Robert Bolt

The classic play about Sir Thomas More, the Lord chancellor who refused to compromise and was executed by Henry VIII.

A Play in Two Acts

A Man for All Seasons

Bolt, Robert.

A play in two acts

Simon Elliott Stegall

It seems like I mostly hear this play praised among my Catholic friends; which is a shame, because I think to really appreciate it you have to be firmly indifferent to Rome. To read this play as a Catholic- well no, rather, to enjoy this play specifically because the hero is a devout Catholic- is, in my view, to see it through something of a distortion. It's the distortion you get when you enjoy the illustrations so much you skim the words.

No shade at my Catholic friends. I just think it's odd for it to have become a staple in those circles, since nothing about Bolt's play aggrandizes Catholicism- quite the opposite. Cardinal Wolsey is portrayed as a slinking scumbag, and the Catholic Church is frequently referred to by its abuses, and the Pope is called many sour names. No, Bolt aggrandizes only Thomas More and his virtue, which is emphatically not dependent on his brand of Christianity, but on his totally wholesome and fully realized selfhood. It's very much a humanist play, in that it strives to portray an individual at his noblest... and by extension, I guess it has religious overtones, since Thomas More would certainly have said an individual can only attain true nobility when totally in the service of the Transcendent... but the fact of the matter is that Bolt was not a Catholic, nor even a Christian, and was actually from England which was still squinting pretty askance at Rome as late as the 1960s. 

But anyway, my point is just that this is a really good play, a great work of humanist literature, a wonderful apology for the impregnability of the Soul, and a beautiful appeal to the Transcendent in the individual heart. More's virtue lies in his total devotion to his integrity (and we all know deep down you can't really believe in your own integrity if there's no Omniscience eyeing you), and his willingness to lay down his life rather than compromise. It's really very heroic, and very Judeo-Christian in an aesthetic sense, but it's not specifically Catholic. That's why I would recommend it without hesitation to a person of any persuasion, even if its aesthetic is a little out of vogue these days.

Maybe it's weird to harp on this point, but it seemed like a passable frame for my review. (Am I just on a goose chase here? Most of the Catholics I know have great taste in stories, so maybe that accounts for the anomaly all by its self.) The bottom line is that this play is really good, and you should pick it up. Or watch the movie, I hear it's decent.

A Man for All Seasons A Play in Two Acts