Courtier Vs Castiglione Essay

The Book of the Courtier vs Utopia

Works by Baldassare Castiglione

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Sir Thomas More

The Book of The Courtier and Utopia are both works discussing ideals in, philosophy, society, and virtue. Many of the ways they go about doing so are even very similar, while others not so much. Both works use their characters as tools for expressing complex ideas through different viewpoints and perspectives; with the hope that after leaving the audience with these ideas and questions, they will be able to resolve and implement them within their lives. To begin I thought it to be most important to first compare the overarching technique, dialogue, and its use in both works. In The Book of The Courtier, Castiglione presents the work as a series of fictional discussions among members of the

This work is different from Utopia in the fact that it is a hybrid of perspectives including first person, past tense, and character voice narrative. The involved narrators reveal the story through their turn in the discussion making it a first person/character voice account because they are narrators as well as characters, and Castiglione recalls these conversations making it a past tense narrative. I think that Castiglione’s use of this perspective gives us unique insight to the characters because we get to hear each of them individually explain what they think is most important to a courtier. This creates character development while also showing the audience certain ideas that would be discontinuous if otherwise narrated. An interesting aspect of our author, like in utopia, is a character in the book, but distances himself from the conversations of the particular evenings by pretending to have been elsewhere during them, it’s said that he was actually in England at the time of the court meetings. (Laurence, "The Book of the Courtier - Critical