A Man for All Seasons (Criticism)

Criticism

Carole L. Hamilton

Hamilton examines Bolt’s play as a tribute to the ideal of selfhood. As Bolt himself described it, Hamilton sees More’s faith to his principles as a stand for individuality and preservation of the self.

In an elegant Preface to the script of A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt explains the historical background to Sir Thomas More’s story of martyrdom at the hands of King Henry VIII. Bolt also explains his reasons for choosing a sixteenth-century theologian and statesman as a “hero of selfhood” in spite of having little interest himself in questions of Christian piety. For Bolt, “virtue” and “selfhood” have lost meaning in the modern era, where the self is “an equivocal commodity.” What fascinated Bolt about More was that he, unlike many of his contemporaries, considered the king’s oath a serious contract, one that asked him to “offer himself as a guarantee.” More refused to take the oath because he disagreed with its premise (that the King could overrule God’s Law) and because he took his own virtue and soul seriously. For More, to take an oath falsely would literally perjure his soul. Bolt translates this position into modern parlance to suggest that More refused also to perjure his “self” — that he valued his faith in his own capacity for virtue. It is this capacity for virtue, where virtue is adherence to the self, that Bolt sees as a scarce commodity in the modern world. Bolt’s story of More is about a man’s fight for selfhood; it is also the story of how the modern loss of selfhood came to be.

Bolt, who belonged to the Communist Party for more than five years before becoming disillusioned with it, abhorred the growing consumerism in the 1950s in Great Britain and elsewhere. He agreed with Karl Marx that a society that placed too much emphasis on getting and spending, money would take on more importance than personal virtue. As Bolt asserts, “We would prefer most men to guarantee their statements with, say, cash rather than with themselves.” Critics have agreed with his assessment of the modern age and of Thomas More as a suitable hero. “In a collective society the individual tends to become an equivocal commodity, and when we think of ourselves in this way we lose all sense of our own identity. More’s refusal to take the oath is Bolt’s way of asserting that even under the greatest of pressures man can exist unequivocally; that it is possible to live in the modern world without ‘selling out’,” wrote Robert Corrigan in The New Theatre of Europe. The modern period has been described as a period of moral bankruptcy; in such a world, the self is compromised at every turn. Thus Bolt turned to history for subject matter because “modern man has become so trivial and uninteresting that he has lost his power to involve us, while modern mass society has inhibited even the superior spirits from expressing themselves through significant action,” according to Robert Brustein in the New Republic.

More believed in the ultimate supremacy of God. For More this was a fact and not simply a matter of allegiance. For More, God was supreme and nothing the King of England said or did could change this fact. More was also a loyal subject, and he supported the King’s governance of the State and of the English Church. More helped Henry write a defense against Martin Luther and he turned down William Roper as suitor to his daughter until Roper mended his heretical views. But when it came to the King’s “Great Matter,” as Henry’s desire to annul his marriage to Catherine came to be known, More could not condone an act that the Pope expressly refused to sanction. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope is God’s presence on earth and the Pope’s decisions carry the weight of a decision by God. This was an especially significant factor in the early sixteenth century, when the Church and State were intertwined in a way that is no longer conceivable. Popes routinely dispensed with inconvenient biblical laws to help monarchs make politically expedient marriages, and priests were routinely involved in matters of war. Cardinal Wolsey himself organized military campaigns as well as conducted peace talks with France. The relationship of the English king to the Pope enforced the king’s authority in England and internationally. Unfortunately though for Henry VIII, Pope Clement VII could not please the English king because of another impingement of State upon Church: at the time hundreds of Spanish troops surrounded the Vatican and Clement VII dared not offend the Spanish king. The Pope refused Henry’s request. Henry could not abide this, so he broke with Rome and declared the Act of Supremacy.

More considered the move an outright defiance of God’s law. Finally breaking his vow of silence after an unfair trial, More declares, “The King in Parliament cannot bestow the Supremacy of the Church because it is a Spiritual Supremacy!” In other words, neither the Parliament nor the King had the authority to decree the Act of Supremacy in the first place. In fact, English law itself protected the Church from such violations of its jurisdiction, and More added,“furthermore, the immunity of the Church is promised in Magna Carta and the King’s own coronation oath.” More was on firm ground both ecclesiastically and legally, but could not prevent either the King’s violation of Church and State law, nor the irreversible chasm between Church and State that his Act would initiate. The creation of a separate, secular government would ultimately lead to the modern condition that Bolt found so lacking in virtue and selfhood that he resurrected a 400-year-old hero to salvage it.

Henry VIII’s declaration of sovereignty over the Church in England was the first of many breaks between church and state that would take place over the next two centuries, thus shifting state governance from an abstract, transcendental mode of authority (derived from God) to a hierarchical, temporal authority (administered by humans). Thenceforth, the state would gradually break free of the connection to God, coincidentally eroding the reinforcing authority of God’s endorsement of the monarch. It was a slippery slope that ultimately contributed to the paucity of moral virtue of the secular world: the absence of God in government translated to the possible absence of God at all. The lack of a transcendental authority, according to Bolt, also contributed to the modern loss of self, for, as Bolt hypothesizes in his Preface, “It may be that a clear sense of the self can only crystallize round something transcendental.” Certainly More’s self is crystallized around a transcendental idea — the supremacy of God over man. The State was also crystallized around this transcendental idea, and Thomas More, foresaw that to remove this idea would prove as fatal for the world as it would for himself. In a final invective to Cromwell, More laments, “It is a long road you have opened. First men will disclaim their hearts and presently they will have no hearts. God help the people whose Statesmen walk your road.”

Bolt clearly desired his audience to find connections in his historical play that would resonate with life in the modern world. He was quoted in the English Journal saying: “The action of this play ends in 1535, but the play was written in 1960, and if in production one date must obscure the other, it is 1960 which I wish clearly to occupy the stage. The ‘life’ of a man like Thomas More proffers a number of caps which in this or any other century we must try on for size,” In the play, More himself alludes to his heroism. Deploring those who rationalize taking the easy path, More tells his daughter, “If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes.”

More was found guilty of High Treason after the perjurous testimony of Richard Rich, an immoral opportunist who sold his own soul for bureaucratic advancement — in other words, an archetypal “modern” man. The first appearance of Rich finds him prophetically asserting to More that “every man has his price.” In their argument (which may or may not have occurred between the historical More and Rich) Rich voices a modern preoccupation with self-interest over integrity and hard currency over ethical value. And yet, it is not Rich that Bolt means the audience to blame. Bolt repeatedly draws the viewer’s attention to the Common Man, who, if not directly responsible for More’s execution, represents the greater danger to the life expectancy of virtue. For it is the Common Man, performing the roles of foreman and headsman, who dutifully and thoughtlessly tenders the guilty verdict and dependably performs the execution. In effect, the Common Man silently condemns the life of morality, as symbolized by Thomas More, or as Corrigan expressed it, the Common Man “judges and executes the heroes of selfhood.”

In one of the few encounters More has with him, the Common Man expresses his wish simply to “keep out of trouble.” More turns away, disgusted by the man’s refusal to take a moral stance, saying “Oh, Sweet Jesus! These plain, simple men!” The interchange carries the added emphasis of ending abruptly with sudden music and a swift change of scene. The epilogue provides a final podium for the Common Man, who reiterates his philosophy and attempts to impose it on the audience; “don’t make trouble,” he warns. The effect is meant ironically, to chide the audience not to follow his advice.

But the medium of theater places implicit emphasis on the first, literal meaning of the Common Man’s words: theater does not “make trouble.” Nor does passively watching this morality play compel the audience to take a stance like that taken by More. Far from it. The price he paid for virtue was his life. The audience, on the other hand, has just bought virtue for the price of a theater ticket. Theater-goers may walk away, feeling a special affinity for a man like Thomas More, passively and tragically failing to recognize themselves in the Common Man, who passively and tragically facilitated More’s demise. For the modern period, too absorbed with the loss of self to commit to virtue, commends itself simply for recognizing virtue when it sees it, and that seems to be enough. With no simple means to practice virtue first-hand, modern humankind prefers to practice it via the arts; it is part of the general dilution of moral values. In a consumer culture, morality, virtue, and ethical goodness are not transcendental ideas around which to crystallize a self, but thoughts that sponsor feelings of “vague humanitarianism,” moments of mental virtue that are never translated into action.

The theater, and plays such as Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons feed the modern appetite for snacks of virtue, small acts of recognizing virtue that can be consumed in the theater, the movie theater, and conveniently at home, on television. Bolt meant his play to stir the consciences of his audience, but in actuality, his play does no more than solace them.

Source: Carole L. Hamilton, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia predates his fatal conflict with Henry VIII. The fictional account analyzes the ills of England before expounding upon “Utopia” (“nowhere”), a land run according to the ideals of Humanism.
• George Bernard Shaw’s 1923 Saint Joan, concerns the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, whose sainthood made her a misfit in her society.
• Jean Anouilh’s 1969 French drama, Becket, Or the Honor of God, like T. S. Eliot’s 1935 Murder in the Cathedral, tells the story of another British Christian martyr, Thomas a Becket.
• In Enemy of the People, an early (1882) play by Henrik Ibsen, a town rejects and persecutes a doctor who warns the people that the town’s lucrative baths are polluted.
• Plato’s Apology (written between 371 and 267 BC) records Socrates’s defense in his trial against the state for impiety and corrupting youth through his teachings.
• In Sophocles’s Antigone (circa 400 BC), a young woman defies the king’s prohibition against performing burial rites for her brother and suffers imprisonment for this act of loyalty. Jean Anouilh’s 1942 adaptation of the same name is an allegory for France under Vichy rule.
• A scholarly account of the various stages of the Reformation of the English Church can be found in Christopher Haigh’s 1993 English Reformation: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors.