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

4 Masculinity, Friendship, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Which Common Weal?

101 FOUR Masculinity, Friendship, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Which Common Weal? As the preceding chapter suggests, the portrayals of women in More’s writings are many sided and often ambiguous—for example, the desperate, flawed yet heroic motherhood of Queen Elizabeth in Historia Richardi Tertii and the rationally controlled but not passionless motherhood at which Hythloday glances now and then in his account of Utopian society. Further, women are misogynically shown as exercising political power, or neutrally though problematically represented as having the opportunity to wield it, or portrayed approvingly as exercising sexual power in order to achieve benign consequences. What is alleged to be a naturally female contrariness marks the wifely power-play of Queen Elizabeth in opposition to her husband’s kinsmen; an equality coexistent with inequality places the best and brightest of women alongside their male counterparts in the political leadership of Utopia; Shore’s wife frequently manages to coax her royal lover, when his anger with others gets the better of him, into affability and mercy. Women are variously identified, too, as actual or potential counselors: actual in the very different cases of Jane Shore and of some women in Utopia; potential in the strange case of Candidus’s notionally ideal wife-to-be.1 More’s representations 102 Pleasure and Gender in the Writings of Thomas More of women are diverse, sometimes deliberately simple, but tend to be elusive. So it is as well with his representations of men, of being male. For instance, although in the “ages of man” stanzas of his “Pageant Verses” More gestures toward humankind as a whole, those segments of the poem nonetheless portray males and offer a view on masculinity.2 They do so diversely, at times with confrontational simplicity, and yet ambiguously. Emphasis is given to male impatience with education—an impatience generated by education’s interrupting the pursuit of physical pleasure. Emphasis is given also to male violence—again, in the pursuit of pleasure—as an aspect of the (male) will to power. It is given to male arrogance and vanity, to the childishness of male sexuality, to male vanity’s subtle contamination of altruism. Emphasis is given, by way of the poem’s implied author, to a male regard for humanist learning and a male capacity for ironic self-awareness. That multifarious presentation of masculinity in More’s “Pageant Verses,” especially through the icons of Manhod and Old Age, has obvious and important affinities with his characterization of Edward IV in Historia Richardi Tertii. It necessarily has points of significant contact likewise with his representation of Richard, though divergences between the two are no less clear. More evidently wanted to image Richard as at once a proto-tyrant and an incarnation of the monstrous. Evoking their characterizations, however, More in turn evokes two roles that seem to have particularly interested him when identifying himself and others as men, namely, fatherhood and friendship. Historia Richardi Tertii Edward’s great speech of farewell in the Historia—the climactic moment of his characterization—is prompted by his fears for his children: it is the speech of a father anxiously seeking, too late, to protect them.3 Much of the king’s portrayal in More’s Historia makes him seem almost a mix of Saturn (the benevolent Masculinity, Friendship, Pleasure, and Which Common Weal? 103 Saturn who ruled in the golden age), Silenus and Priapus; but in his great moment he plays out the role of failing father and king. Richard is, in effect, presented as a child-killer; that is to say, Richard’s portrayal seems to make him akin to the malign Saturn in his (proto-)tyrannic cunning, his callous destructiveness, and his murder of children related to him.4 Further, Richard is shown as having no true friends—it might better be said, no capacity for forming true friendships—but Edward as having the ability to draw people to him and to make friends of them. In the blazon of Richard (CW 15:323–25), More’s narrator remarks, “Lavish beyond his means, to maintain his resources he was forced to squeeze money from one group only to squander it on another; by such tactics he made fickle friends and firm enemies” (325).5 Then the narrator adds soon after, “He had equal regard for a friend and for an enemy in comparison with his own advantage, and never hesitated to...