The ambivalent heart: Thomas More's merry tales

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Anne Lake Prescott

Once into the text, though, More's doubts disappear: "A mery tale quod I commyth never amysse to me," he confesses after his companion ("the messenger" whose theological doubts the 'T' is trying to resolve) has said, in often quoted words, that More is used "to loke so sadly whan ye mene merely [y.sup.t] many tymes men doubte whyther ye speke in sporte whan ye mene good ernest" (68-69). In the pages that follow we are treated to many jokes, some of them exactly the sort of anticlerical stories that one might have thought would make Luther's strictures seem plausible. Why? Perhaps to signal that More hates heresy but is not ready to defend clerical corruption or lay ignorance. So we read of a lecherous priest "over famylyer with" a man's wife who persuades the bishop to make the man do penance for accusing him; the man stands before the congregation and says to his mouth "mouth mouth thou lyest" and then, unexpectedly, adds "buy eyen eyen ... by the masse ye lye not a whytte" (69). We also hear of the unmasking of a "blind" trickster (86); a fake virgin fed fake communion wafers (87); a lame priest on a lame horse (91); a woman so aghast to hear that Jesus' mother was Jewish that she exclaims, "& was she a Jewe ... so helpe me god and halydom I shall love her the worse whyle I lyve" (92); and a story (from Poggio) about a cleric who, asked by the king what he would have done in Joseph's place when Mrs. Potiphar made her famous pass, replies, "By my trouthe ... and it lyke your grace I can not tell you what I wold have done but I can tell you well what I sholde have done" (157). Other stories tell of a man who says of a "false shrew"--a male shrew--that he would not for twenty pounds hear him say the creed, "For he knewe hym for suche a lyer that he thought he shold never byleve his crede after yf he herde it ones of his mouthe" (176); of a sick man who gives up on God and prays to the devil, explaining that "all is good that helpeth" (234); of a man who tells the priest that of course he doesn't believe in the Devil because he has enough ado to believe in God (234); and, in a nicely turned "reversible," of a young Lutheran thief who informs the judges that he was destined to steal only to hear them reply that they are destined to hang him (405). And there are a number of yet other tales.

Uneasiness with his own humor does not disappear, though, and at one point More performs a fast three-step around the problem. First his spokesman retells the Aesopian fable about how we all carry a "dowble walet" on our shoulder with the faults of others in front and our own faults behind. Then a few lines later he grieves that we pay little attention to a good man's "shorte tale" hut "let a lewde frere be taken with a wenche we wyll gest & rayle upon the whole order all [y.sup.e] yere after and say lo what sample they gyve us." Next the messenger reports that when a young priest carried a candle in a procession as penance for lying with a wench, a merchant remarked to the priests that followed him, "Sic luceat lux vestra coram hominibus. Thus let youre lyght shyne afore the people." Irreverent--and funny. More's spokesman is amused, perhaps, yet responds that