A Man for All Seasons

 I had a "birthday treat" opportunity to see the production of Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons at the Harold Pinter Theatre last week. The stage set and costumes were very much true to the Tudor setting of the play, and the dialogue was very faithful to the published text of the play. 

Since seeing the play I have read again the Preface written by Robert Bolt for a 1961 publication of the play. In that Preface, Robert Bolt offers an "explanation and apology for treating Thomas More, a Christian saint, as a hero of selfhood."

... Thomas More, as I wrote about him, became for me a man with an adamantine sense of his own self. He knew where he began and left off, what area of himself he could yield to the encroachment of his enemies, and what to the encroachments of those he loved. It was a substantial area in both cases for he had a proper sense of fear and was a busy lover. Since he was a clever man and a great lawyer he was able to retire from those areas in a wonderfully good order, but at length he was asked to retreat from that final area where he located his self. And there this supple, humorous, unassuming and sophisticated person set like metal, was overtaken by an absolutely primitive rigour, and could no more be budged than a cliff.

The other aspect of Thomas More that was attractive to Robert Bolt was what he termed "his splendid social adjustment". After briefly surveying the range of Thomas More's social and political life, Bolt observes:

He parted with more than most men when he parted with his life, for he accepted and enjoyed his social context.... But why did a man so utterly absorbed in his society, at one particular point disastrously part company from it?

For a Catholic, the explanation can readily be seen in Thomas More's faithfulness to the universal Christian Church. But for Bolt, writing his play, that Christian faith can only be a metaphor representing a larger context into which a man can be excluded when he no longer enjoys the regard of society. 

More's trust in the law was his trust in his society; his desperate sheltering beneath the forms of the law was his determination to remain within the shelter of society. Cromwell's contemptuous shattering of the forms of law  by an unconcealed act of perjury showed how fragile for any individual is that shelter. Legal or illegal had no further meaning, the social references had been removed.

 I was interested to see that the revived production currently running in London (until early September) did leave the play in the original historical setting of its narrative. But it is interesting to ask how it might have been translated into a contemporary narrative. Where today would Robert Bolt be able to find a leading character who combines the selfhood amidst the ebbs and flows of a society that he discovered in Thomas More?