Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas More

"Oh! blame not the bard" is a neat act of rhetorical self-defense dressed up as humility. More reaches for the ancient shield of the poet: if words cause trouble, fault the world that forced them into song, not the singer who merely gave them shape. The little exclamation - "Oh!" - isn’t decoration; it stages the speaker as pained, even surprised that anyone would take offense. It’s an emotional cue that softens what is, underneath, a fairly hard-edged argument about responsibility.

In More’s context, that argument carried real stakes. Tudor England was a place where language was never just aesthetic; it was surveilled, litigated, and weaponized. More himself would be consumed by the politics of speech and conscience, executed for refusing to affirm the king’s supremacy. Read against that biography, "blame not the bard" sounds less like a precious plea for artistic license and more like a survival tactic: a way to claim moral distance from the consequences of saying the wrong thing in public.

The subtext also flatters the audience. By asking not to "blame", More implies there is something blameworthy in the material - satire, critique, inconvenient truth - and positions the bard as a conduit rather than an instigator. It’s strategic ambiguity: he both asserts the power of art to reveal and denies full ownership of the revelation. In a culture where a well-turned line could be evidence, the pose of the reluctant messenger wasn’t coyness; it was cover.