Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines

by Thomas More

  There are many answers to that question, but we might start with the most obvious: the warning to the naive reader that Utopia offers in its names. ‘Utopia’ itself, of course, derived from the Greek ‘ou’ (‘non-’) and ‘topos’ (‘place’), means ‘no-place’ (with a possible pun on ‘eu’ (‘good’): good-place’), and almost all the names in the text play similar kinds of jokes on the reader. ‘Anyder’ (‘waterless’) is the principal river of Utopia’s main town Amaurote (‘dim city’), for instance; like the Utopians, the Achorians are the people of no-place, and the Polylerites inhabit the land of much nonsense. Most significant of all, Hythloday’s name signifies ‘peddlar of nonsense’, ‘expert in trifles’, or perhaps, according to Richard Halpern (who believes that traditional translations of ‘Hythloday’ exaggerate the irony of his discourse), ‘skilled in pleasant speech’.8

  This salutary warning to those who would read the text as a straightforward critique of More’s England and as an unproblematically serious proposal for an alternative social organization is not confined only to the names in Utopia. The text is punctuated with similar jokes, littered with traps into which the unwary reader may fall. To take just one example, let us examine the discussion of the Polylerites in Book 1. The Polylerites, Hythloday maintains, have devised the best alternative to the death penalty, using bonded labour to punish their criminals instead of capital punishment. The bondmen (or ‘serving-men’, as Robinson calls them) are marked by their clothing, which is of a particular colour worn by no one else, by their short haircuts, and by the excision of the tip of one ear (p. 29). Consider the following passage, where Hythloday relates what would happen should a bondman escape:

  Neither they can have any hope at all to scape away by fleeing. For how should a man that in no part of his apparel is like other men fly privily and unknown, unless he would run away naked? Howbeit, so also fleeing he should be descried by the rounding of his head and his ear mark. (p. 30)

  If the Polylerites saw a naked man running across the countryside, would they really need to pay attention to his haircut, or stop him in order to examine his ears?

  Hythloday’s discussion of the Polylerites can also be used to illustrate another way in which the apparently serious proposals communicated by Utopia are not all that they might at first seem. Ostensibly, as we have said, the Polylerites are invoked by Hythloday to exemplify a society which has developed a successful alternative to the death penalty. But the conclusion of the anecdote about them renders dubious that claim. For the bondmen to receive money, recounts Hythloday,

  is death, as well to the giver as to the receiver. And no less jeopardy it is for a free man to receive money of a serving man . . . and likewise for serving men to touch weapons. The serving men . . . be . . . known . . . by their . . . badges which to cast away is death, as it is also to be seen out of . . . their own shire, or to talk with a serving man of another shire. And it is no less danger to them for to intend to run away than to do it indeed. Yea, and to conceal such an enterprise in a serving man it is death, in a free man servitude. (p. 29)

  In contradiction to what Hythloday implies in opening the discussion, the Polylerites have not eradicated the death penalty. All that they have done is displace it, rendering it less visible.

  It could be argued that whatever the relation of the conclusion of the example to Hythloday’s original claim, the Polylerite practice is still vastly more humane than the profligate use of the death penalty which obtained in More’s England. Such an argument is valid, but it cannot eradicate the inconsistency at the heart of the anecdote. This kind of inconsistency, moreover, wherein an initial claim to liberty is curtailed by its subsequent elaboration in the text, is a recurrent feature of Utopia. It was Stephen Greenblatt who first drew attention to this characteristic of the text. Greenblatt examines the way in which the Utopian workday (supposedly only six hours) expands, on closer attention to the text, to fill most daylight hours, thus ending up very similar to the labouring day of the English peasantry in the early sixteenth century. He notes too that a similar movement inhabits the text’s account of Utopian travel, which ‘begins with almost unlimited license and ends with almost total restriction’, since the Utopians who do not attend lectures in their ‘free’ time work at their ‘own occupations’ instead. This move, he argues, is ubiquitous in the text: ‘freedoms’, Greenblatt claims, ‘are heralded, only to shrink in the course of the description.’9 Indeed, this uncertainty about how far liberties in the text actually extend is replayed even on the level of the text’s sentences: as Elizabeth McCutcheon has pointed out, More’s Latin original makes repeated use of litotes, a figure of speech which affirms something by denying its opposite, as in the phrases, ‘not uncommon’ and ‘not unlike’.10

  In its jokes, in ‘the steady constriction of an initially limitless freedom’, as Greenblatt puts it, in a rhetoric which frequently constitutes Utopian practices not so much by what they are as by what they are not, Utopia makes it very difficult for a reader to say with any certainty how seriously Utopian practices are intended to be taken. Yet another way in which More undermines our security in the idealism of the text is in the relation which obtains between Utopia and the ‘real world’. Utopia and England, for example, ostensibly invoked in the text as each other’s opposite, are in many ways very similar: like the British Isles, Utopia is an island; its main town and river resemble London and the Thames, as contemporary commentators were quick to note. On closer investigation Utopia becomes more a distorted reflection of the ‘real’ England than its antithesis; the relation between the two more obscure than an initial reading might suggest. Similar instabilities inhabit the representation of individuals in the text. Hythloday, of course, is invented, but Peter Giles, like More himself, was an actual person, as were the writers and recipients—Erasmus and Busleyden, for example—of the dedicatory letters that surround the text itself. (For more information on the apparatus surrounding Utopia, see the Note on the Texts.) Yet recognition of the distinction between the fictional Hythloday and the ‘real’ More can, if we are not careful, lead the unwary reader into another of the text’s traps, for the opposition which More constructs between ‘himself’ and Hythloday becomes increasingly unstable the more knowledge about More one brings to Utopia. Hythloday, for example, claims to have worked as a page in the household of Cardinal Morton (also a real historical figure); in fact, More himself had held this position. Hythloday expresses his unwillingness to work as a counsellor to princes; More too, although he served as a statesman and counsellor to Henry VIII, had had his own doubts about the advisability of pursuing such a career.

  Perhaps the ‘More-within-the-text’ and Hythloday are not ‘different’ characters, then, but both representations of different aspects of More-the-author? This claim, however, is equally contentious. Hythloday extols the virtues of a society which (for example) banishes lawyers, allows women priests, tolerates the expression of pagan beliefs, encourages euthanasia, and permits not only divorce but subsequent remarriage. It is hard to square admiration for such practices as these with the beliefs of the real-life More, a lawyer himself, as well as a devout Catholic who wrote furiously against the reformist tracts of Luther and his fellow Protestants, who participated in the burning of heretics, and who eventually lost his life through his conviction that the King’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon was wrong. But perhaps the text’s ultimate jest is embedded in its conclusion, when ‘More’ (the textual character) intervenes to undermine all that More (the actual person) has offered us as food for thought through the discourse of Hythloday. ‘Thus when Raphael had made an end of his tale,’ says More, ‘. . . many things came to my mind which in the manners and laws of that people seemed to be . . . founded of no good reason’; these unreasonable customs and laws, he says, include ‘their chivalry’, ‘their sacrifices and their religions’, and other Utopian laws and ordinances; ‘yea and chiefly,’ he goes on:

  in . . . the principal foundation of all t
heir ordinances, that is to say, in the community of their . . . living without any . . . money (by the which thing only all nobility, magnificence, worship, honour, and majesty, the true ornaments and honours . . . of a commonwealth, utterly be overthrown . . .) (p. 123).

  What ‘More’ admires in Utopian customs is left uncertain at the book’s conclusion; what is made explicit is that he finds the most radical aspect of Utopia, and the base on which all of its qualities depend, Utopian communism, to be the most unreasonable of all of the social correctives which Hythloday has proposed in the course of his discourse. The argument initiated in Book 1 about the shortcomings of English society and the best possible solution to them is only exacerbated by the text’s conclusion; Utopia preserves, even to its last lines, an ambivalence which it never resolves.

  Utopian ambivalence has by now been extensively documented in literary criticism, and today it would be an ill-informed reader who would propose that Utopia is presented as a serious or straightforward representation of a better world. Yet that said, it seems important to insist that it is equally mistaken to understand the text solely as a joke. It is not self-evidently true that Utopia’s subordination of individual choice and happiness to the good of the community is a misguided ideal, even if it is one transparently not pursued by late-twentieth-century Western societies. And although Utopia may appear authoritarian, perhaps even totalitarian, it is worth remembering that it is not nearly so repressive as early modern England was, where there was little freedom of speech; where poverty severely delimited any choice for the vast majority of the population; where torture of suspected traitors was commonly practised by the state; and where one might be hanged for petty theft, or hanged, drawn and quartered for offences against the crown. I am in agreement with Richard Halpern here, who maintains that, although there is some truth in C. S. Lewis’s account of Utopia as a jeu d’esprit, to read the text purely as a game is to attempt to depolitize the work, to ‘trivialize [it] and stifle debate’.11 It is hard, even with the knowledge of all the text’s myriad forms of playfulness in mind, to ignore the impassioned sense of injustice with which Hythloday denounces English poverty in Book 1; or the equally impassioned sense of conviction with which the concluding paragraphs of his description of Utopia in Book 2 are infused; hard too to read Utopia and believe that the author of the text was immune to the sense of social injustice which he communicates so effectively through the words of his fictitious traveller.

  Perhaps the most convincing answers to the perennial question of the relation in Utopia between social critique and the playful, or pleasurable qualities of the text have been offered by critics who utilize the insights of literary theory to inform the kinds of question that they ask of the text. Such insights allow Greenblatt, for example, in comparing Utopia with Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, to argue that the book’s ‘subtle displacements, distortions, and shifts of perspective are the closest equivalent in Renaissance prose to the anamorphic virtuosity of Holbein’s art’: Utopia, Greenblatt claims, presents two distinct worlds that occupy the same space while insisting on the impossibility of their doing so’.12 They allow Halpern to argue that ‘England occupies the position of the unconscious with respect to Utopia’,13 and to analyse the text in terms of the logic of its desires and repressions. But even sophisticated analyses such as these cannot hope to provide answers to all the enigmas in the text regarding More’s intentions, nor can they provide definitive solutions to the more general problems about social rights and wrongs that Utopia so seriously, if so ludicly, plays out. And this, ultimately, may be part of the text’s point. As More leads Hythloday in to supper for the second and the last time he tells him that they ‘would choose another time to weigh and examine the same matters and to talk with him more at large therein’ (p. 123). Perhaps one thing that More wished Utopia to do is to invite us into the debate which the book so self-consciously fails to conclude, encouraging us to do as More and Hythloday do, beyond the confines of the text’s enigmatic ending, in the future to which its final lines direct us. It may be that we too are being asked to weigh and examine the questions which Utopia raises, many of which are as pressing today as they were for More in 1516; to continue to talk about the possibilities of other, and perhaps better, worlds; and in so doing to acknowledge, perhaps, the shortcomings of our own.

  New Atlantis

  Like Thomas More, Francis Bacon was a lawyer, a statesman, and an intellectual. In the early 1580s he became a barrister and an MP, and over the next three decades experienced a rapid rise to power, becoming Lord Chancellor (the highest position in the land) in 1618. Shortly afterwards, in 1621, his public life ended when he was accused of (and admitted) taking bribes, committed briefly to the Tower of London, expelled from the court, and fined £40,000. This ignominious end to his public career blighted his reputation for centuries after, at least so far as Bacon the man was concerned. But it should not influence our reception of Bacon the intellectual, who produced, over the course of his life, a vast body of work. Much of this work (such as The Advancement of Learning, the Novum Organum, and the Sylva Sylvarum, or a Natural History, to which the New Atlantis was appended) was an attempt to codify and systematize scientific enquiry. Other works, such as his Essays (for which he is today best remembered), and various letters to monarchs, statesmen, and courtiers, range over other subjects: moral qualities, for instance, such as truth, envy, and love, or political matters, such as sedition, empire, and kingdoms. If science was his main interest, then, he was also intensely interested in the politics of his age, serving two monarchs, and being an admirer of Machiavelli. It was the conflation of these two interests, in science on the one hand and politics on the other, I want to argue here, that led Bacon to produce his single work of fiction, the New Atlantis.

  In his essay ‘Of Travel’, Bacon remarks that ‘travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience’.14 Lamenting the propensity of travellers to keep records at sea where there is nothing to be observed, and to neglect them on land where there is much more to be recorded, Bacon proposes that travel diaries be brought into general use, and offers a list of what the diarist should observe: the churches, monuments, and courts of the countries that he visits; their fortifications and harbours, libraries and lectures; their markets and gardens, processions, feasts, and executions.

  For Bacon here, the purpose of travel is to amass knowledge, and to amass that knowledge in a methodical manner. In this respect, the New Atlantis seems to offer a fictional model of Bacon’s ideal travel narrative and his ideal traveller. The unnamed narrator of the text is concerned methodically to record everything that he and his fellows see in Bensalem (the name of Bacon’s utopian nation). From their arrival in the Bensalemite harbour, through their quarantine in the ‘Strangers’ House’, to their attendance at a Bensalemite feast and procession, everything of note is dutifully set down by the narrator, who punctuates his account of these events with reports of the conversations he has had with various individuals. The first of these is the Governor of the Strangers’ House, who informs the travellers of some Bensalemite laws, explains to them how the islanders heard of Christianity, and tells them of the history of Bensalem and its original ‘lawgiver’, Solamona. The second is Joabin, a Jew, who provides information regarding Bensalemite sexual and marital customs. The third and last is one of the ‘Fathers’ of Salomon’s House, with whom the narrator is granted an audience. In this final conversation the Father tells the narrator about Salomon’s House, Bensalem’s most notable institution, and the work that goes on in it. This discourse constitutes the remaining pages of the New Atlantis, and makes up almost a third of the text. It lists the numerous experiments undertaken in Salomon’s House, and the different institutions which it possesses in order to enable these experiments to take place; after the relation of this information the text ends, abruptly, with the words ‘The rest was not perfected’.

  The relative space afforded to the descript
ion of Salomon’s House is illustrative of the importance which Bacon attached to the role which science should play in an ideal society and, by extension, in modern life. Bacon’s historical place in the formulation of that role has, however, been a matter of debate over the centuries. For many years lauded as one of the ‘fathers’ of modern science, his achievement compared to those of figures such as Galileo and Kepler, Bacon’s status as a ‘scientist’ was later reassessed, and—to draw a broad generalization from a complex debate—interest in his work shifted from his scientific legacy to his power as a rhetorician. Brian Vickers, for example, noted in 1968 that studies of Bacon’s contribution to science had shown him to be derivative, contradictory, and either unaware of many of the new scientific discoveries of his age or dismissive of them. ‘If we can no longer estimate Bacon the scientist very highly,’ Vickers concluded, ‘justice has certainly yet to be done to him as a writer.’15 For Vickers and others, it was Bacon’s literary art, his rhetorical power, which marked his place in our cultural history. More recently, new contributions to the history of ideas have reemphasized Bacon’s legacy to science, but from a perspective whose fundamental presuppositions differ enormously from those held by endorsers of either of these earlier accounts of Bacon’s place in our cultural history. To this third account we will return later.