Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines Read online

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  THE WORLD’S CLASSICS

  THOMAS MORE

  Utopia

  FRANCIS BACON New Atlantis

  HENRY NEVILLE The Isle of Pines

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  SUSAN BRUCE

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  THREE EARLY MODERN UTOPIAS

  UTOPIAS have existed almost since the beginnings of literature, but some eras have produced more utopian literature than others. The early modern period was one such time. The geographical and scientific discoveries of the age, as well as its profound social conflicts, provided a context in which the fusion of ideas about the ideal with representations of ‘other’ fictitious communities became a natural mode of conceiving how things might be different in a world elsewhere. But early modern utopias rarely offered ‘simple’ solutions to the problems that they confronted. Their writers frequently offered representations of other worlds not in order to answer questions about the social, cultural, and political mores of their own times, but rather to raise the issues in their readers’ minds. In other words very few early modern utopias are merely blueprints for ideal societies: their meanings emerge only through the juxtaposition of the utopia represented with the writer’s own world. In different ways this is true of all three of the utopias reprinted in this volume: Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which addresses the social problems of early sixteenth-century England; Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), which foregrounds England’s shortcomings in the nurture of scientific endeavour; and Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668), which engages with issues of colonialism and sexual propriety. These three texts illustrate the range of the utopian imagination in the early modern period, and the different uses to which it could be put.

  SUSAN BRUCE is Lecturer in the English Department of Keele University. She is the author of articles on More, Bacon, Rochester, and Swift, and the editor of The Icon Critical Guide to King Lear.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Note on the Texts

  Select Bibliography

  Chronologies of the Authors

  THOMAS MORE, UTOPIA

  translated by Ralph Robinson

  The First Book of the New Island of Utopia

  The Second Book of the New Island of Utopia

  Appendix. Ancillary Materials From Other Early Editions of ‘Utopia’

  FRANCIS BACON, NEW ATLANTIS

  HENRY NEVILLE, THE ISLE OF PINES

  Explanatory Notes

  Glossary

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Like other editors, I have consulted other editions of the texts in producing my own. I am especially indebted to J. H. Lupton’s and to J. Churton Collins’s editions of Utopia, to J. Weinberger’s and Brian Vickers’s editions of New Atlantis and to Worthington Chauncey Ford’s edition of The Isle of Pines for the Club of Odd Volumes. Many individuals have assisted more directly in the production of this volume, and to all of them I am very grateful. Neil Rhodes encouraged me, some years ago now, to propose the anthology to Oxford World’s Classics. John Rogers assisted me with one of the explanatory notes to Utopian attitudes to the more obscure aspects of medieval philosophy. Dima Abdulrahim helped me on those occasions where expertise in Arabic was required; Marguerite Palmer helped me to ascertain the meaning of a Dutch sentence. Sue Wiseman was kind enough to help me to track down early versions of Neville’s pamphlets; Mishtooni Bose helped me to find a translation of a letter. Tim Lustig has been supportive in many different ways throughout the time I have been working on this anthology, as have Daniel and Luke Lustig-Bruce, in their inimitable and much appreciated fashions. Both Sue and Tim also read and commented on my introduction to The Isle Of Pines, as did Roger Pooley and Julie Sanders; Bridget Orr was kind enough to listen to some early ideas. I should also like to thank Judith Luna of Oxford University Press for her efficiency and helpfulness, the copy-editor, Jeff New, for his careful reading of the typescript, and for his excellent suggestions for improvements, some of which I have incorporated in the notes on the texts, and Brian Vickers, editor of the Oxford Authors Francis Bacon, for allowing me to base the text of the New Atlantis, and the chronology of Francis Bacon, on his edition. Perhaps my greatest debt of gratitude is due to Alison Sharrock of the Classics D
epartment of Keele University, who extended her time (with extraordinary generosity) in helping me with classical allusions in the New Atlantis, and more especially Utopia, and whose suggestions for new connotations of ‘Abraxa’, ‘Philarch’, and ‘Syphogrant’ I have included in the notes to Utopia.

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  Historical Origins: The Early Modern Utopia and the ‘Age of Discovery’

  All three of the utopias reprinted in this volume engage at some level with a discourse of origins. Just as Utopus civilizes his people, bringing them to ‘that excellent perfection . . . wherein they now go beyond all the people of the world’ (p. 50), so Solamona, in Bacon’s New Atlantis, acts as the original ‘lawgiver’ of his nation, Bensalem, devising for his people the edicts which will regulate their behaviour in perpetuity and thus establish Bensalem as the wisest—and hence in Bacon’s terms the most powerful—nation in the world. George Pine too, at least on the surface of Neville’s short narrative, endeavours before he dies to lay the foundations (however unspecific) of good government, appointing one ruler and ‘exhorting him to use justice and sincerity’ (p. 201) among his peers. And just as each text represents the genesis of its utopia in the form of an originating individual whose legacy persists in the very nature of the community that he ruled, so too each is insistent on the separation of its nation from its immediate neighbours, and from the rest of the known world. The Isle of Pines is isolated in terms of its geographical position; similarly removed from Europe in geographical terms, Utopia and Bensalem are further distanced from the outside world by the respective actions of their founding fathers. Utopus turns what was a peninsula into an island, severing Utopia from the mainland in an action which has been read as a kind of birth fantasy;1 Solamona establishes laws forbidding the entry of strangers and restricting the travel of native Bensalemites, whose visits to other lands are henceforth strictly regulated by the state.

  In one very obvious respect the isolation of early modern utopias fulfils a necessary narrative function. The writers of such texts felt impelled to offer a plausible explanation for the fact that the imaginary lands they described were unknown to the audiences to whom they described them, and to posit an unknown nation in the middle of the Indian Ocean or off the coast of the Americas is self-evidently more credible than it would be to situate such a community in a village in the Alps, or an island in the middle of the Mediterranean sea. The opportunities for narrative plausibility here were vastly increased by the explosion of knowledge about the globe which took place over these years: underlying the construction of the early modern utopia was the sense of discovery and possibility afforded by the Renaissance voyages of exploration. The Portuguese had explored much of the coastline of Africa during the fifteenth century, but it was the turn of the century which saw the real explosion in ‘discovery’, as European countries competed with one another to find faster ways of tapping into the immense riches (gold, spices, and, progressively and appallingly, slaves) of Asia and Africa. And with the advent of the printing press, the opportunities for the dissemination of ‘news’ of the discoveries were limited only by literacy: printed records of the explorations were, in a very short space of time, everywhere available to those who could read.

  That the texts in this volume are all to some degree a product of this exploratory context is undeniable. More explicitly makes his traveller a sailor with Amerigo Vespucci: Raphael Hythloday has, he says, accompanied Vespucci on three of the voyages ‘of those four that be now in print’ (p. 12). ‘We sailed from Peru’ (p. 152), begins the New Atlantis, whose opening rehearses those of the travel narratives which, in part, served as its sources. Similarly, in its detailed transcription of the voyages undertaken by its two narrators, The Isle of Pines likewise replicates the style of the early modern travel narrative (although Neville’s community engages more with anxieties about colonialism than it does with the excitement of discovery). Even the fact that the title-pages of these texts announce their own novelty (‘the new isle of Utopia’; the ‘New’ Atlantis; the ‘new and further discovery of the Isle of Pines’)2 bespeaks their indebtedness to the travel narratives, which often advertised their contents in their titles as ‘new’. And in their common appeal to the ‘new’, both the utopia and the travel narrative betray their origins in the early modern (rather, than say, the medieval) period. For previous ages ‘novelty’ had been an indicator of the fictional, the truth of a narrative gauged instead by the degree of its conformity to ancient authorities; now the ‘new’ was coming instead to signify fact instead of fiction, truth instead of falsehood.3

  Generic Origins: Earlier Representations of Ideal Worlds

  The relations between the early modern utopia and the travel narrative are many, and apparently obvious. But assumptions of the ‘obvious’ can sometimes serve to mask more fundamental questions. In our case, two such questions might be these. First, why fiction? Why do so many writers of early modern utopias construct their ideal worlds in the form of fictional narratives? Secondly, and apparently paradoxically, why truth? Why do these early modern utopianists try so hard to convince their readers of the reality of their island, the ‘truth’ of the description that they offer them? Why, in other words, do these writers first feel that they must represent their ideal worlds in a fictional form, and then take pains to convince their readership of the literal (not metaphorical or allegorical) truth of that representation? The real resonance of these questions emerges more fully if we compare the early modern utopia with the ideal worlds which pre- and post-date it. Thomas More invented the word ‘utopia’, as well as the genre it has since come to denote: the genre, stated very simply, of fictional works which claim truly to describe a community posited at some level as ideal. To represent an ideal world, however, was not in itself a novel literary act. Biblical precedents existed in the story of Moses taking his people to the promised land, in the prelapsarian state of Adam and Eve, and in prophecies of the second coming, which were later to give rise to forms of millenarianism. From another ‘high’ culture had emerged Plato’s Republic; from many different ‘low’ ones came fantasies of lands of plenty: the ‘Lands of Cockaygne’, where larks fly into one’s mouth ready cooked, and the rivers flow with wine. Many of these texts were influential on early modern utopias. More’s Utopia, for instance, conducts a kind of dialogue with classical meditations on ideal commonwealths: with Aristotle’s Politics, for instance, and, in particular, with Plato’s Republic, as well as with his Timaeus, Critias, and Laws, with which Bacon also engages in the New Atlantis. Another type of model of an ideal world was to be found in the dialogues of the Greek satirist Lucian. More had translated, with Erasmus, some of these dialogues, including Menippus, in which a representation of a fictional world is posed, playfully, as the answer to problems elaborated earlier in the text. And travel narratives too, had classical antecedents: in Pliny’s Natural History, for instance, in which a number of different customs and communities are described.

  Most of these may loosely be described as ‘utopian’, if by such we mean to indicate their various gestures towards a better world. Yet their degree of difference from the early modern texts we are talking about here can be measured by the nature of the truth claims that each, implicitly or explicitly, makes. Biblical narratives, for instance, and the ideal world discourses which developed out of those narratives, claim literal or prophetic truth: they are not posited as fictional. Lands of Cockaygne, conversely, make no claim to truth at all, except insofar as their dreams of plenty indicate their authors’ rueful recognition of the insufficiencies of the natural world. Texts such as Plato’s Republic may appear to be the closest to the utopia in respect of the truth claims each type of text establishes. But one aspect of the Republic’s difference from the early modern utopia can be apprehended when one considers how emphatically, even emblematically, embedded in reality the early modern utopia generally is. Many early modern utopias, Benedict Anderson has pointed out, not only claimed to
exist in a locatable point on the globe, but illustrated this location with a bogus map: ‘how unimaginable it would be to place Plato’s Republic on any map, sham or real’, he remarks.4

  Two Definitions of the Utopian Genre

  Early modern utopias, then, even as they embraced fiction as their mode of representation, insisted on the location in real space of the communities that they described. So too they rejected any temporal relocation, refusing to displace their ideals into the past (as do Golden Age narratives) or project them into the future (as does millennial literature or today’s science fiction). Cognate with this insistence on spatial and temporal truth is the utopia’s insistence on a credible reality in its representation both of nature and of humanity, a feature which at least one recent critic, J. C. Davis, has seen as the defining characteristic of the utopian genre. Davis has argued that ideal world narratives can be classified according to the way in which they negotiate the problem of supply and demand; the problem, that is, of balancing a finite amount of materials (food, lodging, or women, for example) with a potentially infinite amount of desire for those materials. Davis divides ideal world narratives into five types, each characterized by its particular mode of negotiating this gap between supply and demand. The Land of Cockaygne, he argues, assumes unlimited abundance in order to fulfil unlimited desire. The Arcadia fuses a less excessive natural abundance with a representation of a humanity less acquisitive and more easily satisfied than ‘real’ human beings would be. The Perfect Moral Commonwealth realizes its ideal through an idealization of the nature of humanity. In Millennial literature parity between desire and available material wealth is effected by a deus ex machina, whose intervention transforms both man and nature. But for Davis, what distinguishes the utopia from other kinds of ideal world narrative is its refusal of these solutions to the perennial and trans-historical problem of supply and demand. In utopia, Davis argues, people are as potentially transgressive as they are in the real world, their desires as potentially subversive to collective well-being (no change in humanity); in utopia, the availability of material satisfactions is as limited as it is in reality (no change in nature). The utopian solution to the problems of reality, according to Davis, is to idealize neither man nor nature, but organization: the utopianist devises bureaucratic and institutional systems in order to contain desire and transgression, and thus to apportion a limited supply of material satisfactions.5