“[T]he fault of the man and not the poet”: Sidney’s Troubled Double Vision of Thomas More’s Utopia

Contributor(s): Daniel T. Lochman

In the Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney refers puzzlingly to Thomas More and Utopia. He praises the “way” this work presents a commonwealth yet faults the man who produced it. Sidney might have followed religious writers who condemned More’s Catholicism and his use of poetic fictions rather than...