Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More: Pursuing the Common Weal

5 Role-Play, Masculinity, Pleasure — In and Beyond Pursuit of the Common Weal

125 FIVE Role-Play, Masculinity, Pleasure—In and Beyond Pursuit of the Common Weal From the “Pageant Verses” to De tristitia Christi, that is, from probably his earliest extant work to certainly his last, More revealed his fascination with what he and so many of his contemporaries saw as the theatricality of human experience. In what follows I shall consider how selection, interplay, and performance of role dominate self-presentation in his A Dialogue of Comfort.1 More does not there describe the world as a theater; on the contrary, he writes of it as a maze and a prison (see, e.g., CW 12, 2.17, 3.19–20). Yet his protagonist, who demonstrably seems his alter ego in A Dialogue, presents himself again and again in terms of roles that he indicates should be prized and enacted (and sometimes he indicates roles that are to be avoided). His doing so accords with More’s remarks, in the letter to Peter Giles prefacing Utopia, about obligatory social or familial roles. It agrees too with More’s remarks in De tristitia Christi about role-play’s linking the individual with Christ and about playing the Good Shepherd.2 Thus the roles adopted by More’s speaker, in keeping with what has been proposed throughout the previous chapter, sometimes imply what it is to be specifically a man; at others, they intimate what one should seek to become as a human being. That strategy 126 Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More of self-presentation allowed More to show how he was confronting imminent death and, simultaneously, to attempt a composite, immutable, final image of himself for his family and for posterity. He seems with typical cunning to have designed a self-portrayal that would both memorialize him and turn him into an exemplum of adherence to the old religion. Through his self-portrait, in effect, he sought to evade constraint by gaoler and executioner, to continue his resistance to Henrician religious policy, to pursue the common weal of the Church Militant. His self-portrayal has further significance, however. For a start, the roles that More’s surrogate performs or seeks to fulfill include some of those adopted by or imposed on More in his days of less troubled celebrity, long before he entered the Tower. He brings them together and recontextualizes them, he himself having been now recontextualized.3 In addition, the roles sought or enacted by the surrogate More often indicate his concern with the instability of the imagination or of the will to pleasure. The latter, as has been argued above, is a preoccupation in More’s writings from the “Pageant Verses” onwards.4 Given, too, that More’s A Dialogue of Comfort suggests a broadly identifiable sequence to role-selection as a human phenomenon, there are illuminating likenesses and dissimilarities between that work and Vives’s A Fable about Man.5 There appear as well to be telling similarities and differences between A Dialogue and Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy.6 The second of those textual relationships is at least in part self-conscious, whereas the first seems to be uncalculated. Nevertheless, recognizing and examining them, even if briefly, emphasizes the extent to which More’s last major work implicitly engages with preoccupations that recur throughout the various culture of humanism, namely, self-transformation and exile.7 There is a moment in A Dialogue when More unmistakably unveils his text’s artificiality. He has his protagonist, Antony, say to Nephew Vincent in the preface to book 2: Role-Play, Masculinity, Pleasure, and the Common Weal 127 And therfor wished I the last tyme after you were gone / when I felt my selfe (to sey the trowth) evyn a litell wery / that I had not so told you styll a long tale alone / but that we had more often enterchaungid wordes / and partid the talke betwene vs, with [ofter] enterparlyng vppon your part / in such maner as lernid men vse betwene the persons / whom they devise disputyng in their faynid diologes. (CW 12:79, lines 20–26) All More’s gestures toward realism in his text—the topical, political details, the details of prison experience, the individuating habits of speech assigned to Antony and to Vincent—are suddenly countermanded by one gesture notionally affirming verisimilitude but of course negating it.8 Moreover, through the remark about...