Since Utopia is the only book by More that most people have ever heard of, there is the common impression that he is a one-book man. Actually he was a prolific writer, but because much that he wrote was theological in nature and written in Latin, it has had little circulation since his time. It is interesting to note that early in his career he published an abridged translation of a biography of the brilliant Italian humanist, Pico della Mirandula (The Life of John Picus, Earl of Mirandula). The best known of his works after Utopia was A History of Richard III. For several centuries after that work appeared it exerted great influence either directly or indirectly on the interpretation of Richard’s character and the events of his reign. Shakespeare’s Richard III was a product of that interpretation. Recent scholarship has tended to discount More’s report of that king as untrustworthy, and there can be no doubt that More’s sources of information were strongly prejudiced in favor of the Tudor regime and, consequently, anti-Yorkist.
A moving document, Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, written by More in prison shortly before his execution, has been compared to Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy.
