III.

6 In 1505–06. More contributed translations of Cynicus, Menippus or Necromantia, Philopseudes, and Tyrannicida, with an original declamation in answer. Between 1503 and 1517 Erasmus translated thirty-six of Lucian's writings. Cf. Craig Thompson, The Translations of Lucien by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca, New York, 1940).

7 For history in the schools, see especially Foster Watson, Vives: On Education (Cambridge, 1913); W. H. Woodward, Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education (Cambridge, 1904), and Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators (Cambridge, 1905); and J. A. Gee, The Life and Works of Thomas Lupset (Yale Univ. Press, 1928), pp. 88–89.

8 Cf. T. C. Burgess, “Epideictic Literature,” Univ. of Chicago Studies in Classical Philology, iii (1902), 195–213. For the continuation of the tradition among the early Italian humanists, many of whose writings were known in England in More's time, see Remigio Sabbadini, Il metodo degli umanisti (Firenze, 1922), Cap. viii: “Storiografia.” The tradition was carried to England in person by Polydore Vergil, who began his Anglica historia shortly after 1501 and published it in 1534. A satisfactory comparison of Polydore's theory and method of history-writing with More's must await the appearance of a critical edition of the Historia, which has been promised. The important Vatican MS. is a first draft in Polydore's own hand, which was written in 1512–13 and ends in 1513. Cf. Denis Hay, “The Manuscript of Polydore Vergil's ‘Anglica Historia’,” EHR, liv (1939), 240–252.

9 Although not translated by More or Erasmus, it was in the edition of Lucian which they used. The story of Diogenes at the opening of Utopia may be from it. It was translated into Latin by Pirckheimer (Nuremberg, 1515), to whom More had dedicated his Epigrammata.

10 The Works of Lucian of Samosata, tr. H. W. and F. G. Fowler (Oxford, 1905), ii, 118, 131–133.

11 Ibid., pp. 126–127.

12 The traditional distinction between the historian and the compiler was well established. Bacon observed, a century after More, that a great inconvenience in historical composition in his time was the lack of adequate chronicles or catalogues of brute facts upon which the historian could exercise his powers of interpretation and synthesis.—Preface to Henry VII, Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (Boston, 1860–64), xi, 35.

This distinction is also important in the controversy over the authorship of Richard III. There has never been any reasonable doubt that the extant versions are More's, but it has been suggested that his source was written and fairly elaborate, and that, in short, he may have done little more than reproduce a composition by Morton or someone else. Cf. W. G. Zeeveld, “A Tudor Defense of Richard III,” PMLA, lv (1940), 946–957. This cannot be settled without further external evidence, but certainly it was considered proper in More's time for an historian to use a previous chronicle as the basis for his literary and interpretative treatment. It should be clear from the present discussion that a great merit of Richard III is its literary excellence, and that probably More alone was responsible for that excellence.

13 Works, tr. Fowler, pp. 119–120, 123. Cf. T. C. Burgess, op. cit., pp. 200–201.

14 Tr. Fowler, p. 134.

15 Ibid., pp. 113–116, 120, 121, 124, 125, 129–130.

16 Cf. T. C. Burgess, op. cit., p. 124.

17 Tr. Fowler, p. 130.

18 Ibid., p. 122.

19 Eduard Feuter, Histoire de l'historiographie moderne, tr. Émile Jeanmaire (Paris, 1914), pp. 20, 21, 27, 198–199. Cf. Emilio Santini, “Leonardo Bruni Aretini e i suoi ‘Historiarum Florentini populi libri xii‘,” Annali della R. Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, xxii (1910), 47–48, 114–116.

20 Op. cit., p. 15. He tells us also (p. 104) that Sallust was used as a textbook in More's household.

21 The historical reading of a mature scholar would differ, of course, from that prescribed for a schoolboy, and there is some evidence that Tacitus, and especially Thucydides, would be ranked by More's humanist contemporaries than this list indicates. This is important in connection with More's use of irony; consequently their histories as well as those listed above have been compared with Richard III. There is, for example, the item “Cornelius Tacitus” in the catalogue of Grocyn's library made in 1520 by William Linacre (Collectanea, Oxf. Hist. Soc., sec. ser., pt. v, 1890). This was probably the Tacitus purchased in 1521 for Corpus Christi. See J. R. Liddell, “The Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the Sixteenth Century,” The Library, n. s., xviii (1938), 385–416. Dorne, in 1520, records (no. 1811) “Cornelius Tacitus nouus magnus in quaternis.” See “Day-Book of John Dorne,” ed. F. Madden, Collectanea, Oxf. Hist. Soc., first ser., 1885. Corpus Christi had two copies of Thucydides by 1538 (Liddell, op. cit.); one copy is listed in Linacre's will (1534) according to J. N. Johnson, The Life of Thomas Linacre (London, 1835), p. 344; and John Clement, More's protégé, owned three copies before 1549 as shown in A. W. Reed, “John Clement and his Books,” The Library, vi (1925–26), 329–339. Thucydides was one of the Aldine Greek historians prized by the Utopians (Bk. ii, chap. vi.).

22 Two passages in Sallust have the closest parallels in Richard III. The first, somewhat of a sterotype, is a characterization of Jugurtha at the climax of his bloody career, after he has murdered Bomilcar and other former confederates.

But from that time forward Jugurtha never passed a quiet day or night; he put little trust in any place, person, or time; feared his country men and the enemy alike; was always on the watch, started at every sound; and spent his nights in different places, many of which were ill suited to the dignity of a king. Sometimes on being roused from sleep he would utter outcries and seize his arms; he was hounded by a fear that was all but madness. [Tr. J. C. Rolfe (Loeb Classical Library, London, 1921), pp. 287–289.]

Richard suffers in a similar fashion after he has climaxed his crimes with the murder of the young princes.

… after this abominable deed done, he never had quiet in his mind, he never thought himself sure: where he went abroad, his eyes whirled about, his body privily fenced, his hand ever on his dagger, his countenance and manner like one always ready to strike again; he took ill rest o' nights, lay long waking and musing, sore wearied with care and watch, rather slumbered than slept, troubled with fearful dreams, suddenly sometime started up, leaped out of his bed and ran about the chamber, so was his restless heart continually tossed and tumbled with the tedious impression and stormy remembrance of his abominable deed. See English Works, i, 451–452. Cited hereafter as EW. It is impossible to compare the Latin since both Latin versions of Richard III (Louvain 1565 and MS. Arundel 43) break off before this.

More states that he has this information about Richard's condition “by credible report, of such as were secret with his chamberers”; but it is possible that his treatment was influenced by Sallust, whom, he must, indeed, have had by heart.

The second parallel is that between the dying speeches of Edward and Micipsa. (EW, 403–405; Sallust, op. cit., pp. 147–151. There are no verbal similarities between the Latin versions.) The passages which are too long for quotation, contain these similarities. In both instances a dying king is leaving the royal power to minors and therefore pleads with the nobles to preserve harmony and lawful order by being loyal to kin and country. And in both instances the nobles reply ironically, pretending to accede when they are really plotting to rebel. Edward's speech is, as Pollard observes, a “more finished composition than [he] could achieve in articulo mortis” (Op. cit., p. 234). Judged as an epideictic device, however, it conforms to Lucian's precepts, because it is suitable to the speaker and the occasion, because it heightens the emotional effect, and because, as we shall see, it performs an integral function in the structure of the history as a whole.

23 Cf. R. W. Chambers, Thomas More, pp. 18–19, and Stapleton, op. cit., pp. 132–139.

24 Cf. T. C. Burgess, op. cit., p. 110. Evidence is scanty because classical rhetoricians generally contented themselves with saying that the principles of the vituperative portrait were simply the counterpart of those of the encomium.

25 Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1924), xi, 1441b.

Ironical invective was of course employed by Christian writers and preachers, including More's favorite Father, St. Augustine. Cf. Sister M. Inviolata Barry, St. Augustine, the Orator (Washington, D. C., 1924), p. 126: “This figure [irony] is admirably adapted for reproving sin and error, consequently Augustine makes a liberal use of it.”

26 Nicomachean Ethics iv.7; see also ii.7, iv.3, and Eudemian Ethics iii.7.

27 Characters, ed. with translation and notes by R. C. Jebb, rev. by J. E. Sandys (London, 1909), 51–53; see especially note 1, p. 51.

This character was in the editio princeps published with a Latin translation by More's friend Pirckheimer at Nuremberg in 1527 from a MS. given him in 1515 by Pico della Mirandola. More may well have seen a MS. of Theophrastus before writing Richard III.

28 Cf. J. A. K. Thomson, Irony (Harvard Univ. Press, 1927), p. 3 ff.

29 The ironical man “will praise to their faces those whom he attacked behind their backs, and will sympathize with them in their defeats.” (Characters, p. 53.) Cf. More's description of Richard: “He was close and secret, a deep dissimulator, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly compinable where he inwardly hated, not letting to kiss whom he thought to kill….” (EW, p. 402).

Richard is unlike Theophrastus' character in that his deception is not always ‘motiveless’; he is “dispiteous and cruel, not for evil will always, but ofter for ambition, and either for the surety or increase of his estate” (EW, p. 402). He is also sometimes unduly brutal, as in his toying with Hastings before the latter's execution. There he continues to act a part after the deception has become obvious, and he goes out of his way to bring in the strawberries in order to equate them with the value of Hastings' life. (EW, pp. 426–427.)

30 Op. cit., p. 235.

31 See especially the scenes in which they ‘bow to the will of the people.‘ North's Plutarch (London, 1895–96), iv, 238; Philemon Holland's Suetonius (London, 1899), i, 191; and Tacitus, Annals xii, v-vii. Cf. EW, pp. 445–447. J. B. Bury has remarked that in Tacitus the picture of Tiberius has been “psychologically reconstructed … on the assumption that the mainspring of his character is dissimulation; he simply reveals the man in this light, interprets his actions and words in this sense, and uses all the devices of innuendo, of which he was so subtle a master, to bring it out….” —The Ancient Greek Historians (New York, 1909), p. 231.

Of interest here, also, is the kind of rhetorical exercise employed by More in his answer to Tyrannicida or by Lucian in Phalaris I. A. M. Harmon remarks of the latter: “To put yourself in another man's shoes and say what he would have said was a regular exercise of the schools, but to laugh in your sleeve as you said it was not the way of the ordinary rhetorician.” (Lucian, Loeb Classical Library [London, 1913], i, 1; cf. i, 5–6 and EW, p. 440 ff.) More's interest in these matters is well known. Cf. Stapleton, op. cit., p. 116 ff., and W. G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (Columbia Univ. Press, 1937), pp. 18–20.

32 Cf. Wynken de Worde (1502): “Yronye of grammar” occurs when “a man sayth one & gyveth to understande the contrarye.” (Quoted in NED, s.v. “Irony.”)

Puttenham in the Arte of English Poesie (1589) mentions irony under the heading of figures which are characterized by a “certaine doubleness, whereby our talke is the more guileful & abusing.” Irony he calls the “merry skoffe” or the “Drie Mock,” and distinguishes it from sarcasm, the “bitter taunt.” (Ed. G. D. Wilcock and A. Walker [Cambridge, 1936], iii. 18.)

The conventional epithet dry points to the relation between the ironical character and the system of bodily humours. Ironical speech or action might be expected from the melancholy man, who was dry and cold, and especially from the choleric man, who was dry and hot. A typical description is Thomas Newton's in The Touchstone of Complexions (1565): “… the Cholerike are bitter taunters, dry bobbers nypping gybers, and skornefull mockers of others….” Quoted by Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (Cambridge, 1930), p. 59. See W. C. Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences (Oxford, 1926), p. 71 ff., for an account of medieval treatises on the subject, which More probably knew, and which illustrate those characters in Chaucer who are “choleric … and, therefore, cunning and crafty,” as well as proud and cruel.

33 Institutio oratoria vi. 2, 3, 54; ix. 1, 2. The Institutio was a textbook in More's household.

34 For other similar classical definitions, see Cicero, De oratore ii. 66–67; the Rhetorica ad Herennium, as summarized by A. S. Wilkins in his edition of the De oratore (Oxford, 1888), p. 63; and the passages previously cited from Aristotle and the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum. Aristotle adds the suggestion that the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to amuse others.

35 For other examples of verbal irony, see EW, pp. 423, 432, 433, 434, 437, 438, 440, 449, 451. More is particularly skilful in making the evil Richard mouth the conventional sayings of virtue. “Ah, whom shall a man trust?” Richard asks when Sir Robert Brackenbury refuses to murder the princes. But this is more properly a part of Richard's dissimulation rather than a comment by the author expressed in the form of verbal irony.

36 EW, 431.

37 The Praise of Folly, tr. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton University Press, 1941), pp. 39–40.

38 Ibid., p. 99.

39 Ibid., pp. 64–65.

40 This kind or use of irony is often encountered (as in Chaucer), but it has not been satisfactorily studied. It is related to the subtler forms of verbal irony. When Chaucer, for example, pretends to agree with the Monk's rationalizing (“I seyde his opinion was good”), he is not only ironically condemning his victim, but he is also acknowledging the difficulty of deciding how the world shall be served. If the Monk were sincere, his arguments would have some cogency. Cf. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935), p. 56: “An irony has no point unless it is true, in some degree, in both senses….” A rather rare example in Lucian is his statement about historical description quoted above.

Its relation to Socratic irony has been suggested by J. H. Robinson, The Mind in the Making (New York, 1939), pp. 107–108: “Plato's indecision and urbane fair-mindedness is called irony. Now irony is seriousness without solemnity. It assumes that man is a seriocomic animal, and that no treatment of his affairs can be appropriate which gives him a consistency and dignity which he does not possess…. Human thought and conduct can only be treated broadly and truly in a mood of tolerant irony. It belies the logical precision of the long-faced, humorless writer on politics and ethics.” Emphasis on the dual nature of man is, of course, a characteristic of More and other humanists. Cf. Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism (Univ. of Toronto Press, 1939), pp. 54–56.

I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot and their followers also have some suggestive remarks in this connection. See the summary of their position by Cleanth Brooks in Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1939), pp. 29–37: “… nearly all mature attitudes represent some sort of mingling of the approbative and satirical. Frequently the more complex attitudes are expressed, and necessarily expressed, in varying degrees of irony … The sentimentalist takes a short cut to intensity by removing all the elements of the experience which might conceivably militate against the intensity… Sincerity as irony, on the other hand, reveals itself as an unwillingness to ignore the complexity of experience.”

41 Tr. Hudson, pp. 37–38: If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon the stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theater with brickbats, as a drunken disturber? For at once a new order of things would be apparent. The actor who played a woman would now be seen a man; he who a moment ago appeared young, is old; he who but now was a king, is suddenly an hostler; and he who played the god is a sorry little scrub. Destroy the illusion and any play is ruined. It is the paint and trappings that take the eyes of spectators. Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows; yet this play is put on in no other way.

But suppose, right here, some wise man who has dropped down from the sky should suddenly confront me and cry out that the person whom the world has accepted as a god and a master is not even a man, because he is driven sheeplike by his passions; that he is the lowest slave, because he willingly serves so many and such base masters. Or again, suppose the visitor should command some one mourning his father's death to laugh, because now his father has really begun to live—for in a sense our earthly life is but a kind of death. Suppose him to address another who is glorying in his ancestry, and to call him low and base-born because he is so far from virtue, the only true fount of nobility. Suppose him to speak of others in like vein. I ask you, what would he get by it, except to be considered by everyone as insane and raving? As nothing is more foolish than wisdom out of place, so nothing is more imprudent than unseasonable prudence. And he is unseasonable who does not accommodate himself to things as they are, who is “unwilling to follow the market,” who does not keep in mind at least that rule of conviviality, “Either drink or get out”; who demands, in short, that the play should no longer be a play. The part of a truly prudent man, on the contrary, is (since we are mortal) not to aspire to wisdom beyond his station, and either, along with the rest of the crowd, pretend not to notice anything, or affably and companionably be deceived. But that, they tell us, is folly. Indeed, I shall not deny it; only let them, on their side, allow that it is also to play out the comedy of life.“

42 Louvain, 1565: “Jam eum qui Imperatoris personam agit in tragoedia, populus non ignorat forsitan esse cerdonem. Tamen tantae inscitiae est illic scire quae scias, ut si quis eum vocet qui vere est, non qui falso fingitur, veniat in periculum, ne ab personatis satelliti-bus malo joco bene vapulet et id quidem merito totam fabulam sit aggressus intempestiva ventate turbare.”

43 EW, p. 210.

44 Tr. Hudson, p. 118. Erasmus concludes: “The Christian religion on the whole seems to have a kinship with some sort of folly, while it has no alliance whatever with wisdom.”

45 EW, p. 400.

46 EW, pp. 400, 402.—Innuendo of a similar kind is to be found in Tacitus. When Italicus was sent as king to the Cerusci, his “admirers flocked around a prince who practised occasionally the inoffensive foibles of courtesy and restraint, but more frequently the drunkenness and incontinence dear to barbarians.” (Annals xi. xvi, Loeb translation.) Nero's affair with Acte was countenanced because “there was always the risk that, if he were checked in this passion, his instincts would break out at the expense of women of rank.” (Ibid. xiii. xii.) Compare Edward's “wantonness,” which “fault not greatly grieved the people, for neither could any one man's pleasure stretch and extend to the displeasure of very many….” (EW, p. 400.)

47 EW, p. 446. Cf. Erasmus' treatment of the same problem. “I say that if the prince weighed these things [royal hardships], and many more like them, within himself—and he would do so were he wise—I am afraid he could neither sleep nor eat in any joy. But as it is, with my assistance, kings leave all these concerns to the gods, [and] take care of themselves nicely….” (Tr. Hudson, p. 94.)

The subtlety of More's approach is emphasized by comparison with that of Commynes, a chronicler of great native shrewdness, but of little learning or literary sophistication. In his Mémoires, published about ten years after the completion of Richard III, he decides that for each nation God has set up another in opposition to it in order to keep both within the bounds of fear and humility. God isforced to make this arrangement because only He is powerful enough to chastise princes, and because without this check, princes, who are even more wicked than ordinary men, would be unbearable. (Ed. Joseph Calmette [Paris, 1924], ii, xviii–xx.)

48 The subject of the reader's participation in ironic writing is well developed by David Worcester, The Art of Satire (Harvard University Press, 1940), pp. 31–32.

49 EW, pp. 412–413.

50 Cf. N. M. Trenholme, “The Right of Sanctuary in England,” Univ. of Missouri Studies, I, 5 (1903), passim.

51 EW, p. 416.

52 If not Lydgate's Fall of Princes.

53 De gestis regum Anglorum; Historiae novellae, ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series (London, 1887–1889), ii, 283–284. The translation is by J. A. Giles, The Chronicles of the Kings of England (London, 1847).

54 A History of Greater Britain (1521), tr. and ed. by Archibald Constable, Scottish Hist. Soc., first series, x (Edinburgh, 1892), p. cxxxv.

55 Ibid., pp. 129–130. Major is often more realistic and detailed than in this passage, where he is following medieval models, but it is significant that neither he nor Polydore Vergil felt it necessary to exclude such artificial examples. In this respect they are less advanced than More.

56 Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Univ. of California Press, 1936), pp. 162–163, 168.

57 Advancement of Learning, Works, vi, 327.

58 Ibid., vi, 309–310. For a fuller treatment of Bacon's discussion and use of the exemplary method, see the writer's article, “Sir Francis Bacon's Theory of Civil History-Writing,” ELH, viii (1941), 161–183.

59 This distinction between medieval chronicle or theatrical humanist history and a narrative like More's resembles that between melodrama and tragedy. A melodrama administers shocks by piling up horrors which are insufficiently motivated because they are dependent upon coincidence or acts of God. In a tragedy “the excess of tragic feeling is removed from the actual catastrophe and transferred to apparently insignificant events.” This is done by exposition of causes and dramatic irony. (Cf. David Worcester, op. cit., pp. 138–139.) Just so, in the chronicles, saints, devils, miracles, sudden conversions, and rivers red with blood, like sinister mustachios and the arrival of the marines, supply the deficiencies of the author. Cf. Eleanor P. Hammond, English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (Duke Univ. Press, 1927), p. 28: “the notion of bringing the figure closer to the eye … is outside the comprehension of most medieval narrators. Was a narrative to be more impressive or more heroic, it had more tortures and more combats added to it.” More's account is better narrative, if not more truthful history, because, as in tragedy, causation and dramatic irony are stressed.

60 Much of the material used as evidence by Farnham was familiar to More—Boccaccio, Chaucer, and the moralities, especially those produced by Henry Medwall at Morton's. Cf. Farnham, op. cit., pp. 94–97, 201–221; R. W. Chambers, Thomas More, pp. 61–62; and A. W. Reed, Early Tudor Drama (London, 1926), p. 154, where we are told that in 1538 More was left “Chauseer of Talles and Boocas” by Walter Smyth, who had been his servant from 1520 to 1529.

61 It is perhaps pertinent to recall that this is also the method of Thucydides, since his history was studied in More's circle. Thucydides, like More, was writing a history and not a drama, but beneath the multiplicity of skirmishes runs the ironic undertone: the tragic ruin of a people whose democratic ideals were perverted by the brutality of war. Pericles' funeral oration is the expression of those ideals. Thereafter, Thucydides is careful to point the irony. Hard upon the oration comes the statement that “on neither side were there any mean thoughts …; they had never seen war, and were therefore very willing to take up arms.” [Tr. B. Jowett (Oxford, 1900), i, 107.] At the death of Pericles we are given a preview of the inevitable disaster when the people shall have departed from his counsel. (i, 148). For “war, which takes away the comfortable provision of life, is a hard master and tends to assimilate men's characters to their conditions.” (i, 242) How the character of the Athenians has been corrupted is shown us in the cynical dialogue with the Melians before the wanton destruction of Melos. This kind of preparation so heightens the tragedy in Sicily that one is inclined, like Professor Thomson, to read more irony than was perhaps intended into the quiet conclusion: “Thus ended the Sicilian expedition.” (Cf. J. A. K. Thomson, Irony, pp. 139–162.) More guides the reader in a similar manner.

62 EW, p. 428.

63 Ibid., p. 448.

64 Ibid., p. 451.