Theatricality and the Early Modern Art of Government in Sir Thomas More's Richard III and Utopia

초록

Sir Thomas More is well known for his martyrdom which seems to entail a solemn and stern personality. But if we look into anecdotal stories of his life, we may come across a somewhat different picture of him as an enthusiastic actor keen on improvisation. Taking a cue from these contradictory features of his life, this article attempts to position More's two oeuvres, Richard III and Utopia, in the context of early modern discourse of subjectivity. Richard III betrays the ways in which More tries to normalize the disturbance of meanings in the king's use of theatrics that generates an anxiety over the performative sense of identity, whereas Utopia allows us to ruminate on the transition of forms of government, from a medieval household government to the institutionalized administration associated with the Henrician bureaucratization. In both the quasi-history and the utopian narrative, I try to read the renowned Humanist's way of configuring and re-figuring the art of government within the gambit of theatricality and surveillance. Both texts, I would argue, reveals the paradoxical impulse, though in somewhat different forms, of the Renaissance humanist's eagerness to subsume the performative sense of self within the frame of the old epistemology. Not only the anecdotal picture of More as an actor but also the two literary texts certainly point to the ways in which the early modern Humanist attempted to grasp the sense of subjectivity with the available discursive resources.

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