Abstract
In this essay I would like to offer a reading of a sixteenth-century biography of Thomas More written in the 1550s by his son-in-law, William Roper. In the course of this reading, I will sketch the text’s relationship to a tradition of lives of More, to questions of the generic status of biography, and to the importance of framing and contexts to interpretation.
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Notes
I am here using the standard translation: Thomas Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, ed. E. E. Reynolds and trans. Philip E. Hallett (London: Burns & Oates, 1966), p. 133.
See John R. Knott’s note on John Foxe’s repetition of this, in Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 40.
See Donald A. Stauffer, English Biography before 1700 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), p. 32.
William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, knighte, ed. E. V. Hitchcock, EETS Original Series: 197 (London: Oxford University Press, 1935; repr. 1958), p. 82.
For a discussion of the ‘deliberated design’ of Roper’s text, see Judith H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984).
See also Jonathan V. Crewe, ‘The “Encomium Moriae” of William Roper’, ELH, 55 (1988), 287–307, later revised and reprinted in
Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Cal.: University of California Press, 1990).
See the discussion in John Maguire, ‘William Roper’s Life of More: The Working Methods of a Tudor Biographer’, Moreana, 23 (1969), 59–65.
C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 287.
David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, vol. 1 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), p. 476.
For discussions of these writings, see, for example, Louis L. Martz, Thomas More: The Search for the Inner Man (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990); and
G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
Quoted by Anthony Kenny, Thomas More (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 51.
Thomas More, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, in The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 8, ed. L. Schuster, R. Marius, J. Lusardi and R. J. Schoeck (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 179.
Support for Kenny’s view is given by the discussion in J. A. Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), pp. 141–74.
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 49–55, 54.
I have used the slightly different translation given in Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (London: Hutchinson, 1983), p. 104.
For Derrida’s own work on the signature, see most obviously: ‘Signature Event Context’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), and
later also in Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988);
Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
For recent pieces of related interest see, for instance, Bennington’s ‘Derridabase’, in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 148–66;
Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), ch. 5.
William H. Epstein, ‘Introduction: Contesting the Subject’, in Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, ed. William H. Epstein (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1991), pp. 1–7, 2.
William H. Epstein, ‘Recognizing the Life-Text: Towards a Poetics of Biography’, Biography, 6: 4 (1983), 283–306.
The most obvious of the Derridean texts to invoke in this regard is ‘La Loi du genre’, in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986);
‘The Law of Genre’, a substantial extract from which is translated by Avital Ronell in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 221–52.
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 123.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’, trans. Anne Tomiche, in The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1990, 1994), pp. 63–94, 92.
For an example of this, see Louis A. Montrose, ‘Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History’, English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 5–12.
See Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 25.
See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. xv.
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© 1998 Mark Robson
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Robson, M. (1998). Writing Contexts in William Roper’s Life of Thomas More. In: Gould, W., Staley, T.F. (eds) Writing the Lives of Writers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26548-0_6
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