St. Thomas More's Utopia, whether considered as dialogue or discourse, is a self-consciously rhetorical work, and critics tend to approach it accordingly. Scholars primarily interested in logos as a means of persuasion typically characterize Utopia either as an argument upholding the superiority of the "philosophical city" so vividly described in Book II, or as a carefully balanced (and unresolved) debate about "The Best State of a Commonwealth." Critics especially sensitive to the pathetic appeal describe More's book as a satire against England. Still others, concerned with the personal appeal, have argued that More qualifies the ethos of Raphael Hythloday in a way that discredits him, disassociates him from More, and renders Utopia itself suspect as an ideal state.

Despite this kind of critical interest in the rhetoric of Utopia, practically no attempt has been made to relate the moving power of the text to its effect upon its intended, historical audience: the circle of More's Latinist friends whose response to the work is recorded in the so-called parerga—the letters, poems, and marginalnotes that accompanied the editions of 1516, 1517, and 1518. Indeed, there has been relatively little scholarly interest in the humanist writings on Utopia. In J. H. Hexter's brilliant 1952 study [More's Utopia: The Biography of an Idea] he relied upon the opinions expressed in the parerga to set forth an "unimpeachably orthodox" interpretation of More's social doctrine. In 1963 Peter R. Allen called attention to the prefatory letters and verses as a way of identifying Utopia to the reader as a specifically "humanist document within the growing forces of the movement" ["Utopia and European Humanism: The Function of the Prefatory Letters and Verses," Studies in the Renaissance X (1963)]. In the 1965 Yale edition all the supplementary material that accompanied the first three editions of More's Utopia was reprinted for the first time. Four years later R. S. Sylvester complained [in Si Hythlodaeo Credimus: Vision and Revision in Thomas More's Utopia," Soundings, 1969] that the comments of More's humanist friends had been "rather unjustly neglected" and urged that their attitude toward the work be reconsidered as a model for reader response.

Like Sylvester I believe that the parerga provides a means for us to recover the rhetorical context within which the book's symbols are to be understood. Quid and guibus belong together. More addresses his Utopia to a particular, historical, humanist audiencewhom he fictionalizes within the work itself as the auditors of Raphael Hythloday. Through the fiction of audience More delights his readers, engages their imaginative cooperation with the narrative, and directs their response, step by step, from within the text. He does so in order to achieve a particular rhetorical objective: the moral education of his audience towards humility, the single most important virtue for a servant of the commonwealth. The writings of the parerga, which according to More's wish should accompany Utopia into print, provide a guide for reader response and remind us that artifact and audience, structure and rhetorical strategy, must be considered together.

More himself attached great importance to the parerga as a way of placing Utopia within its proper rhetorical context. His 1516 correspondence with Erasmus reveals that the desired the soon-to-be-published Utopia to be "handsomely set off" by the "highest of recommendations", and that he actively solicited written responses to the book from "both intellectuals and distinguished statesmen." He himself supplied two of the letters within the parerga. More's second letter to Peter Giles, published in the 1517 Paris edition, alerts the reader to clues in the text which disclose the nature of Utopia to be "truth under the guise of fiction," and urges him to read it accordingly. Two other items inthe parerga, the poems of Gerhard Geldenhauer and Cornells de Schrijver, are specifically addressed to the general reader, telling him what he may expect to find in the book and what benefits he will surely derive from the reading experience. All of the supplementary material, including the marginalia, was certainly approved by More for publication in the 1518 Basel edition, and there is every reason to believe that More expected the humanist commentary to lead, not mislead, the reader.

As causa exemplaris for the larger reading audience, the humanist circle makes a typical and therefore supra-temporal response to More's Utopia in the writings of the parerga which preface the text proper,

interpenetrate it in the form of marginalia, and follow it as an appendix. The parerga continually invite the reader to respond as others have responded before him; to take up membership in an audience that already exists, and generally agrees, about the meaning of Utopia; to sit down, as it were, in company with Erasmus, Froben, Budé, Lupset, Giles, Busleyden, Desmarais, Geldenhauer, de Schrijver, Rhenanus, and More himself. Indeed, the parerga present the humanist circle as an audience capable of assimilating the individual reader who makes their response his own.

This outer audience, moreover, functions as an extension of the fictive humanist audience More creates within Utopia itself. More effects that rhetorical extenion of audience into audience by fictionalizing himself and Peter Giles as the auditors of Raphael Hythloday. As a rhetorical device, the frame audience provides More with a self-conscious way of doing what Father Walter Ong insists the writer always does—i.e., he casts his readers in a particular role, directs them toward the discovery of their part, and invites them to play it. As model and teacher, More himself assumes

the part he expects his readers to play. Ambrosius Holbein's delightful woodcut, which headed the text proper in the 1518 edition, suggests that the reader's place is on the garden bench, next to More and Giles, facing the bearded Hythloday, and listening to him as he speaks. The title, directly below the garden scene, invites the reader to read a transcription of the very discourse More has heard, to join company with the trustworthy reporter.

The parerga reveals that More's original audience, the circle of European humanists, delighted in the role More had assigned to them, and responded by fictionalizing themselves even further. The scholar William Budé, for instance, in his letter to Thomas Lupset, contends that he has conducted a personal investigation as to the whereabouts of Utopia. Peter Giles contributes two poems, aquatrain and a hexastichon, that he claims to have translated into Latin from the Utopian vernacular. Giles also reports to Jerome Busleyden that the island's exact location is unknown to him because someone coughed very loudly just at the moment when Raphael described it. John Desmarais, the orator of the University of Louvain, proposes in playful earnestness that "a number of distinguished and invincible theologians … betake themselves to the island". More himself continues the fiction in his correspondence, asking Giles to contact Raphael and find out from him the exact length of the bridge spanning the River Anydrus at Amaurotum.

The enthusiastic willingness of representative humanists to play the part of Raphael's audience reflects their understanding that the benefit to be gained from the reading experience depends on their imaginative cooperation with the fiction, their tasting the honey where More has hid the moral truths he wishes to convey. Indeed, the reader only learns the lesson More teaches if he plays the part of Raphael's auditor in company with More and Giles.

The response of that fictive audience to Hythloday's discourse is guided, in turn, by the responses of other groups who have supposedly given Hythloday a hearing in the past: Cardinal Mortonand his associates, and the Utopians themselves. A series of hypothetical audiences, introduced by Hythloday during the Dialogue of Counsel, also influences the response of More and Giles. As the various responses of all these audiences to Hythloday's speeches are recorded and evaluated, the range of possible reader responses is simultaneously explored, with certain responses being systematically excluded as inappropriate. The textual directives constrain the reader to respond with increasing openness and humility to Hythloday's speech.

At the same time Hythloday's success or failure with each group of auditors becomes eventful. The hero Hythloday is in search of an audience that will pay heed to his message. Indeed, there is no other plot and, as Elizabeth McCutcheon notes [in "Thomas More, Raphael Hythlodaeus, and the Angel Raphael," Studies in English Literature, 1969], "the most dramatic moment in all of Utopia occurs in the last few paragraphs" when the reader finds out whether or not Raphael Hythlodaeus succeeds with that most promising of audiences, More and Giles. To the extent that the reader's sympathy for Hythloday is aroused, he wishes him success—even to the point of becoming himself the audience Hythloday seeks. The reader who does so eventually confronts his own pride and, in that confrontation, achieves the self-knowledge that makes it possible for him to be both a rhetor and a reformer.

In the moral education of his audience toward humility, More points to a solution of the problem posed in the Dialogue of Counsel when Hythloday denies, and More affirms, that a reformer can reach his goals in a court culture opposed to his views by way of rhetorical indirection and accommodation. Hythloday insists that one cannot proceed obliquo ductu without coming "to share the madness" of those he sought to cure, and More does not deny that that danger exists. Striving "to handle things tactfully" can easily lead to a compromise of principles and the loss of one's prophetic mission. In many ways this problem—the necessity of using rhetoric to attain one's goal and the near impossibility of doing so—is a specifically humanist version of a universal Christian problem: how is it possible to be in the world without being of it?

The Dialogue throws into relief the difficult rhetorical situation actually confronting the humanist reformer at court in a moral climate fraught with "many and great dangers". More observes in his October 31, 1516 letter to Erasmus that Cuthbert Tunstal, Jerome Busleyden, and Jean le Sauvage have to endure "some high and mighty clowns as their equals, if not superiors, in authority and influence." The parerga includes Budé's complaint that most of thepeople in positions of authority "to give definitive replies on what is good and fair" achieved that status by accumulating dishonest wealth. Busleyden, too, writes with a certain poignancy that More is one of a very few men "who not only sincerely want to serve the commonwealth, but also have the learning to know how, the trust of others to be able, and the prestige with the corresponding power, and who consequently can serve" with loyalty, honesty, and wisdom.

John Cardinal Morton has the qualities Busleyden names, and his presence in the Dialogue symbolizes the solution to the dilemma it poses. Hythloday's high esteem for Morton endears him to More, who has admired the Cardinal from the days of his youth. As he tells Hythloday, "Since you are strongly devoted to his memory, you cannot believe how much more attached I feel to you on that account". Remembering Morton, then, produces a certain harmony between the disputants. Indeed, in his person the issues that divide More and Hythloday are transcended. What is impossible for Hythloday (and, indeed, for most men) is possible for Morton. Hythloday describes the Cardinal as a man "who deserved respect as much for his prudence and virtue as for his authority", and observes that "the King placed the greatest confidence in his advice, and the commonwealth seemed to depend on him when I was there". Morton, then, represents the possibility of combining service to the King with genuine service to the commonwealth, a position of public influence with nobility of character, experience with youthfulness, eloquence ("his speech was polished and pointed") with honor, rhetoric with moral philosophy, tact with the ability to effect reform.

Hythloday notes that Morton had come directly from school to the court where, during the course of a long political career filled with "many and great dangers", he has acquired "a statesman's sagacity." In the wolfish court circle he has learned to be cunning as a serpent, gentle as a dove. Through hard and humiliating experience with the ways of the world, he has come to know his own worst tendencies, and to guard against them.

The lesson Morton learned by passing through "many and great dangers" is the same lesson More wishes to teach his readers. Knowing "the original causes of the world's evils" and "the very sources of right and wrong", the reader will be in a position to serve the commonwealth and lighten the burden that "cannot be removed entirely" even in Utopia because it belongs to the condition of fallen man.

More's second letter to Giles, included in the parerga of 1517, suggests that human nature is such that the hard truths of failure and sin, the experiential knowledge of one's own, and England's, wickedness, can only "slide into men's minds" if it is "smeared with honey". The poet as moral teacher, then, must use the "indirect approach" More recommends to Hythloday. More's obliquo ductu, like Cicero's de insinuatione, names the rhetorical strategy one must employ in the face of an audience that is opposed to one's view, or offended and alienated by the subject of one's speech. In such a case the rhetor must proceed by way of indirection—"dissimulatione et circumitione obscure, " as Cicero puts it in his De Inventione—gradually approaching his true subject, stealing into the minds of his auditors ("subiens auditoris animum ") who are surprised, or even tricked, into assent.

Utopia as a whole is a masterpiece of rhetorical indirection. It is More's book, but it is entitled "The Discourse of the Extraordinary Character, Raphael Hythlodaeus." It pretends to make known the "manners and customs" of a distant people when it actually lays bare our own pride as the fountainhead of all injustice. It purports to be about Utopia when its true subject is Europe, and England in particular. Erasmus testifies to this in his famous July 23, 1519 letter to Ulrich Hutten when he states that More's "Utopia was published with the aim of showing the causes of the bad conditions of states; but was chiefly a portrait of the British state." Similarly, Gerhard Geldenhauer's verse address to the reader maintains, "In this book the very sources of right and wrong are revealed by the eloquent More". And Cornells de Schrijver's poem preface advises the reader to "read these pages which the celebrated More has given us" if he wants to "uncover the original causes of the world's evils and to experience the great emptiness lying concealed at the heart of things".

In order to disclose the emptiness of vainglory, More first conceals that truth in the honey of his fiction. In order to teach true humility, he identifies himself with his audience and plays with them the part of Hythloday's pupil. When the reader first encounters More he finds him in the company of Cuthbert Tunstal, a humanist statesman well-known for his "integrity and learning". They are negotiating with Georges de Themsecke, the shrewd and eloquent representative of Charles, Prince of Castile, on behalf of a "model monarch," Henry VIII. When the Provost of Cassel temporarily breaks off the negotiations, More goes to Antwerp where he meets Giles, "an honorable man of high position in his home town" who is "distinguished equally by learning and character." These brief sketches serve to establish the ethos of Hythloday' simmediate audience for the reader. Certainly the humanist scholars and statesmen who read More's Utopia found it easy to identify with these men whom they knew by reputation, if not personally, as leading exponents of their own high ideals.

When Giles introduces the sunburnt and bearded Hythloday to More, he describes him as a wayfaring philosopher, more conversant in Greek than Latin, who has just returned from a voyage like "that of Ulysses or … of Plato". Giles informs More that Hythloday, an associate of Amerigo Vespucci, can tell him much about "unknown peoples and lands," adding that this is a subject about which More is "always most greedy to hear." Thus the reader's curiosity is piqued along with More's, and directed by his interest in the "excellent institutions" of foreign commonwealths away from a trivial concern with "stale travelers' wonders". Indeed, More rather pointedly remarks that "those wise and prudent provisions" which Hythloday noticed in his travels through various civilized nations are the sort of facts which "would be useful to readers". Not only are the "well and wisely trained citizens" of other nations useful to our own people as exempla leading to the "correction of … errors"; they are also, More observes, more rare, wonderful, and interesting than the "scyllas and greedy Celaenos and folk-devouring Laestrygones" that are the subjects ofpopular travelogues. Remarks of this sort prepare the reader for what is to come by defining the genre of Hythloday's discourse, appeal to the reader's sense of civic responsibility, and incorporate the reader's motives for reading into More's own reasons for listening to Hythloday.

According to Hexter's reconstruction, Hythloday launches into his account "of the manners and customs of the Utopians" immediately after this brief introduction in More's original draft of the Utopia. More, however, apparently felt the need to provide a more fully developed rhetorical context for the speech Hythloday delivers in Book II. Therefore, in his revised draft, More added the so-called Dialogue of Counsel—"the talk which drew and led [Hythloday] on to mention that commonwealth".

The discussion begins with Giles' naive suggestion that the knowledgeable and wise Hythloday attach himself to some king in order to profit the commonwealth while securing personal gain and "the advancement of all [his] relatives and friends." In words echoing Luke 9: 25, Hythloday replies that he does not want to become "prosperous by a way which [his] soul abhors", and More commends him for his personal integrity: "It is plain that you, my dear Raphael, are desirous neither of riches nor of power. Assuredly, I reverence and look up to a man of your mind." Thus, at the very beginning of the Dialogue, Hythloday's high moral character is affirmed, and the reader is invited to respond to him as More does, the ethos of the speaker appealing to the ethos of the audience.

More proceeds to make an ethical appeal to Hythloday, telling him that his own "generous and truly philosophic spirit" should motivate him to apply his "talent and industry to the public interest," even at the cost of "personal disadvantages." More stresses that he who influences the king affects the people as a whole, the monarch being, like a "never-failing spring," the source of "good and evil" for the nation. Hythloday modestly replies that he lacks the great abilities More ascribes to him, and that he would not be able to accomplish any good anyway in the king's service because neither the king nor his courtiers would listen to his counsel.

Hythloday proceeds to call up a number of possible audiences for himself as test-cases. He imagines himself making an innovative proposal "in the company of people who are jealous of others' discoveries or prefer their own". He pictures himself arguing for measures of reform in the presence of a long-winded lawyer, ahanger-on, an unholy friar, and a flock of other flatterers surrounding John Cardinal Morton. He imagines himself advocating peace to the King of France before "a circle of his most astute councilors" at a meeting called for the express purpose of planning military aggression against Italy, Flanders, Brabant, and Burgundy. He pictures himself admonishing a king against arrogance and greed at a session when the other councilors are busy "devising by what schemes they may heap up treasure for him". He concludes that his opinions would surely meet with an unfavorable reception from each of these audiences, exclaiming, "if I tried to obtrude these and like ideas on men strongly inclined to the opposite way of thinking, to what deaf ears should I tell my tale!" More can only shake his head and agree with Hythloday that he surely would not succeed if he tried to "force upon people new and strange ideas which … carry no weight with persons of opposite conviction".

This series of strange and difficult audiences has proved troublesome to critics of Utopia who usually conclude, as David Bevington does, that Hythloday is proposing extreme cases that are irrelevant to the topic actually under discussion: the Tudor monarchy. In his introduction to the Yale edition, Father Surtz suggests, moreover, that Hythloday's hypothetical audiences have no relationship to Utopia's real audience, outside of defining theintended readership by negation.

The ending of the Dialogue and the conclusion of Book II, however, suggest that these fictive audiences do have an inner relationship to Utopia's intended audience, and that the discovery of that relationship belongs to the gnosis imparted by the poet as moral teacher. Certainly More expects his high-minded readers to suppose that the corrupt court circles, who would reward Hythloday with banishment or ridicule for his attempt to "uproot … the seeds of evil and corruption", are far-removed from themselves. Indeed, he cultivates that response by awakening in his (and Hythloday's) audience moral outrage against kings and councilors who have inflicted so much suffering on the peoples of Europe through their schemes, deceptions and warmongering.

Suddenly, however, the audience is asked to direct that same moral outrage toward themselves when, at the end of the Dialogue, Hythloday candidly reveals his "heart's sentiments" and tells More that such abuses are inevitable in a society based on private property—i.e., the unequal distribution of goods: "wherever you have private property and all men measure things by cash values, there it is scarcely possible for a common-wealth to have justice or prosperity". Hythloday's conclusion challenges the value system of More's readers, all of whom are property owners, and suggests that they are not untainted by the selfishness and pride which manifests itself so blatantly in the wealthy and powerful. Persona More adds weight to Hythloday's charge when, at the end of the Utopian discourse, he remarks that the "estimation of the common people" places a high value on worldly goods—"nobility, magnificence, splendor and majesty"—as "the true glories and ornaments of the commonwealth".

When Hythloday connects the moral ills of the court in a causal relationship with an economic system based on private ownership that encourages fallen man's propensity toward covetousness, his auditors in the garden suddenly find themselves among the "persons of opposite conviction" whom Hythloday had addressed hypothetically before. More declares that he is "of the contrary opinion" and proceeds to enumerate the usual arguments against communism. When Hythloday refutes More's objections by citing his happy experience among the Utopians, Giles, equally on the defensive, says that he finds it hard to believe "that a betterordered people is to be found in that new world than the one known to us". The notion of common ownership is thrust upon them as one of Hythloday's "novel ideas".

As threatened as More and Giles may feel by Hythloday's position, they can hardly respond in any of the ways that have previously been rejected as reflecting "proud, ridiculous and obstinate prejudices". They cannot reject Hythloday's view out-of-hand as the punctilious lawyer had. They cannot respond with contempt, as the Cardinal's courtiers did. They can hardly treat the matter as a jest, as did the foolish hanger-on. Nor can they turn a deaf ear like the wicked kings and courtiers. More himself makes a direct connection between his possible response as an auditor and the responses of Hythloday's other audiences at the conclusion of the afternoon discourse when he recalls Hythloday's "censure of others on account of their fear that they might not appear wise enough, unless they found some fault to criticize in other men's discoveries", and decides (at least for the time being) not to voice any opposition to Hythloday's views. If at the end of the long Utopian discourse More still recalls Hythloday's other audiences and measures his response by theirs, we may be sure that they are much closer to his thoughts at the end of the Dialogue. The reader, like More and Giles, finds himself constrained to respond with greater humility and open-mindedness to Hythloday's "novel ideas" than others have.

In Book I More provides his readers with two models for that kindof magnanimous response to Hythloday's message in the Utopians themselves and in the person of John Cardinal Morton. The Cardinal, as Lord Chancellor of England, listens attentively to Hythloday's impassioned harangue on the injustice of the death penalty for thieves, the disastrous consequences of maintaining a standing militia, and the multiple problems stemming from the policy of enclosing arable farmland for grazing sheep. After silencing the lawyer who is about to reply to Hythloday "in the usual manner of disputants", Morton offers the opportunity for further discussion at a later meeting. When, in response to the Cardinal's sincere question about what penalty, other than the death penalty, Hythloday would propose for theft, he suggests an adaptation of the penal system used by the Romans and the Polylerites, the Cardinal agrees with Hythloday that there is no reason "why this method might not be adopted … in England". Indeed, Morton immediately conceives a plan for experimenting with Hythloday's proposal, even extending its application to vagrants as well as thieves. Morton's wisdom keeps him from clinging to old practices that have proven ineffectual, and from rejecting new ways that have not been tested. He serves as a model for the reader who is asked, not to ape him as the blind courtiers do, but to assume his fundamental attitude toward Hythloday's "novel ideas".

At the end of the Dialogue, however, Hythloday is not merely opposing the abuses of the rich and powerful; he is challenging private ownership itself, an institution cherished even by the common man, and suggesting that justice will never be achieved by a society that fails to counteract fallen man's root tendency toward greed, sloth, and pride by taking Utopian measures. Despite the example of openness set by Cardinal Morton, More and Giles are in obvious disagreement with Hythloday even before he begins to describe "the manners and customs of the Utopians".

Ultimately he secures their attentiveness by appealing to their civic pride and supplying them with the example of yet another model audience, the Utopians themselves. Hythloday reports that the islanders "immediately at one meeting appropriated to themselves every good discovery of ours". This openness to change and willingness to "adopt whatever is better from others" is, Hythloday asserts, the chief reason why "their commonwealth is more wisely governed and more happily flourishing than ours".

More responds by begging and beseeching Raphael to describe the island:

Do not be brief, but set forth in order the terrain, therivers, the cities, the inhabitants, the traditions, the customs, the laws, and, in fact, everything which you think we should like to know. And you must think we wish to know everything of which we are still ignorant.

The sincerity of More's request gains symbolic expression when he reserves the whole afternoon for listening to Hythloday's account, commands the servants to leave them in peace, and takes up his seat anew in the same place, on the same bench. Both Giles and More urge Raphael to "fulfill his promise," and he sees them "intent and eager to listen".

At the end of Book I, then, Hythloday has gained an audience for himself through the use of other audiences: the censured audiences whose response arises out of "proud, ridiculous and obstinate prejudices" and the commended audiences, outstanding for their good will, attentiveness and docility. More has also gained an audience for Book II of his Utopia by fictionalizing himself and his fellow humanists (represented by Giles) as Hythloday's attentive listeners. The part More expects his audience to play is clear enough: they are to set aside their prejudgments about how a society is to be ordered, and seriously entertain the possibility of a better way of doing things as a way of reorienting themselvestoward the ideal, and directing their energies in everyday life toward the achievement of "the best state of a commonwealth."

The writings of the parerga indicate that More's original audience read Book II in just that way. The reader hears no more of More and Giles until the very last paragraphs, and their less-than-wholehearted response to Hythloday's discourse is concealed from the reader until the very end. Throughout almost all of Book II the only audience directing the reader's response is the enthusiastic outer circle of humanists whose side-comments in the margins either capsule Hythloday's description, express admiration for the Utopian ways, or pass judgment against European practices that fall short of the ideal. When, for instance, Hythloday reports that no city on the blessed island "has any desire to extend its territory", the comment in the opposite margin reads, "Yet Today the Desire for Expansion Is the Curse of All Commonwealths." When Raphael notes that the Utopians are unacquainted with dice "and that kind of foolish and ruinous game", the unseen audience whose voice is recorded in the marginal comment exclaims, "Yet Now Dicing Is the Amusement of Kings." At other points the humanist response is a burst of exclamatory praise: "O Holy Commonwealth—and Worthy of Imitation Even by Christians!", "How Much Wiser the Utopians Are than the Common Run of Christians!", "O Priests Far More Holy than Ours!". Page by page, paragraph by paragraph, the marginal comments render the outer audience present and invite the reader to enter into its ranks by appropriating the canonical response.

At times, too, the reader is directly addressed. When Hythloday notes that the Utopian religion is the best to which human reason, unaided by revelation, can attain, the side comment reads: "Careful Attention Must be Paid Also to This Point". And when Hythloday in his peroratio surveys the European status quo and denounces it as a "conspiracy of the rich" who only pretend to serve the commonwealth, the speaker in the margin urges, "Reader, Take Notice of These Words!"

More's ultimate goal—the bringing of his humanist audience to a new self-knowledge and humility that will safeguard and increase their fruitfulness as advocates of reform—can only be accomplished if the reader cooperates with the text, fictionalizes himself as Hythloday's audience and (at least for a while) believes that there is a Utopia somewhere. Only if the reader takes the blessed island seriously, and imaginatively perceives it as an ideal state that other men have actually achieved, will the on-going comparison with England bring about the desired effect. More wants the reader to experience the failure of England and Christian Europe keenly. Therefore he uses Utopia, "the best state of a commonwealth," as a standard of comparison; he holds up the fictive island as a Golden World before the eyes of his readers so that they can realize anew that they have fallen short of the communal ideal to which they are called. Indeed, Hythloday, Budé, and Erasmus all describe Utopia as the embodiment of Christ's social teaching, which remains the ultimate standard by which all human conduct is judged and found wanting.

At the end of the Dialogue of Counsel Hythloday draws a causal relationship between the abuses of the nobility and the self-seeking generally encouraged by the economics of private ownership. At the end of the Utopian Discourse he goes a step further and declares that men have institutionalized the unequal distribution of goods and rejected communism (even though the latter has obvious benefits and has been recommended to us by Christ Himself) because of the urgings of "one single Monster, the chief and progenitor of all plagues", Pride. The progression is rhetorically potent, beginning with an evil that is distant from the reader and localized in the king and his court, proceeding to a systemic evil in which the individual participates, and ending at the the threshold of each heart with the personal sin of pride, the chief sin which is the root cause of all the others, includingcovetousness. The broad outline of this progression reveals to what an extent the rhetor More has taken the philosopher Hythloday into his service and used him to accomplish the education and formation of Utopia's audience. More, the "arranger of the materials" supposedly presented by Hythloday, proceeds by way of indirection, first arousing the reader's indignation at unjust laws and the corrupt practices of others, and then gradually redirecting that same indignation toward his own moral shortcomings.

Having brought the reader into a confrontation with his own pride and achieved his educational aim, More calls attention to the rhetorical strategy he has used by discarding its devices, distancing his reading audience from the fictive audience, and himself from Hythloday. In the very last paragraphs of Book II persona More confides to the reader that he finds many of the Utopian customs and laws to be "very absurdly established"; he admits that he "cannot agree with all" that Hythloday said; and he says that he has little if any "hope of being realized" in Europe those features which he admires in the Utopian commonwealth. While he may be provoked to thought and desirous of further discussion, he is certainly not persuaded, not moved to action, by what he has heard.

In Hythloday's failure with More and Giles, the poet More dramatizes the failure of unadorned philosophy to move men, and addresses the very problem Sir Philip Sidney accuses him of having overlooked when he patterned a "most absolute commonwealth." With a certain shock the reader recalls that the book he has been reading is not, after all, a transcription of the talk given by Raphael Hythlodaeus, but a fiction of Thomas More. Like Sidney, More believed that "the fayned image of Poesie" has a greater power than "the regular instruction of Philosophy" to move men. Accordingly he retells Hythloday's facts as fictions, translates his Greek into Latin, turns his "philosophical city" into a "phantom", changes his Somewhere into a No-Where, and thus transforms even the philosopher Hythloday (much against his will, no doubt) into a rhetor and poet.

Thus it is that while persona More responds in a reserved and almost patronizing way to Hythloday's afternoon discourse, the humanist writers of the parerga respond with an unqualified enthusiasm to the book which purports to be nothing more than a reporting of that same talk. All of them praise More for his eloquence, and attribute to his artistry the moving power of the book. At the same time they attribute the philosophical function of revelation to Hythloday, calling him "the discoverer" of Utopia. They distinguish, however, only in order to unite, and thus pay tribute to the perfect poetry of the Utopia that delights even as it moves and teaches. They know, after all, that "Utopia lies outside the limits of the known world, … perhaps close to the Elysian Fields" and that Hythloday himself belongs to the realm of More's imagination. On the other hand, they know that Utopia has a serious message for the reader who is willing to enter into the game and play along with More himself the part of Hythloday's audience.