A striking example of the coincidence of opposites has been created by Robert Bolt in his play, A Man For All Seasons. The crude stagehand dressed in satanic black and called the "Common Man" is an exact shadow of Thomas More, the saint-protagonist. More and the Common Man, who at first sight seem so irreconcilable, are two sides of an equation…. Bolt, who is not a Christian in "the meaningful sense of the world" …, makes abundantly clear in the Preface that More&#x...

[A Man for All Seasons] is one of the finest achievements of the modern theatre, and one of the great dramas of selfhood of all time. (pp. 27-8) Bolt sees all too clearly the effects collectivism have had upon the individual. In his preface he describes how in our time we have lost all conception of ourselves as individual men, and as a result we have increasingly come to see ourselves in the third person. As this happens we are less and less able to deal with life's psychic, social, and spiritual co...

Bolt's Sir Thomas More [in A Man for All Seasons] is an intellectual blessed with common sense and cursed with a conscience. He is witty, charming, and wise, and not especially eager to add to these the supererogatory virtue of heroism. His unshakable belief in Catholicism is coupled with an almost equal faith in the law …, which will protect his conscience provided it has the good sense of not going naked to its enemy. He is as loyal a minister to Henry as superior intelligence will permit, a...

After some years of neglect, the chronicle history play has been enjoying a rebirth among the more literary English and French dramatists. Up till now, the results have been rather indifferent, but in Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons we finally have an effective example of the genre. A faithful account of the martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, this work is too diffuse to be completely successful, yet, compared with more vulgar dramatic biographies like Anouilh's Becket and Osborne's Luthe...

A drama based on the political confusions of sixteenth-century England might readily succumb to turgidity and bombast, but Mr. Bolt [in "A Man for All Seasons"] has avoided extraneous historical detail to give us a sharp and brilliant portrait of a man who might just as easily be of our day as of King Henry's. The stuff More is made of doesn't lack its heroic element, but he is never obtrusively larger than life; indeed, the limit of his daring consists in saying nothing when he ...