The ambivalent heart: Thomas More's merry tales

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Anne Lake Prescott

   it were pyte but that an evyll prest were punysshed. But yet it is
   as moche pyre that we take suche a wretched pleasure in [y.sup.e]
   herynge of theyr synne and in the syght of theyr shame. Good is it
   for theym to loke on theyr fames but for us were it better to loke
   lesse to theyrs and more unto our owne. But surely many of us have
   suche delyte to here of theyr harme that it semeth we be glad whan
   one of them dothe any suche thynge as we may have occasyon to se
   them punysshed or hadde in derysyon. Whiche wretched appetyte and
   synfull affeccyon yet is moche worse & moch more worthy the curse of
   god than [y.sup.e] lewde mynd of Cam which fell into [y.sup.e] curse
   of his father Noe for [y.sup.t] he made a gaude and shewed forthe in
   skorne the secrete membres of his father.... And surely we have
   lytell cause to laughe at theyr lewdnesse. (296-97)

Fair enough, except that of course it is More himself who has just told the joke (and who returns to Aesop's fable some pages later). Joubert might say that such tales amuse precisely because they mix pleasure and sorrow: sorrow at clerical abuses, pleasure in human absurdity and verbal wit. But More needs to avoid being Master Mock even as he presents himself as balanced and healthy enough to jest--moderately, of course, and not like a mere sardonic scoffer like Cain. Hence this little narrative whirl, giving us the joke and then lamenting the very laughter that he has solicited. If we have laughed at the story we can now regret our lack of charity and yet laugh at the way we ourselves, eyes on that bag in front of us, have just proven Aesop's point about the bag behind us. Where this leaves merry tales is a nice question. (24)

More never does quite explain the thinking behind his merry tales, but he comes close in Book II of his Dialogue of Comfort, that astonishing dialogue between a nervous nephew Vincent and his wiser uncle Anthony as they wrestle with dark terrors of the soul and a flesh that shrinks from imagined future pain. Setting his scene in Budapest on the eve of what appeared to be an imminent Ottoman conquest that would force Christians to choose between death and apostasy, More wrote in the Tower while awaiting probable death and possible torture. (Had Henry VIII read over his former friend's shoulder he might have recognized in the quasi-allegorized Great Turk--Suleiman the Magnificent--not only a touch of Satan but more than a touch of his royal self.) Uncle Anthony has argued in Book I that in such terrible distress we should seek comfort only in God, not in any worldly pleasure or happiness. After all, he says, Jesus bade us to "take his crosse of tribulacion uppon his bake & folow me. He sayth not here lo let hym laugh & make mery." (25) It is in Heaven, he tells his nephew, that we shall have "a mery laughing hervest forever" after watering "our sede with the showers of our teares" here on earth (42; in this passage More says several times that Heaven has human laughter, not a matter on which all Christians agreed). At the start of Book II, however, Vincent says that to him his uncle's suspicion of merriment