A thorough, balanced, but sometimes numbingly discursive life of "a
complex, haunted, and not altogether admirable man." Marius,
currently head of Harvard's Expository Writing Program, is a
Reformation historian who started working on More as a graduate
student at Yale and has edited several volumes of the Yale edition
of More's complete works; he brings a quarter-century of experience
to this job, and it shows. Most lives of More, from the fine one
written in 1557 by his son-in-law, William Roper, down to the
generally accepted standard biography by R. W. Chambers (1935),
have been biased in his favor. Marius, by contrast, takes great
pains to portray fairly this "cruelly divided" character, a monkish
ascetic who rose to the heights of secular power (and loved it), an
exemplary husband who never forgave himself for succumbing to
sexual desire, a gentle father who wrote furiously abusive
religious propaganda, a champion of freedom of conscience who
burned heretics for following theirs. Marius' work is also
distinguished by its effort to draw on More's immense (and
generally depressing) oeuvre to understand his soul. Thus, while
conceding the many witty touches in A Dialogue Concerning Heresies
(1529), Marius notes how this polemical blast "reveals the
cast-iron rules-maker" who wrote Utopia, a closed mind with "an icy
inflexibility and an unyielding resolve to make the worst of his
opponents." Marius' biggest problem is that he wants to tell the
reader everything. When it comes to the obscure, ugly case of
Richard Hunne, he spins out pages of tedious speculation. Every
allusion is explicated: Marius summarizes The Praise of Folly, the
political claims of Pope Gregory VII (1073-85), even the New
Testament story of John the Baptist and Herod Antipas. More's
behavior during his persecution by Henry VIII - cunning when there
was still a chance to escape, quietly heroic when there was not -
has always been a great story, and Marius does it justice. But his
final assessment sees More, like his face in the brilliant Holbein
portrait, as deeply ambivalent and perhaps unfathomable. Despite
its prolixity, this is now the fullest, fairest, most carefully
nuanced account of More available. (Kirkus Reviews)
Over the centuries, biographers of Thomas More have always
praised him and made him an example for their own times. He was a
man for all seasons. This Tudor prelate and Lord Chancellor of
England shared human qualities identifiable in all ages--pride,
love, ambition, generosity, hypocrisy, and greed. He was less than
common because he was witty and a great storyteller--the best
between Chaucer and Shakespeare. Truly, he was a Renaissance man
with the contradictions such praise imposes on a towering figure.
In Richard Marius's authoritative and engaging portrait, Sir Thomas
More, the martyr and brilliant public figure, is a lesson for our
season.
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