Cheaters, Saints, and Simultaneous Narrative: Early and Postmodern Lessons from Thomas More’s The History of Richard III

Thomas More’s biographers emphasize the dexterity of his legal mind in the months leading up to his trial, but More’s efforts to display, rather than fully explain, the difficulty of his position can be viewed not just as legal maneuvers but as experiments in an illustrative technique—simultaneous narrative. This technique, rhetorical rather than mimetic, is one More had already utilized in his History of Richard III, a work less concerned with Richard’s villainy than in the flinching complicity that sanctions his rise to power. Rather than a continuous historical narrative, More’s History provides a series of didactic notations alluding to rhetorical and moral positions. More paints a bleak portrait of a perverted social consciousness, but he nevertheless offers both early modern and postmodern audiences the opportunity to re-familiarize themselves with what consciousness is, with the awkward, disordered, often guilty and always interactive process by which it is constructed.