The New Republic: A Commentary on Book I of More's ‘Utopia’ Showing Its Relation to Plato's Republic by Colin Starnes (review)

HUMANITIES 127 especially '[gu]may,' page66, the emendationofwhich remains unjustified; and 'fastigat,' 'whipped,' pages 63, 273n, more likely 'castigat,' 'chastised' or 'let off with a warning' (the more usual form of punishment for such a crime as cited in many other texts). Some of the documents, however interesting in themselves, are of questionable relevance, in particular the Goodrich 160<)-10 Star Chamber Bills ofComplaint involving merry-making which led to violence, or the Worcester Cathedral case accusing John Davis of heresy (pages 417-22). One must sympathize with Nicholas Orme's criticism ofan earlier REED volume (Journal ofEcclesiastical History 39 [1988], 632-3) that the printed format is uneconomically generous and contributes unnecessarily to the volume's cost, placing it beyond the reach of most students and scholars: the text could be condensed, and translations follow directly, thus avoiding duplication of headings and facilitating reference. It is an especially attractive feature of this collection, however, that Klausner conscientiously provides full aids towards understanding this rich plethora of material: topographical maps, both historical and modern; an account of ecclesiastical court procedure and the 'acta' (without which many articles ofinquiry and starchamber proceedings would be incomprehensible ); full textual notes on relevant historical, social, political, literary, and geographical background; appendices containing post-1642 Pageant House Leases, saints' days and festivals, and other documents; an alphabetical list of patrons and travelling companies; Latin and English glossaries; and a comprehensive index. He has rendered the gap between documentation and interpretation - until now by deliberate policy in the REED Series a wide one - within leaping d,istance. (LAUREL BRASWELLMEANS ) Colin Starnes. The New Republic: A CommentanJ on Book I of More's 'Wopia' Showing Its Relation to Plato's Republic Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xiv, 122. $24.95 Starnes's subtitle encapsulates the preoccupation of his essay.He contends that the manifest lack of criticalconsensuson a reading of Utopia results not from anything inherently enigmatic or incoherent in its conception or execution but from More's modern commentators' underestimating the extent of his allusive debt to Plato's Republic. In consequence, they fail to take sufficient contextual account of the urgently felt contemporary need Moreaddresses, using Plato's model as a point of departure, for a structure both theoretical and practical to replace the collapsing, discredited polity of medieval Christendom. 'The Utopia is the Republicrecast in a new mould applicable to the demands of contemporary Christianity as these were understood by More and his circle of reforming friends. In a word, it is a Christianized Republic: 128 LETTERS IN CANADA 1990 In supporting this thesis, Starnes limits his analytical evidence to the exchange between HythIoday and More's fictional namesake in book I, assuming with other recent commentators that More added this dialogue to generate an interpretive context for the uncritical account from Hythloday of Utopia and its institutions that comprises book II. Indeed, Starnes's viewpoint is substantially comprehended within the mainstream of recent commentary, represented most influentially perhaps by George Logan'sThe Meaning of More's 'Utopia' (1983). Logan critically assimilates and builds upon the work of Adams, Ames, Caspari, Hexter, Schoeck, Skinner, and Surtz locating Utopia within the tradition of Renaissance humanism and arguing that it addresses concerns pandemic among humanists so diverse as Erasmus and Machiavelli with the issues ofsovereigntyand social justice that Starnes attributes to 'More and his circle of reforming friends.' Logan discriminates among 'humanisms' to argue that Utopia is designed as an exercise in controversia challenging the presuppositions of both the Erasmian speculum principis and the 'realpolitisch' tendencies of secular humanists. Starnes accepts Logan's identification of the Erasmian speculum as More's target, but argues that More addresses a much wider audience than his fellow humanists, and denies that the work is in any sense an 'exercise': it is 'a truly practical answer to a desperately practical problem.' HythIoday's function, Starnes argues, is simply to demonstrate More's thesis that, precisely because they are purely theoretical, PlatD's accretions to his initial 'Arcadian' society demanded by the 'luxurious' state, his concepts of functional class-divisions and rule by philosophers, create the evils of post-medieval society when applied in practice; the military caste does not consist of guardians, kings are not philosophers, and philosophical courtiers will not make them good. Starnes therefore differs procedurally from Logan by accepting HythIoday unequivocally as More's spokesman. Issues of perspective, ironic distance, and the rhetorical ambiguity as proof-texts of HythIoday's scenarios involving Cardinal Morton and the French court Starnes dismisses as relevant to 'Utopia considered as a work of literature' but not to his concern with its 'contribution to the history of ideas.' Perforce he must also dismiss as 'anachronistic' Logan's concept of the Utopian society as a hypothetical model, a sustained act of reasoned imagination, designed to test fictionally the effect of radical changes in social assumptions about property and hierarchy rather than Simply to advocate them like HythIoday . Similarly, Starnes discounts, in favour of Plato's Republic alone, the Significance of the classical and contemporary tradition of 'best commonwealth ' exercises derived from Aristotle as well as Plato, and from Latin works of Stoic and Epicurean thought, which Logan adduces as the source of the rational principles on which More bases his radical reconstruction of society in book o. Unfortunately, Starnes does not refute this evidence, and engages HUMANITIES 129 Logan's argument only tangentially in the footnotes. He simply asserts in his abrupt Conclusion that More constructs his 'radically new solution' by secularizing the self-sufficient, regulated, communal life of the medieval monastery to re-create Plato's 'Arcadian' society. Yet I found this cursory section on book ll, perhaps because its focus is indeed 'the history of ideas' derivative principally from Augustine, more persuasive and potentially influential than the somewhat laboured 'literary' analyses of dialogue in book Ithat not only entrap More arbitrarily within one of his creatures but often require heavily intrusive parenthetical glosses to make quotations support assertions. Starnes's case for the role of Plato in book I is provocative , but its provocations would gain in resonance and suasive consistency from a direct engagement with Logan's provocations and a thorough consideration of book ll. (MICHAEL F. DIXON) Christina Luckyj. A Winter's Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies ofJohn Webster University of Georgia Press 1989. xxvi, 181. US $27.50 'Crabbed Websterio,' as one of his contemporaries called him, seems not to have been a rapid writer: 'Lord! who would know him? / Was ever man so mangled with a poem? / See how he draws his mouth awry of late, / How he scrubs, wrings his wrists,scratches his pate. / A midwife, help!' Webster himself confessed, in the preface to The White Devil, that he did not 'write with a goose-quill, winged with two feathers' - though at the same time he anticipated that this play would be valued in ages which had long since forgotten the verses of his detractors. With respect to his major tragedies, The White Devil and The DuchessofMa1fi, this boast has been amply fulfilled: they are not merely read and studied, but also performed - more often and more happily, I would guess, than any other play by a contemporary of Shakespeare. (Appius and Virginia, a later tragedy, and The Devil's Law Case, a tragicomedy, have fared less well.) There is, then, good reason to expect rewards from a study of the formal properties ofWebster's two masterworks. In her choice ofan epigraph from The White Devil, Christina Luckyj shows her awareness that Webster's dark and laboured genius moved, not crabwise (as his contemporary's epithet might perhaps suggest), but in a manner resembling the plottings of his own F1arnineo: 'to aspire some mountain's top, / The way ascends not straight, but imitates / The subtle foldings of a winter's snake' (I.ii.35D-2). Luckyj writes, as well, with an eye to the dramatic impact of the playwright 's repetitions and indirections, his interweavings ofverbal and stage images, of parallel and contrasting characters, episodes, and scenes. In this regard she has taken care to draw not merely upon her own experience of productions of these plays, but also upon the evidence provided by a joint ...