George Saintsbury, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth birthday of the eminent scholar Dr. Frederick J. Furnivall, wrote a poem to pay tribute to his friend's achievements in philology. It begins:

The designing of permanent indoor theatres did not command the attention of Italian Renaissance architects until the sixteenth century was well under way, temporary structures and portable facilities having previously sufficed for dramatic presentations. Yet already in the second quarter of the quattrocento a chamber in one of the most prominent palaces of fifteenth-century Rome was referred to as the sala theatri.

More's Utopia is a 'no place' land, as the title etymologically denominates it. To name this nusquama where the main river is the Anydrus is to enter a realm of fiction and contradiction, for this place belongs to language. This verbal irony has a precedent in the Platonic text which is one of More's models and which is, like the Utopia, a fiction with practical and didactic implications. At the end of Book ix of the Republic, Plato has Glaucon ponder just where might be located that city which has been their topic of conversation for so long: it is to be found, he says, only and 'nowhere on earth.'