The Game and Play of Utopia

Abstract

Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), describing the eponymous island which gave its name to the entire genre, is, above all, playful. Its very title is a pun, playing on the Greek eu-topia, a ‘good place’, and ou-topia, a ‘no place’.¹ Such puns continue to permeate the work, with the ‘waterless’ river Anyder, the ‘vanishing’ city Amaurot, and the ‘peopleless’ governor Ademus (116–7, 130–1, 268–9). Indeed, in an ancillary letter which framed the text, More quips that if Utopia were fictional, would he not have included signs, such as those three exact puns (268–9)? Such joking at the expense of careless readers, or at least those uneducated in classical Greek, reached its peak when More related a story of a foolish churchman who, upon hearing of Utopia, offered himself to the papacy as candidate for a bishopric covering the entire island of 54 cities, with, More urged sardonically, not a hint of self-interest (34–5). More’s puns have continued to inspire and puzzle scholars. It is broadly accepted that the latinized name of More’s self-insert character, ‘Morus’, evokes an idiot, while the fictional traveller who describes the island, Raphael Hythlodaeus, has been related both to the Archangel Raphael, God’s own messenger, at the same time as his surname has been understood as ‘peddler of nonsense’, ‘destroyer of nonsense’, or even ‘destructive nonsense’.² Not that puns were More’s only form of referential play. The beginnings of the Utopian civilization date to 244 bce, which happens to be the exact date King Agis of Sparta was executed for attempting to undermine private property.³ Meanwhile, Utopia’s 54 city-states match the number of English counties, and the structure and titles of its civic government have been connected to the city of London.⁴ Furthermore, the playfulness of Utopia’s very style, in particular its paradoxicality, embedded, for example, in its repeated use of litotes, has further located Utopia within the Renaissance practice of serio ludere, ‘to play seriously’, essentially a ‘rediscovery’ of satire.⁵ Utopia’s playfulness has furthermore been considered in its use, and abuse, of space, and in its dialogic form.⁶ Thus, from the beginning, Utopia’s reader is invited into a game, challenged to notice the jokes, twists, and references More has set up. However, a particularly notable aspect of Utopia’s playfulness has, with a few exceptions, been underexplored: the games of the Utopians themselves.⁷ When these games are closely examined, it becomes clear that there is a further game Utopia is inviting its readers to play, one which ultimately, like More’s punning title, codifies the genre itself.

More’s evident delight in playfulness is shared by the Utopians he wrote about. All Utopians spend one hour a day literally ‘in playing’ ‘music’, ‘conversation’, and, indeed, ‘games’ (126–7).⁸ This is not surprising, as the entirety of Utopian philosophy is built on the consensus that pleasure provides ‘all or the principal part of human happiness’, and thus the ultimate goal of human existence (158–61).⁹ As such, the workday is limited to six hours, to provide time for the cultivation of pleasure; large communal gardens are integrated into the city for the Utopians to enjoy; and their sumptuous dinners are never lacking in desserts (118–19, 126–8, 142–3).¹⁰ This was not to encourage unqualified hedonism, for, as Hythlodaeus specifies, ‘no kind of pleasure is forbidden, provided harm does not come of it’ (142–3).¹¹ The presumption that reason proves the immortality of the soul and the existence of reward and punishment after death allows the Utopians to temper (some might say redefine) pleasure-seeking through a religious affirmation that pleasure should be sociable. Only ‘good and honest’ pleasure which is the result of ‘virtue’ will produce eternal reward, and ‘no virtue is more proper to humans’ than to relieve others, ease their sadness, and restore their pleasure.¹² And so, under good laws, looking to your own good is prudent, but care for the common good is pure ‘piety’ (160–5).¹³ Meanwhile, to pain oneself with no social benefit, or to revel in wealth, status, family heritage, gambling, or similar matters is simply to pursue ‘false pleasures’, damaging to oneself as well as to others and to the public (166–79).¹⁴ The Utopians pursue a form of classical Epicureanism, which had undergone something of a reconciliation since Valla’s De Voluptate (1431), later entitled De Vero Falsoque Bono, constrained by rational religious principles.¹⁵ Pleasure is a human good, but it must also be salutary.

As such, when the Utopians set out to play, they do so with the purpose of not just personal but communal benefit. Indeed, they integrate play into childhood education. Agricultural labour, which each Utopian, regardless of gender, is required to perform for two years, is taught to children ‘as if through play’, punning on the double meaning of ludus as both play, or a game, but also school (124–5).¹⁶ This recalls the use of games recommended by Plato’s Athenian in The Laws, who suggested that each profession should be instilled in children from their early play.¹⁷ Several Renaissance humanist treatises on education echoed Plato, reiterating the educative role of games, albeit with a greater emphasis on physical exercise.¹⁸ The Utopians are not so sporting, as the two games the Utopians play in their leisure time were intellectual games ‘not dissimilar to chess’.¹⁹ The first is a ‘battle of numbers’, where one number captures another, described very little in the text, but which More’s educated readers would recognize as the game ‘rithmomachia’, or ‘battle of numbers’ in Greek (128–9).²⁰ This game had been played in western Europe since about the eleventh century, and would still be played, especially in universities, until the seventeenth. More importantly, sixteenth-century authors, drawing on medieval commentators, attributed the game’s invention to ancient Pythagoreans.²¹ Thus, the leading French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1455–c.1536), describing the game in 1496 (reissued in 1507 and 1514), presented it in a dialogue between the ancient Greek medical writer Alcmaeon of Croton, ‘a disciple of Pythagoras’, and two Pythagorean youths, Brontinus and Barbillus.²² As Guillaume Budé noted in his ancillary letter to Utopia, the Pythagoreans were also reputed to have practised communal ownership (12–3).²³ By situating this game in Utopia, More was thus not only demonstrating the Utopians’ education, whereby they all play a game reserved in Europe for the members of the universities, but making yet another obscure reference implying connections between Utopia and ancient Greece.²⁴

The second game, which will prove the focus of this article, represents a ‘battle’ of ‘vices against virtues’, designed to show how the vices seek to undermine and overwhelm the virtues, and how the virtues fight back, to reveal ‘by what means one side or the other gains the victory’ (128–9).²⁵ Both games are directly compared to the ‘foolish and pernicious’ games of Europe, such as ‘dice’, which Book One had described in detail as a means by which people gamble away their livelihood, leading them towards lives of crime (66–7, 128–9).²⁶ However, the structure of this second game, the battle between vices and virtues, suggests a way of reading Utopia itself.

The educative value of chess on subjects from social mores to the function of the English Exchequer had notable precedent in a multitude of medieval works.²⁷ The most famous example was a tract by the Dominican Jacobus de Cessolis (c.1250–c.1322) entitled Liber de Moribus Hominum et Officiis Nobilium super Ludo Scacchorum. Enjoying over 20 printed editions from the 1470s to the 1550s, which ranged geographically from Vienna to Valladolid to London and included translations into five vernacular languages, it is fair to say that the rise of the printing press only heightened the popularity of Cessolis’ work. The translation into English produced by William Caxton, The Game and Playe of the Chesse, in Bruges in 1474, was, in fact, one of the very first works printed in English, published before even a single press was established in England itself.²⁸

Cessolis recounted how chess had been invented by a philosopher in Babylon to teach a wayward king the respective social roles of king, nobles, and commons.²⁹ Each piece represented a social role: the major pieces were king, queen, judges (the bishops, at this point still called ‘alfins’, after elephants), knights, and royal officials (the rooks), while each pawn represented a different kind of labourer, artificer, or professional occupation. He then set out each of their duties: the king is there to rule virtuously, the queen to raise successors, the judges to enforce law, the knights to fight and maintain order, and the officials to enact the king’s will to the benefit of the commonwealth.³⁰ Meanwhile, the various pawns are there out of necessity to provide for the noble orders (74–156). All should remain in their role: the nobles are there to rule, the people to produce, for just as it ‘apperteyneth not’ to the people to ‘be of councellys’, so the nobles while governing should ‘despise not the comyn peple’ while ensuring they have the means ‘to laboure & doo their ocupacion’. But Cessolis perceives the need for some equity, and warns of the dangers when law is enforced only on the poor, while the rich are free to break it at will. Indeed, if the realm fails to provide livings to its people, then it becomes an Augustinian ‘latrocynce’ (latrocinia) or ‘nest of theeuys’ rather than a realm (157–62).³¹ Cessolis’ metaphor thus reflects within the game of chess the hierarchical social order which was still largely idealized by sixteenth-century authors, where the rulers and the ruled, the nobles and the commons, all functioned as necessary, mutually supporting but unequal members of society. As such, John Fitzherbert, in the prologue of his influential Book of Husbandry (1523, with over 10 editions in the next 50 years), uses precisely the ‘boke of the moralyties of the chesse’ to show how everyone ‘from the hyest degree to the lowest’ is ‘set and ordeyned to haue labour and occupacyon’. Indeed, he urges that Cessolis’ book is ‘necessary to be known of euery degree’ so that they might all know and fulfil their respective positions ‘according to the same’.³²

Compare Cessolis’ game to that of the Utopians: Utopian chess has no rigid social hierarchies it seeks to defend, but instead, its purpose is to teach one how to pursue and defend virtue. The change in game is indicative of the change from a society based on social hierarchies to one based on the cultivation of moral faculties. Utopia is famous for its practice of communal ownership, which in turn undermines the social hierarchies of nobility and wealth: at the end of the dialogue Morus specifically notes that Utopia’s ‘communal way of living’ is the ‘foundation’ of the country, and is alone the subversion of ‘all nobility, magnificence, splendour, and majesty’ (246–7).³³ No property is owned individually, and everything the Utopians produce is stored in warehouses or brought to marketplaces from which each head of household could draw whatever they want (136–9). Thus, in Utopia ‘no one is poor nor a beggar, and although no one owns anything, everyone is rich’ (240–1).³⁴ Since all property is held in common, traditional distinctions in wealth and status are removed, and indeed the Utopians spurn conventional signs of outward wealth: ‘silk is despised, gold a badge of contempt’ (150–1).³⁵ The Utopian sabotage of European hierarchy should not be overstated: the familial unit remains patriarchal, led by a paterfamilias; slavery permeates the island; and the Utopians display a genocidal commitment to racial hierarchy in relation to the neighbouring Zapoletes, whom they consider it would be praiseworthy to exterminate (136–7, 184–7, 208–11). Furthermore, officials are elected to govern the cities of Utopia, including a princeps for life leading each city, but Hythlodaeus specifies that the structure of elections seeks to ensure those ‘most fit’ to govern became officials, while term limits and mechanisms of deposition protect against tyranny (120–3).³⁶ Similarly, scholars and priests are elevated to a distinct self-selecting caste of intellectual leaders, who also provide a separate order of officials, but their distinction is not due to innate hierarchies, but to the selection of those who have ‘since childhood’ demonstrated ‘excellent character, exceptional intelligence, and a spirit inclined to fine arts’ (130–1, 154–5, 230–1).³⁷ They form an aristocracy founded on ability and confirmed by election which ensures that Utopia fulfils that moral goal which so many of Thomas More’s contemporary humanists struggled to fit into their own societies: ‘virtue has its reward’ (100–1).³⁸ Utopia still practises a natural hierarchy whereby virtuous intellectual leaders should rule, but detaches this from the accretions of wealth and heritage, to suggest that rule does not innately belong to any, but that they are elevated to it because of their capabilities. Cessolis had interpreted the rule in chess which allows pawns to be promoted to major pieces upon reaching the final rank as a demonstration that the ‘comyn peple’ might by ‘vertu & witte’ rise to rule, as he suggests many popes, bishops, emperors, and kings had done, so no one should despise the commonalty.³⁹ Caxton’s translation, following the fourteenth-century French translation of Jean de Vignay, added a further emphasis on the vexed relation between virtue and nobility: likewise ‘many noble men haue been brought to myserye by their defaulte’ (181).⁴⁰ Utopian customs, in contrast, suggest that all should begin in the same rank and, although the deserving will be promoted, this will not be accompanied by wealth or class status. Utopia has stolen the major pieces from Cessolis’ set, replacing them with pawns.

In a further distinction, Utopian chess emphasizes actual play. In contrast, Cessolis had nothing to say about strategies or different approaches to chess, but instead drew metaphors from the pieces, the board, and the rules of the game. He acknowledged the many different ways a game could play out, and suggested this was the reason for the game’s fame, but it did not feature in his metaphor.⁴¹ Such a ‘static’ allegory precludes the necessity to explain, for example, how an opening gambit works with Cessolis’ model of equity, or how a Queen sacrifice would translate into practice.⁴² One plays to contemplate the metaphor, indeed as Thomas Elyot described it in The Book Named the Governor (1531), the strategy of chess sharpens the wit and the memory, but chess becomes more ‘commendable’ if, while playing, the players ‘do think upon’ Cessolis’ ‘moralization of the chess’.⁴³ Playing does emphasize the need for the pieces to unite and work together, and hints at hierarchical value as each piece defends those of greater worth, but it adds little to the moral message.

Other works moralizing chess, with a far smaller influence than Cessolis’ book, had paid closer attention to the actual process of playing a game, in what Kristin Juel has described as ‘active’ moralizations. Indeed, one late-fifteenth-century example central to Juel’s analysis, Le Jeu des Esches de la Dame Moralisé, constructs the game as a battle of white pieces named after virtues and black pieces named after vices, and portrays the progress of a particular game fought by a lady against the devil.⁴⁴ Through playing out the game, the author does consider strategy, with the devil pursuing a hideously bungled scholar’s mate, missing an obvious fork with check, and leaving Ambition, his queen, hanging, to be captured by Benevolence, the lady’s king’s knight pawn.⁴⁵ Such satanic ineptitude reflects how this moralization does not extend far beyond Cessolis’ metaphor: the strategy remains secondary to the more obvious symbolism of, say, the pawn Continence happening to capture the bishop Sensual Pleasure. As Juel concludes, the allegorical power derives from interactions between ‘pairs of pieces’.⁴⁶ It remains about symbolism, not play.

Utopian chess stands in stark contrast with these examples, for it embeds strategy directly into the educative value of the game. The vices can either ‘openly assault’ the virtues or seek to undermine them ‘through plots’ (machinamentis), while the virtues can either ‘break the strength’ of the vices, or else ‘skilfully elude their attacks’.⁴⁷ There are thus multiple ‘means’ by which either side can achieve victory, a recognition the Utopians also incorporated into their military pursuits (128–9, 204–7).⁴⁸ Such emphasis on strategy can teach the players how to translate what they have learned into reality, while also encouraging them to think of alternative strategies. What is more, chess was undergoing somewhat of a revolution at the very moment of Utopia’s composition. Experimentation with empowering the queen and bishops beginning in the late fifteenth century had taken Europe by storm, vastly increasing the tactical possibilities of the game.⁴⁹ Chess itself was at this time a game of experimentation and iteration, practising new rules to extend its complexity. Utopian chess is thus not merely didactic, but iterative, using repetition not merely to teach, but to encourage its players to continually develop their understanding of how to approach virtue and vice. Furthermore, by using chess as the game’s comparison, the analogy encompasses the possibility for the Utopian game itself to iterate and develop. Utopian chess is about play, whereby strategies within the game, but also the game as a whole, develop and improve through the act of playing.

Such an approach to play replicates broader Utopian practices. As emphasized by Brendan Bradshaw, Hythlodaeus praises how the Utopians ‘are wonderfully adept’ at discovering new means to improve their lives and adapt to new information.⁵⁰ Thus, merely from learning of the recently discovered printing press in Europe, indeed from people who themselves had no practical experience of the industry, the Utopians swiftly develop the means to make paper and print thousands of books; while Hythlodaeus even suggested the Utopians learned every single useful art practised in the Roman Empire either directly, or by hearing but a seed, and then inventing it themselves (106–7, 182–5). Meanwhile, they also learn Greek so quickly that Hythlodaeus compares it to a ‘miracle’, before using this to recommend some shared lineage between the Utopians and the ancient Greeks (180–1).⁵¹ Similarly, a typical Utopian prayer thanks God for placing them in a society they think best and inspiring them with the religious ideas they think truest, but if they are mistaken then they hope God’s grace will intervene so that they might ‘learn’ their error, and pursue a better way.⁵² This stands in stark contrast to the portrayal of European culture in Book One of Utopia, where Hythlodaeus repeatedly complains about the impossibility of anyone listening to the new ideas he has discovered through his travels (76–81, 84–99). When one person, Cardinal Morton, seems willing to listen, the conversation is swiftly derailed by others, who ‘began to play’, but badly, making insulting, inutile jokes, and one participant flying into a rage (76–9).⁵³ Morus’ counter to Hythlodaeus’ grievances, suggesting that they demonstrate the necessity to pursue a tactful ‘indirect approach’, only confirms this European resistance to novelty (96–7).⁵⁴

Utopian society is thus modelled within the strategic and iterative nature of Utopian chess, as well as its focus on virtues and vices, which thus offers a mirror to sixteenth-century Europe. Whereas Europe values rigid class and status, as reflected by Cessolis, Utopia and Utopia’s chess remove these and, as a result, are able to engage with the truly important questions concerning virtue and vice. While Europe resists new ideas, and even those texts on chess which did attempt to moralize active play paid no attention to iteration or developing new strategies, Utopia is ever eager to explore new ideas, and it is the very strategy of Utopian chess which provides the moral lesson.

The reflections captured in Utopian chess, however, do not cease there, for it also replicates the structure of Utopia itself. Utopia is divided into two books.⁵⁵ The bulk of the first is devoted to a stinging description of European society. As Hythlodaeus declares, in specific relation to England, the rich despoil the commons, buying up land and raw materials, and hoarding them for their own profits, while casting the commons out of the houses, lands, and crafts by which they support themselves. Further, they maintain huge retinues of idle retainers in luxury, only to then cast them out, having no trade by which to earn a living. The rich oppress the poor and then dare to punish the populace for theft when they themselves have created the conditions whereby the poor must steal to survive. There is no justice in this ‘making thieves and punishing them [for it]’ (54–67).⁵⁶ Hythlodaeus then describes two royal councils, where monarchs are ever urged to extract more wealth from the people and to pursue expensive, ruinous wars for their own glory (82–95). Europe is utterly corrupted by concerns for wealth and status, and Hythlodaeus urges that becoming so ‘greedy and rapacious’ is the result of human ‘pride’ which ‘glories in getting ahead of others by a superfluous display of possessions’ (136–9).⁵⁷ As Hythlodaeus declares at the end of his description of Utopia: when he considers the commonwealths flourishing in Europe, he sees ‘nothing but a conspiracy of the rich’ using the ‘name and title of the commonwealth’ to oppress the poor and advance their own interests through the same ‘plots’ (machinamenta) the vices use in Utopian chess.⁵⁸ This is not natural to humans, Hythlodaeus claims, for everyone must know that it is far better to have enough of what we need than have abundance of superfluities. But ‘pride’, that ‘monster, the chief and begetter of all plagues’, prevents humanity from recognizing what their ‘true interest’, not to mention ‘Christ’s authority’, recommends (242–6).⁵⁹

Book One thus shows the plots and assaults of the vices, especially pride. In contrast, ‘this sort of vice [pride] has no place whatsoever among the practises of the Utopians’ which are described in Book Two (138–9).⁶⁰ For their customs have ‘extirpated the roots (radicibus) of ambition and faction along with other vices’, a clear reference to the biblical proverb ‘love of money is the root (radix) of all evils’ (246–7).⁶¹ As Budé notes in his ancillary letter, if Utopian policy were imitated, ‘pride, love of money, foolish competition, and nearly all the other deadly weapons of the infernal enemy’ would fall and wither (12–5).⁶² The customs of the Utopians, but especially their practice of communal ownership, by which no one ever suffers want and no one is ever inspired to hoard to excess, shows the method by which pride and all other evils might be overcome. Book One and Book Two thus together structurally replicate the Utopian chessboard, opposing vice against virtue, and demonstrating by what means the virtues can overcome the vices, and how the vices defeat the virtues. In constructing his text exploring a model for how to live virtuously as a game, More would have been closely aware of a direct predecessor. At several points, Utopia explicitly invites comparison to Plato’s Republic, with an introductory poem even directly claiming Utopia was ‘rivaling’, and perhaps even outdoing, ‘the city of Plato’ (18–9).⁶³ At one point in Republic, Plato’s spokesperson Socrates rebukes himself for becoming too passionate during the discussion, when it is only ‘a game we are playing’.⁶⁴ The idea that considering an ideal polity is a game would thus have already occurred to More, but Utopia takes Socrates’ comment seriously, emphasizing the importance of gameplay, for both the Utopian game and Utopia itself are both, at their core, iterative.

Utopia famously ends on an ambiguous note. Hythlodaeus has delivered his thundering peroration, and yet, to conclude the text, Morus undercuts him. ‘I was left thinking’, he muses, that ‘not a few’ of Utopian laws and customs were ‘really absurd’, above all that foundation of their society, their ‘communal way of living’.⁶⁵ He also suggests they might be impracticable, for it attacks those very things which are valued by ‘public opinion’.⁶⁶ Nevertheless, Morus adds in the final line, there are many features of the Utopian commonwealth which ‘I would wish rather than expect to see’.⁶⁷  Utopia is not the conclusion but the beginning of a discussion. Morus is unconvinced by Hythlodaeus’ strategy, and so what he says to Hythlodaeus, instead of voicing his criticisms, is that they should find time ‘for thinking of these things more deeply’ and discussing them ‘in more detail’ (246–9).⁶⁸ As More himself adds in a letter which immediately followed the text of the second edition in 1517, ‘did any one of all the philosophers who have offered a pattern of a society’, or indeed of a single household, ‘set down everything so well that nothing ought to be changed?’ (266–7).⁶⁹

Utopia the text is thus a playing out of the Utopian game, combatting virtues and vices, and proffering a particular strategy by which the virtues may emerge victorious: the model of the isle of Utopia itself. But it is only one potential strategy in that game, which is open to refinement and adaptation by future players. Indeed, Utopia’s ambiguous conclusion raises the question of whether the strategy described would even work.⁷⁰ This is only strengthened by the unreliability of both Morus and Hythlodaeus and the work’s dialogic nature, which invite the reader to question whether, perhaps, Hythlodaeus and Utopia were blithely playing as the vices all along.⁷¹ Indeed, the Utopians themselves seem unreliable: the Utopian definition of pleasure could easily be read as tautological, while their condemnation of pride stands in absurd contrast to their arrogance towards their neighbours, whom they believe it is just to annex and dispossess if their own population grows too large or, in the case of the Zapoletes, actively seek their extermination (136–7, 208–11). Further, Utopian chess also requires the Utopians, who supposedly know so little about the vices, to play as them and activate an intimate knowledge of their stratagems. The reader is to take nothing for granted. As such, Utopia not only describes a game, but is a game, with an ambiguous strategy and an uncertain ending which invites its readers not only to observe, but to play it for themselves. Like any good game, Utopia wants to be played multiple times, to be reconsidered from new angles, and for its players to construct new strategies in this battle between the virtues and the vices played out on a board encompassing all human society. It invites replay, both through being reread and indeed rewritten by others. It is this very iterative nature embedded into the work’s ludic structure which ensures readers keep returning to Utopia and keep finding new ways to engage with the text. Thus, as Utopia’s title page declares, it is a work ‘no less beneficial than entertaining’ (2–3).⁷²

More’s work not only gave its name to the genre of utopian writing, but, in doing so, also codified the genre itself. It is no coincidence that, a century later, when Robert Burton constructed a fictional ideal society, the quintessential characteristic of utopian writing, he described it as ‘mak[ing] an Vtopia of mine owne’.⁷³ The question must therefore be asked whether this game of Utopia reflects the utopian genre as a whole? Are all utopias playing a game?

An analogy between utopian writing and games has been previously suggested by Michael Holquist, who took a similar starting point of the Utopian battle of vices against virtues and identified it specifically as ‘the game of utopia’ (109). However, Holquist’s desire to analogize utopias with chess itself and fit them into the structures of game as described by Roger Caillois ensures that utopias and dystopias are all conflated and confined to their plots, while even the complex structure of Utopia itself is not explored in detail.⁷⁴ As a result, Holquist projects the idea that utopias portray a ‘static society’ filled with ‘robots’ instead of characters as much onto Hythlodaeus, and the specifically changing isle of Utopia, as onto D-503’s and Winston Smith’s psychological sufferings under totalitarian regimes (113–4). Similarly, despite recognizing the iterative nature of utopias, Holquist still concludes that the object of the utopian game is to ‘win’, as it were, showing why one particular utopian system ‘is superior to others’, while the players’ end is the freedom of ‘revel[ling] in a second world’ abstracted from the real (122). This description can hardly apply to Utopia, which intimately engages with the real world and embeds deliberate ambiguity to preclude any pretension to such a victory. By overemphasizing the analogy to chess, Holquist thus misses a vital aspect of Utopia and utopias: the author, reader, and subsequent participants in the genre are playing the game together, collaboratively even, not parallelly. Thus, despite much astute observation which this article agrees with, Holquist’s analogy falters. The above close analysis of Utopia, however, shows definitively how and why Utopia reflects Utopian chess. Furthermore, close consideration of More’s most immediate English imitators can suggest both how this utopian game was continued and how, like early modern chess, it changed.

More’s most immediate English successors not only play a game, but the exact same game of virtue and vice as the Utopians. Thomas Lupton’s Too Good to Be True of the 1580s schematically traipses through a list of the moral evils of ‘Ailgna’ (Anglia, ‘England’, inverted) showing how each one is solved in ‘Mauqsun’ (nusquam, ‘nowhere’, inverted), through rigorous punitive application of the Golden Rule: ‘As you would that other shoulde do vnto you, euen so do yee to them’.⁷⁵ For example, if a man ignores a poor beggar on the street, then he shall be stripped and forced to beg himself, while guards prevent anyone from giving him alms so that he will suffer the same cruelty he inflicted (32). In a more figurative example from Lupton’s sequel, a judge who has taken a bribe should have the coin melted down and poured down their throat: just as they let gold silence the voice of the plaintiff, so their voice must be silenced by gold.⁷⁶ Lupton’s interlocutors are convinced that these harsh punishments lead the people of Mauqsun to virtue. Indeed, the confiscation of a quarter of all the goods of landlords who seek to profit off their tenants means that, in contrast to the England described by Hythlodaeus, the tenants of Mauqsun ‘do not even know what enhaunsing of Rentes doth mean’ (sigs E1v–E3v). In a similar vein, T.N.’s description of the fictional Christian land of Crangalor in Asia (1579) also promised the victory of virtue over vice through the reform of the justice system. Although the penalty for a judge taking a bribe (having their legs sawn off in the market place with a wooden saw) evokes Lupton’s extremity, such violence was but one aspect of reforms, including a distinguished public advocate with a ‘great stipend’ employed to defend the poor against the rich in court, and constant investigation to ensure ‘vicious persons’ are ‘expulsed’.⁷⁷ Lupton clearly faced off virtues and vices, but insisted he had the single winning strategy to the game: vicious punitive action. T.N. was less convinced that this alone could conquer vice, and so integrated it within a broader reform of justice.

Robert Burton (1577–1640) was an even more explicit participant in Utopia’s game. His Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) diagnoses the causes of ‘Melancholy’ within European states, before constructing his own utopian commonwealth. To demonstrate these issues, Burton draws on new considerations of approaches to politics, such as Giovanni Botero’s Della Ragion di Stato (1589), but also looks back to Utopia, and identifies ‘bad policy, and idle education’ as the foundation of Europe’s vices, including those same sheep Hythlodaeus denounced for ‘deuoure[ing] men’ (26–56). Burton, however, expresses powerlessness to enact reform, as some mighty hero, an ‘Atilla’ or a ‘Hercules’, is necessary to ‘reforme our manners’ and purge ‘all those ferall vices and monsters of the minde’, not some bookish Oxford librarian (55–6). His utopia, then, is a self-aware ‘poeticall commonwealth’ which shows the strategies whereby good policy can undo vice in a place deliberately abstracted from Europe: some unexplored land in America, or even the legendary Terra Australis Incognita (disregarding the potential existence of native inhabitants).⁷⁸ Burton explicitly rejects ‘Vtopian parity’, in a deliberate twist of Morus’ parting thought, as something ‘to be wished for rather then effected’ for it removes ‘splendor and magnificence’. Instead, he constructs ‘degrees of nobility’ attached to set proportions of land, but, to protect the commonalty from the covetousness of the rich, he also establishes a commission preventing ‘ingrossings’ of multiple holdings into a few people’s hands, a practice he compares to the Roman lex agraria (56–61). Burton is taking the Utopian game and playing out his own version of it. He agrees with Morus against Hythlodaeus that ameliorative policy is the best strategy to combat vice, and recommends what these methods could be. As Chloë Houston has argued, these utopias eschew the ambiguity of More’s Utopia and claim instead to proffer definitive solutions (4–5, 59). Even so, they still participate in the same game as both Utopia and the Utopians, providing strategies whereby the virtues can defeat the vices, such as Lupton’s strict punitive Christian morality, or Burton’s deliberate invocation of ‘policy’.

Utopian writing beyond the context of sixteenth-century Europe, where questions of virtue and vice enjoyed reduced dominance, clearly does not play the exact same Utopian battle between the virtues and vices. However, they are still playing a comparable game, as can be effectively demonstrated with the example of James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). Oceana eschews Utopia’s emphasis on the vices and virtues with the suggestion that ‘virtue’ is nothing else but ‘reason’ and ‘interest’, and so both right reason and right virtue are but the ‘interest of mankind’.⁷⁹ Harrington thus writes a utopia without considering how virtue can beat vice. Instead, Oceana turns on securing a distribution of property and provision of political orders necessary for a ‘rightly ordered’ commonwealth which can provide for the general interest and thus become ‘immortal’ (256). But it still follows the same ludic structure as More’s Utopia. It arrays the flaws in extant society, its monarchical government founded on unequal orders of citizens and a maldistribution of property, against their antithesis, a popular government founded on one order of nominally equal citizens and a distribution of property which will maintain a popular constitution. It thus recommends particular strategies, especially agrarian laws and rotation of offices, by which the better option can overcome the worse. Harrington is still playing the game; he has simply exchanged the pieces.

To write a utopia is not to play the exact same chess the Utopians play. Traditional conceptions of the vices and the virtues hold little relevance, for example, to socialist utopias defeating capitalism, feminist utopias undermining patriarchy, or ecological utopias escaping the climate crisis.⁸⁰ But just as in the early sixteenth century chess was still changing in shape, the utopian game continues to take different forms. Subsequent utopias still pursue Utopia’s ludic structure, drawing up battle lines and demonstrating strategies whereby one side or the other can claim victory. Like Harrington, they are still playing the game, but they substitute different pieces.⁸¹ The virtues become the achievements of the proposed world; the vices become the flaws with the current. Even a purely fantastical arcadia or tale of Cockaigne, where some supernatural force makes scarcity a natural impossibility, is encompassed by such utopian gameplay. These simply experiment with magical, rather than practical, strategies. Furthermore, all utopias necessarily embed Utopia’s recursive and iterative structure. As Fredric Jameson has described: the genre is ‘uniquely’ characterized by its ‘explicit intertextuality’.⁸² It is fundamentally intertwined with its ability to be replayed.

The ludic structure underpinning More’s Utopia thus defines the utopian genre. This definition extends beyond the predominant current definitions of utopian writing as ‘social dreaming’ or a yearning for a ‘better’ or ‘more perfect’ place, to recognize the playfulness integral to utopias, recognized previously by Holquist.⁸³ This interpretation thus explains why so many authors, from Plato, to Marx, to modern critics, have reached so easily for the metaphor of a ‘game’ to describe constructing a utopia.⁸⁴ Utopian writing is a game, setting up a conflict between the flaws of extant society and their antithesis, and presenting a strategy whereby those flaws could, potentially, be conquered.

The form of chess played by the Utopians not only imitates Utopian society, but also models the work Utopia itself and, furthermore, vividly demonstrates what utopian writing itself does. Understanding this about the utopian genre, finally, helps explain what it is about More’s Utopia which has ensured its continued prominent standing among utopian literature. Utopia, unlike many of its successors, recognizes that it is playing a complex game to which it only offers one strategy, which it further notes could be wrong or indeed could be utterly impracticable. It does not offer a single problem which can be solved, nor does it arrogantly suggest that it has ‘solved’ the entire game. Just as a chess magazine would not dare suggest that it had discovered the one and only way to play chess, and so all chess sets should be promptly recycled, Utopia does not offer a solution, but instead commends the very act of playing itself. It is this conscious recognition that it is playing a game which has ensured Utopia’s pre-eminence within the genre it bestowed its name upon.

Footnotes