Sometimes a neologism’s afterlife is even busier than that of its inventor. A recent Google search of ‘Thomas More’ brought 2,500,000 hits, but a search of ‘utopia’ yielded exactly 18,000,000. All those zeros! How fitting for More’s Nowhere, even though its name is now nearly everywhere, even reimagined – witness my epigraph – as a computer game combining feudalism with American get-up-and-go.

What of the man who coined ‘utopia’? More’s early biographer William Roper reports that after his arraignment More told his judges (as he told others) that he and they would ‘in heaven merrily all meet together’ (Roper 250). This essay, however, will focus on More’s earthly afterlife and that of his two major works The History of King Richard the Third and Utopia. In his own day his Latin epigrams were widely enjoyed, his savage polemics roundly condemned but just as savagely answered by William Tyndale and other Reformers, and his eloquent Tower Works (particularly the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation) published and, if we may judge from a few allusions, read with appreciation. But More’s later fame was shaped largely by ambivalent memories of the man, by the usurping duke of York whom he helped make an archetype of pathologically cunning tyranny, and by the famous island that gave us the word ‘utopia’, the genre of utopian fantasy, and eventually, in an expansion of More’s pun on u/eutopia, the word ‘dystopia’. It is on these three afterlives – of the person and his two most influential books – that I will focus.

AT the start of Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie (written some time in the early 1580s), John Pietro Pugliano, the Emperor's master of horse, praises horsemanship and horses so compellingly that Sidney says, smilingly, “if I had not been a piece of logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to wish myself a horse.” We see, he says, the distorting effect of self-love, and offers the reader another example: himself. A poet, he will praise poetry. The paradox Sidney sets up is not quite that of self-reference, although it comes close, but Sidney does place himself in a paradoxically logical if pleasantly sophistical win-win situation. If we believe him on poetry we must respect the avocation into which he has fallen. If, on the other hand, we doubt him because we think his logic distorted by bias he also wins, for the Defence is explicitly designed—so the speaker claims—to show self-love at work. Hearing a poet praise poetry is not too far from hearing Folly praise folly, even if not quite like hearing a Cretan say all Cretans are liars.

Sidney's opening gambit, clever but no mere courtly sprezzatura, is a revealing moment, because behind Pugliano's self-loving praise of horses and horsemanship, as behind the poet Sidney's praise of poetry, lies a defense of desire itself. Horses are ancient symbols of desire, after all, and Sidney's very name—Phil-hip—means “horse-lover.” If horses have often represented libido, though, logic and the superego suggest that even a passionate poet should not want to be one.

This essay discusses the shorter poems that Spenser published in the 1590s with the exceptions of 'Mother Hubberds Tale' and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. Do they have anything in common aside from authorship and relative brevity? Perhaps so. All concern love or sorrow, and some explore the often tense relation of those two energies that Spenser variously locates in the psyche, the state and the cosmos. True, much human life can be read as a dialectic of desire and melancholy (in Elizabethan terms, 'forward' and 'froward' passions), but Spenser's focus on the dialectic is particularly sharp. These poems are by definition non-epic ventures. Yet awareness of The Faerie Queene is never far away, sometimes detectable in verse on the collapse of greatness, sometimes, more obliquely, in echoes of Virgil or Ovidian subversions of the Aeneid, and sometimes audible as references to the national epic on which Spenser the lover knows, or says he knows, he should be working.

Complaints (1591) was published by William Ponsonby, publisher of the 1590 Faerie Queene. Much remains mysterious about this venture. Did Spenser oversee its printing? In a preface Ponsonby reports that he has collected the contents, extracting poems from those owning copies, retrieving others 'purloined' from Spenser, and failing to obtain some others. Spenser had been in England, so it is possible that he oversaw the printing or at least authorised the volume's arrangement.

It is hard, said the poet Juvenal as he looked around Nero's Rome, not to write satire (Satires i.i). But what is “satire”? Sometimes a form, often a mode, it can double as diatribe, sermon, parody, joke, Utopia, dystopia, epistle, or novel; its tone ranges from fury to faint irony, anguish to amusement. Is it, then, discourse with attitude? Any sendup or putdown? It must be more than irritability or grief, and that “more” is often some fantasy, conceit, myth, invention, or persona. Like allegory, it thrives in a fallen world of ambiguous signs, Augustine's “land of unlikeness.” Not all Tudor writers explore a deconstructionist's “differance,” but some adopt a distance or difference - fiction - that distinguishes their work from lament, polemic, or sermon. When such work holds something up to amused or scornful scrutiny, and at some length, the result is satire.

Although medieval Europe, like all cultures, enjoyed wit and satire, Renaissance humanists and others had a specific interest in classical views of the risible and in definably classical genres. The interest, however, was seldom expressed with much subtlety even by major critics. When Sir Philip Sidney, for example, briefly mentions the ‘bitter but wholesome Iambic, who rubs the galled mind’ and the gentler ‘Satyr’ who ‘sportingly never leaveth till he make a man laugh at folly’, or when Joachim du Bellay advises the French to give up inept native forms and imitate such poets as Horace in ‘modestement’ taxing the age's vice, the limitations of Renaissance genre theory are clear. Renaissance scholars and writers thought about the history of satire and the nature and function of humour, but thanks in part to a tendency to prize the moral and didactic with just a nod or two at the recreative, their speculations – even those of the great Isaac Casaubon – lagged behind the imaginative complexity of actual practice. A certain unease in Renaissance commentary on satire and humour can also be explained by the need, when following the ancients, to adapt classical genres and styles to a culture with dukes and kings, not senators and emperors, to new media and new means of censorship, and to a religion that urges us to love our enemies, not to humiliate them into suicide as, it was said, the ancient satirist Archilochus had done when he invented the iambic. Those who imitated ancient humour are therefore often careful to say that laughter repairs the hard-working body and spirit, that an acid-dipped pen can serve as a doctor's scalpel, that fools and villains need a good rhetorical drubbing, that one may bite back at detractors, or that those who wince at satire are probably guilty of something.