The historical More acted out of religious belief as well as integrity, and he became a saint for his forbearance. For Sir Thomas More, God not a political sovereign self-appointed to head the Church had jurisdiction over a human's soul, and More felt compelled to honor God's rule over an earthly king's command. Robert Bolt modernizes More's beliefs however, Robert Bolt's Thomas More tells his daughter that for a man to take an oath is to hold "his own self in his own hands," a sentiment more aligned with the individualism of the modern period, when Bolt wrote the play. Bolt's More equates the soul with the self, saying "a man's soul is his self," a statement that would have been as unfamiliar to the historical More as to any of his sixteenth-century contemporaries......
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