The ambivalent heart: Thomas More's merry tales

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Anne Lake Prescott

Use three physicians still; first Doctor Quiet, Next Doctor Merry-man, and Doctor Diet.

(The School of Salerno, tr. Sir John Harington) (1)

IT IS A CURIOSITY of Thomas More's career that although his early writings include clever epigrams, translations from the satirist Lucian, and jouncing verses about a sergeant who would be a friar, most of his prose "merry tales" (although some might say Utopia is itself a merry tale) are found in the polemics penned in hot anger at heresy and in the more serene Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation written in the cold Tower of London. At the very end, according to the anecdotes that circulated after his death, More even performed "merry tales," or at least the "quick answers" that also figured in jestbooks and in discussions of wit by Cicero and others. After stumbling on the scaffold steps, runs one story, More told the executioner that he could use a hand when going up--but could manage for himself when coming down. Moving aside his long beard as he positioned his head on the block, says another tale, More explained that it had grown since his indictment and so had to be innocent. More's enemies, one of whom had called him "Master Mock," might read such humor as evidence of spiritual frivolity; others could see it as a sign of inner peace?

One reason for More's jesting, aside from personality and talent, is familiar from authorities on clever rhetoric and behavior such as Cicero, Quintilian, Castiglione, and Thomas Wilson. To joke when facing juries, political opponents, courtly competitors, angry heretics, worrisome rulers, or even shrewish wives is to signal a smiling urbanity--eutrapelia, the Greeks called it--that Renaissance jest-collectors such as Poggio liked to contrast with their critics' blockish rusticity and that More himself seems to have hoped his readers would contrast with heretics' seditious irrationality and, later, with Henry VIII's tyrannical pride. (3) But there is more to be said concerning More's willingness, despite misgivings and quasi-apologies, to joke about serious matters and also concerning his strategy of jesting: his jokes are not random, for they cluster in significant ways. Good jesting, moreover (and this is my main point), is not merely a rhetorically astute urbanity: used moderately, it indicates a balanced mind and body and is itself curative--medicine for an individual body and perhaps also for the body politic and even for Christ's own body, the Church.

In this essay I will look at three texts that show Master Mock at work, but first some theory. Most of the best Renaissance discussions of the nature and uses of laughter were written after More died, but a general knowledge of the assumptions that sustained theories of the risible, its physiology, and its medicinal value was ancient and widespread. (4) The fullest and most original exposition of what happens when we laugh is the now often-cited Treatise on Laughter (1579) by Laurent Joubert. True laughter, says Joubert, does not respond either to pure bliss or to what is truly pitiable or utterly loathsome. Rather, it depends on ambivalence. If, to take a modern example, we see an Enron executive doing a perp walk we feel both grief (the poor man is more or less human) and pleasure (it is good to see rich criminals get caught). The blood rushes to our hearts to solace its compassionate grief but also rushes away from it so we can flush with joy. This palpitation pulis on the pericardium, which in turn pulls on the diaphragm, which then makes the lungs push the air in and out, and we say, "Ho, ho, ho." (5)

Joubert's theory cleverly reconciles a number of earlier contradictory comments on laughter. Some authorities, such as More's close contemporary Juan Luis Vives, had said that laughter arises from joy, whereas others, such as Aristotle, had ascribed it to the sight of defect or ugliness unaccompanied by pain; Castiglione, publishing his Courtier a few years before More's death, agreed with the latter. (6) Joubert is unusual, moreover, in giving a fully physiological explanation of how ambivalence works in the body itself as the effects of laughter spread from part to part. True, Joubert wrote at least a generation after More was dead, but awareness that the risible often involves mixed feelings of some sort and that laughter affects the body, often for the better, may be found, less coherently spelled out, in texts that More could have (and in some cases must have) known. Socrates himself thought that laughter can depend on or at least accompany contradictory feelings, arguing in the Philebus that "when we laugh at what is ridiculous in our friends, we mix pleasure with envy, that is our pleasure with pain," although he finds a similar ambivalence in tragedy and indeed in "the entire tragi-comedy of human life." (7) Cicero's De Oratore, which More of course must have known virtually by heart (no doubt relishing its belief in the rhetorical value of appearing smartly urbane) disappointingly locates the laughable only in "that which may be described as unseemly or ugly" but not fully evil or pitifully anguished. The warning to jest only at those things "which call for neither strong disgust nor the deepest sympathy," however, can suggest something like Joubert's ambivalence: what in Cicero (and others) is a moderate "neither/nor" is in Joubert a paradoxical "both/and." If the difference matters, so does the long history of associating laughter with both pleasure and pain as well as with such physical effects as a shaking body and distorted face. (8)