The ambivalent heart: Thomas More's merry tales

Criticism, Fall, 2003 by Anne Lake Prescott

Mere solemnity would not, of course, indicate the serenity that More tries to show (and that one hopes that he indeed felt). Rather, he needs moderate mirth that would indicate a balanced mind at odds with heresy's fantastic lunacy and, perhaps, a tyrant's fantasies of a power that defies all Christendom. Jests might also suggest and even help effect a mental health that, cooperating with reason and the theological virtues, might exorcise the fearful pictures in the mind that derive from and in turn intensify the melancholy brain's atrabilions imagination. More very probably did indeed believe that such refreshment as mirth can offer is simultaneously mental and physical, for in later words to Vincent, Anthony shows an acute awareness of the somatic base for much of what we feel, a reminder--like those remarks on Purgatory that I have already quoted--that More lived well before the Cartesian dualism from which modern medicine has still not fully recovered. The devil, says Anthony, "useth the blode of mans own bodye toward his purpose," and it is the task of such "whose maliciouse humours the devill abuseth toward the castyng of such a desperat drede into his hart" to resist this invasion. A doctor, then, "shall consider what abundaunce the man hath of those evill humours that the devill maketh his instrument in movyng the man toward that ferefull affeccion[.] And as well by diet convenient & medicyns mete therfor to resist them, as by purgacions to disburden the body of them[.] Since "the soule & the bodye be so knyt and joynid together, that they both make betwene them one person the distemperaunce of either other, engendreth some tyme the distemperaunce of both twayne." That is why, he says, he sometimes advises the soulsick to get advice from the "phisicion for the bodye," although it is of course wrong to do this simply in the pursuit of "fowle fleshly delight" (151-52).

Having had his say, however, and having helped More position himself as capable of genial and healthy self-mockery (for he is of course in good part Anthony as well as Vincent), Anthony is more than willing to be a "giglot" and tell some excellent stories. He makes this concession to our nature only with the warning that they are "but for sawce" and "not our meate," although his regretful proof that we need them is itself a merry tale about a priest whose congregation dozes off while he preaches about Heaven and jerks awake when he says "I shall tell you a mery tale" (84; a famous secular equivalent is the professor who, seeing his students slumped sleepily over their notebooks, says "Sex!" in a raised voice and sees them snap to attention). So we now get stories such as that of an army's nighttime panic when the imagination produces non-existent enemies (109-10) or a theologically significant animal fable about an overscrupulous ass and a self-serving wolf (115-18). Then there is the carver's wife whose irrationally devout husband wants to kill himself on Good Friday; one of many ingenious wives in the Renaissance facetiae tradition, she reminds him that "christ perdie killid not him selfe" and offers secretly to crucify him on "a greate crosse that he had made to nayle a new carvid crucifyx uppon." When this in fact sounds like a good idea to him, she points out that truly to imitate Jesus he must first be bound, scourged, and crowned by thorns, and after spending some time being tied to a post and beaten he agrees--not least because the wife offers to press upon his brow the thorns she had woven together--that "this was inough for that yere," and when Good Friday came around the following year "he longid to folow christ no ferther" (143-44). A doctor would have diagnosed the husband's illness as religious melancholia; the cure is not so much making him laugh as making him feel in his flesh what he had earlier imagined--too many cerebral images being both a cause and consequence of an atrabilious brain. The story is typically Morean in its insistence on the body's significance and in its dry understanding of faith gone crazy; More himself, who wore a hair shirt, may have found this funny tale all the more provocative because he was himself vulnerable to the accusation, and not only by others, that he was courting martyrdom rather than abiding by the truth and hoping for the best.