"In an age when conduct was so often interpreted in terms of types, models, or precedents, More showed an exceptional facility in assuming personae and his writings frequently suggest his awareness of social life as a dramatic performance. This is not the stoic commonplace of the world as a stage but a more developed sense of role-playing as an essential device in self-definition. Again, it can be seen as an integral part of the rhetorical tradition that the self is not presented as a 'personality' or a 'substantial self' but as a source of raw psychic energy which assimilates the possible forms offered by society."
(Dominic Baker-Smith, More's Utopia, p. 10)
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