The emphasis on work-ethics, regimented society and on the royal genesis of Utopia ─ it is created by King Utopus ─ facilitate the dream of a new England under Henry VIII. style pleasant and delectable.” While this facilitates the dissemination of the work in its native land and insulates the translator, it draws attention away from Utopia’s self-referential character that is heavily invested with the polyvalent aspirations and roles of its creator. Since context invests specificity of intent upon a text, the article further engages in a scrutiny of the first vernacularisation of Utopia by Ralph Robinson in 1551, which undertakes the perilous task of assimilating the work of a renowned Catholic martyr within a Protestant context by disjuncting More’s “wilful and stubborn obstinacy” in religion from his work which “containeth fruitful and profitable. To illustrate this process, the article begins with an extended comparison between More’s Utopia and Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly as complementary productions by two friends with close intellectual affinities who deploy multiple hedging strategies to circumscribe and safeguard their humanist critique of existing authority and their reformist impulse. The contradictory strains of empirical objectivity and empire building playful intellectual exercise and serious intent make More’s ‘no-place happyland’ a site of ideological contestation which effectively establishes the linkages between a literary artefact and extra-literary considerations. A vehicle for self-cancellation and self-transference for More, Utopia thrives on the paradox and ambivalence resulting from an uneasy miscegenation of practical humanism and nascent bourgeois ideology. Located within the tradition of humanist social criticism, it posits an ideal state that is simultaneously absolutist and radically progressive, inclusive in format yet elitist in dissemination. It investigates the text as a literary artefact produced as much by its author as by the age imbibing the multifarious ambiguities and uncertainties of a transitional era. This article attempts to foreground More’s Utopia against the Renaissance backdrop of complex and unprecedented transformations both on the individual and the collective plain.
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