Movie Quote of the Day (‘A Man for All Seasons,’ on Men and Angels)

Sir Thomas More [played by Paul Scofield]: “God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.”—A Man for All Seasons (1966), screenplay by Robert Bolt, based on his play, directed by Fred Zinnemann

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Fr. James Martin, on ‘The Saint as Companion’)

“Traditionally, there are two ways that Christians relate to the saints: as patron and as companion….Christians, especially Catholics, ask for the saint’s help, for his or her prayers in heaven, in the same way that you would ask for a friend’s prayer here on earth…. But the model more prevalent in the early church… was the saint as companion….The saint was seen as our fellow traveler along the way to God; by following his or her example the saint provides us with a model of Christian life.”—James Martin, S.J., My Life with the Saints (2007)

(The image accompanying this post shows Paul Scofield in his Oscar-winning role as St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons—a figure who put his career and even his life at stake for the sake of a principle. With all the imperfections of his life--as a man and figure making his way amid the religious and political quarrels of his day--More remains a model of courage over opportunism in his melancholy but determined opposition to his capricious king's whim.)

Quote of the Day (St. Thomas More, on the Soul and Gardens)

“The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don’t want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don’t have a soul."―English statesman St. Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia (1516) 

I took this photo 2 ½ years ago in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Photo of the Day: An Unexpectedly Savage Place

You’d never know, from the bright sunshine of this midwinter day and the trees, not to mention the peeps at contemporary metropolitan London in the background, that the structure in this photo I took from a tour bus several weeks ago once inspired terror. But that’s what the Tower of London used to do--and, truth be told, maybe you get a hint of the dread it inspired from the sight of its parapets.

This is where they lodged enemies of the state, and in the time of King Henry VIII it had more than its share of residents (Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell), once in the favor of the mad monarch, then finding themselves, terrifyingly, on the outside.  One of my posts that had the most hits described how a Jesuit, in perhaps the worst period for Catholics in England, under Queen Elizabeth I, managed to escape from this nearly impregnable prison.

The continuing fascination that people have with this once-savage place (not used to house a prisoner since Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess, astoundingly, landed in the country early in WWII) can best be seen by the fact that a movie called Tower of London, about Richard III (before the revisionists and modern archaeologists got hold of him), was made about it, then remade. Naturally, these were horror movies. (Just what you'd expect, with Boris Karloff and Vincent Price in the casts.)

This Day in British History (Thomas More, Saint and Richard III ‘Biographer,’ Born)

February 7, 1478— Sir Thomas More (left), a witty intellectual who rose to the heights of English law and politics, was born just down the street in London from Thomas Becket, another commoner martyred and canonized (three centuries before) for defying a monarch named Henry.

Two recent events have thrust More—already powerfully etched in the history books, especially as hero of the play and film made from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons—once again into the public eye:

*The Royal Shakespeare Co. has announced that it will mount a stage version of two novels spotlighting Thomas Cromwell, one of More’s chief antagonists in the struggle arising from Henry VIII’s attempt to make his mistress Anne Boleyn the queen: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. (Previously, the BBC had announced separate plans for a mini-series based on these works.)

*Scholars announced that, after digging beneath a parking lot, they had discovered and positively identified the skeleton of Richard III, the king that More had immortalized, in an influential tract, as the epitome of treachery and tyranny.

More, Cromwell and Richard have a couple of things in common. First, all are connected, in some way, to the Tower of London—More and Cromwell as prisoners, and Richard as a monarch who ordered his enemies there (several of whom famously died untimely deaths). Second, all three ran afoul of the Tudor dynasty—More and Cromwell, executed on orders of the King they served as counselors, Henry VIII, and Richard killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, by troops under the man who took his throne, Henry VII, father of the fellow with six wives.

This particular blog post, in considering these three figures, is, in a real sense, concerned with reputation and revisionism. It’s about how history obscures lives, attempts to compensate by wiping the slate clean—and, in the process, continues to mess matters up, albeit differently.

Take Richard III, for instance. The man who overthrew him to end the War of the Roses, Henry Tudor, received an honored resting place in Westminster Abbey, even though his life didn’t really measure up to that hallowed institution. (He grasped money as tightly as power.) In contrast, Richard was dislodged from what was believed to be his original resting place, a church in Leicester,100 north of London, by what historian Eamon Duffy has called “The Stripping of the Altars,” i.e., the dismantling of England's churches and monasteries as part of Henry VIII’s effort to bring the Roman Catholic Church to heel. Then, the last of the Plantagenets had to endure lying underground, without any known shroud or coffin, for centuries--as we know now, more recently, even beneath a parking lot.

But, long before piles of dirt obscured the site of his remains, metaphorical ones had already been heaped on his reputation, courtesy of William Shakespeare. And one of the Bard’s major sources for his tragedy is More’s History of Richard III.

More’s work about the monarch is especially curious, given its influence on histiography and theater, for several reasons:

*It was never published in More’s lifetime—and in fact, according to the statesman’s biographer, Peter Ackroyd, it may have been intended more as a grammatical and rhetorical exercise for students that More was teaching at Oxford around 1513;

*More never completed the work, not getting close to what should have been its climax—Richard’s defeat and death at Bosworth;

*Other writers of the Tudor period incorporated More’s work into their own, and these latter materials were ultimately what Shakespeare saw when he wrote his play;

*More freely invented entire speeches for his characters, a practice almost no modern historian uses (this was before tape recorders or even stenographers), though such reputable ancient chroniclers as Thucydides and Tacitus had done likewise;

*It is unknown how many eyewitnesses More interviewed (one likely source: the Bishop of Ely, who had known the young More, and may have related to him Richard’s request for flowers—an anecdote that Shakespeare picked up on, too);

*More got some dates and names wrong, so he was not particularly accurate;

*Most tellingly, More may well have exaggerated Richard’s physical imperfections (the scoliosis of the spine present in the discovered skeleton) into the “croke backed” usurper we know, and he gave full credence to the part of Richard’s reign that weighs most powerfully in Shakespeare’s indictment: that he had his two young nephews killed while they were in the Tower of London.

Speaking of the Tower of London…Nearly two weeks ago, on the tail end of a business trip, I saw it at the start of a bus tour of Britain’s capital. It was hard to believe that the place I saw, albeit from a slight distance, on one sunlit morning, was a savage place once, but it was—a relic of a time of civil unrest and moral darkness.

This was the universe of what is now projected as Hilary Mantel’s historical trilogy on the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. I am halfway through the first of these three works, Wolf Hall, and Mantel’s ability to evoke the atmosphere of Henry VIII’s time—and to penetrate Cromwell’s psyche—are masterful. She is fully deserving of the critical acclaim (including receiving the Man Booker prize, Britain’s highly touted literary award, twice) that has come her way.

The most often used literary device of More's was irony. Now, in an ironic turn of events, the man who helped darken Richard’s character in the eyes of posterity is seeing his own reputation called into question. Mantel’s More suffers in constant comparison with her protagonist Cromwell, a figure long derided as ruthless. While she depicts Cromwell as accepting a new religion (Protestantism) based on individual interpretations of the Bible, More is rendered as a relentless heretic-hunter and book burner.Cromwell is shown as a loving widower; More, as a prude with no affection for his (second) wife, Alice. Cromwell might be tough, even ruthless, when he has to be, but he's a proto-democrat who's risen from common origins (a blacksmith-brewer father who mercilessly beat him) to take down entrenched, privilege nobility and clergy of England.

The beauty of Mantel’s style make all the more seductive a portrait of More with virtually no redeeming qualities. Even More did not deny Richard’s courage in battle, but in Mantel the only hint of the wit so often remarked upon in More is a scene where he mocks the intellectually inferior wife. Even one of the aspects of More’s private life most attractive to modern readers—his pride in his  daughter Margaret, easily one of the most learned women of the Tudor Era—comes off in Mantel’s depiction as incestuous.  

The practice of source-based, dispassionate history as we know it did not exist in More's time. But he was no mere Tudor propagandist (otherwise, he would have finished his history of Richard, and made sure it received the widest possible circulation). He did not have the benefit of distance from the events he describes, nor the freedom to tell about it--but, again ironically, he also did not mix rampant speculation and extensive historical research into his account as the presumably more reality-based Mantel did. 

Mantel was right, as she wrote in an account in Britain's Telegraph of how she came to write Wolf Hall and its sequels (the third installment of the trilogy, taking Cromwell up to his own execution, is in the works), that the confrontation between More and Cromwell was "more nuanced than the one familiar to us from A Man for All Seasons." But it is also more nuanced than the one she has presented. A figure who had a spy network everywhere, who exploited a time of uncertainty to overturn the civil society of his time,who ordered the rampant seizure of others' properties that created for his ruler a source of wealth independent of the long-established pillars of society, who himself became powerful in the service of a capricious authoritarian, would, under normal circumstances, be seen as the harbinger of a 20th-century apparatchik for a totalitarian regime. It is the seductive power of Mantel's work this same figure--Cromwell--becomes, in her view, a gregarious, humane man who met a brutal world on its own terms.

Shakespeare's (and, it might be said, More's) Richard III sought to "set the murderous Machiavell to school," but it might more truly be said that Cromwell (who knew The Prince quite well) succeeded in applying its lessons more thoroughly.

Quote of the Day (T.S. Eliot, on the “Chance of Greater Sin”)

"Servant of God has chance of greater sin And sorrow, than the man who serves a king. For those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them, Still doing right: and striving with political men May make that cause political, not by what they do But by what they are.”—Archbishop Thomas Becket, in T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935) 

Somehow this past year, I missed writing about two anniversaries related to T.S. Eliot, including the 45th of his death and the 60th of his verse drama, The Cocktail Party. I would have missed discussing the 75th anniversary of the publication of his most famous verse play, Murder in the Cathedral, except that another date provided me with an opportunity to discuss it. 

On this date in 1170, Archbishop Thomas a Becket--recently returned to England after seven years on the continent, where he had fled after fearing for his life—was murdered. 

He wasn’t the first archbishop to die violently, nor the last (the long, grim line of highly placed Roman Catholic martyrs extends from St. Peter to Archbishop Oscar Romero, and undoubtedly more recent ones I’m not aware of). 

 But the site of the crime—on the altar of the archbishop’s own cathedral, in Canterbury—shocked the English public. When it became common knowledge that the four assassins were acting on the half-wish, half-command of the prelate’s friend-turned-enemy, King Henry II (“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"), unrest grew to such a state that three years later, Henry felt obliged to proceed to the cathedral for public penance, kneeling before the tomb of Becket while a crowd of priests and monks took turns striking him with a rod. 

It’s not an accident that interest in Becket and another English “Thomas” engaged in a long, ultimately fatal battle of wills about a royal named Henry, Thomas More, peaked twice in the last century, in the exact same two years. More’s canonization occurred in 1935, the year that Eliot’s drama made its stage debut. The two events occurred as Adolf Hitler threatened virtually every major church in Germany as part of his larger attempt to crush all opposition as he marginalized, disenfranchised, then annihilated the Jews of his country. 

Twenty-five years later, with the Soviet Union trying to snuff out religious sentiment behind the Iron Curtain, Paul Scofield electrified Broadway audiences as More in A Man for All Seasons, and Anthony Quinn and Laurence Olivier were facing off as Henry and the Archbishop of Canterbury in Jean Anouilh‘s Becket. Becket and More, then, became heroes of conscience for a Western Christian civilization desperate to maintain portions of the private realm from the encroachment of an all-powerful state. 

I had a difficult time in choosing between the Eliot and Anouilh dramas (particularly because, in the case of the latter, I still have a powerful fascination with the 1964 cinematic adaptation with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton in the roles of Henry and Thomas). Even after picking Eliot, I could have selected a different quote from that play (notably the most famous couplet, “The last temptation is the greatest treason,/To do the right deed for the wrong reason”).

I ended up picking the lines above because they are so jarring in the context of the play, like a streak of lightning across a dark sky. A poet obsessed with heritage and antiquity is sounding an unexpectedly contemporary note. 

At the heart of the conflict between Henry and Becket was the archbishop’s refusal to accede to the king’s command that accused clerics be tried in the civil realm. (In one case that particularly brought a public outcry, one priest had been acquitted in an ecclesiastic court on a murder charge.) 

In a long essay on Becket, G.K. Chesterton scoffed that the modern understanding of the argument between the king and his former friend--that is, the relationship between church and state--had nothing to do with what was really at stake. Much as I admire the great contrarian, his reading in this case is simply a case of denying the obvious. The proper place of church and state had everything to do with this tragedy. 

In fending off the arguments of the four tempters, Eliot’s Becket argues for a church as a center of a rightly ordered world. But in the quote above, he briefly acknowledges the grave potential in one of the temptations he quickly dismissed: power. 

When popes and theologians looked to scripture for sources of church authority, more often than not they cited Christ’s charge to his first among equals among his Apostles: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16: 18-19). 

A more powerful element, however, was fear--the well-founded concern of what would happen in a society without a clerical bulwark against both anarchy and political oppression. Burnt into the collective memory of the Church--and especially the popes--were Roman emperors’ persecution of the early Christians, and Pope Leo the Great’s meeting with Attila the Hun that saved the Eternal City from slaughter. 

By Becket’s time, however, the potential for ecclesiastic abuse of power loomed large. Henry had banked on a reaction against it when he sought to extend his legal jurisdiction over the church in his realm. 

Moreover, two centuries before Martin Luther took aim at Rome for its corruption, Geoffrey Chaucer was already satirizing, in Canterbury Tales, the abuse of clerical privilege by at least two pilgrims to Becket’s shrine, in “The Friar‘s Tale“ and “The Summoner’s Tale.” 

One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens, immersed in centuries of anti-Catholic feeling, had little sympathy for the martyred archbishop and his defense of church privilege. His need to explain why Henry would threaten his old friend leads to a pile of suppositions in his Child’s History of England: 

“He [Becket] may have had some secret grudge against the King besides. The King may have offended his proud humour at some time or other, for anything I know. I think it likely, because it is a common thing for Kings, Princes, and other great people, to try the tempers of their favourites rather severely. Even the little affair of the crimson cloak must have been anything but a pleasant one to a haughty man. Thomas a Becket knew better than any one in England what the King expected of him. In all his sumptuous life, he had never yet been in a position to disappoint the King. He could take up that proud stand now, as head of the Church; and he determined that it should be written in history, either that he subdued the King, or that the King subdued him.” 

Today, nearly a millennium after Becket’s murder, the Church is dealing with the fallout from a hierarchy who employed the martyred archbishop’s method of dealing with accused clerics: i.e., let us handle it, not the state. The results, in the case of the priest abuse scandals, have not been pretty. 

The usual suspects--that is, revisionists--are all too aware of the implications of this. In a 2005 poll of historians on the worst Britons of all time that was published in BBC History Magazine, John Hudson of St. Andrews University nominated Becket as the 12th century’s worst villain, barely containing himself: “Those who share my prejudice against Becket may consider his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December, 1170, a fittingly grisly end."

Somehow, in Hudson's view, outrageous state sanction of murder by Henry has assumed second place behind Becket's alleged "greed." But that was bound to happen, given the tenor of our time.

But it needs to be said: Though, despite Chesterton, the relationship between church and state was at work in the Becket-Henry conflict, there was no solid concept of separation of church and state at this point in history. That would need to be resolved over the course of centuries, with landmarks including the battle over the establishment of the Episcopal Church in Virginia in the 1780s (pitting Thomas Jefferson and James Madison against Patrick Henry) and France's 1905 law mandating separation of church and state in the wake of the Dreyfus Affairs.

Eliot's Becket, in his agony of conscience, has hit upon the special need of clergy for eternal self-vigilance. Their position holds special potential for the "chance of greater sin/And sorrow" than one who serves the state, because abuse of a sacred trust matters more in the hearts of the people who hold their faith as dear as their lives. The Church is now, to its great shame and sorrow, re-learning the meaning of these lines.

Quote of the Day (Raphael Holinshed, on St. John Fisher)

“The hat came as far as Calais, but the head was off before the hat was on.”—Raphael Holinshed, on Bishop of Rochester John Fisher, executed on orders of King Henry VIII before he could receive his cardinal’s hat, quoted in Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (1998)

Today marks the feast day of martyrs Thomas More and John Fisher, both canonized in 1935 for refusing to accept King Henry VIII’s title of head of the Church in England. Their sainthood was declared at a moment when new forms of tyranny—Fascism on the right, Communism on the left—convinced Rome of the need for positive models for witnessing to the faith against the demands of an all-powerful state.

Yet, though the Roman Catholic Church links the two on this common feast day, their personalities—and posthumous fame—differ dramatically.

My initial misimpression notwithstanding, the two men were not executed on the same day. Fisher (in the image accompanying this post)—confessor to Henry’s estranged wife, Catherine of Aragon, and an unremitting foe of the monarch’s divorce from her and re-marriage to Anne Boleyn--was the first to be tried and executed, on this date in 1535.

Pope Paul III, unaware, because of slow communication in that time, of Fisher’s great danger by early 1535, thought he could draw Henry and the bishop closer by naming the latter a cardinal. The pontiff certainly did nothing at this point to maintain the Church’s reputation in those years for worldliness.

Henry, by now well launched on his tyrannical, psychopathic later period, was so enraged by the appointment that he fulminated that the bishop would die before he had a chance to wear his red hat. Five days after being brought to trial at Westminster, Fisher was brought to the gallows. More followed two weeks later.

Most of the college-educated, it seems safe to say, know something about More. If Utopia, a staple of college literature courses, didn’t produce that result, then Robert Bolt’s play and screenplay about the humanist-politician, A Man for All Seasons, has assured his lasting fame.

Not only is Fisher’s name recognition today nowhere near as great as his fellow martyr’s, but a general appreciation for his life and supreme sacrifice is distinctly lacking.

To modern eyes, Fisher is a less sympathetic figure than More—a man unencumbered by family, not so gifted with wit, not dreading the loss of his position or even his life. An age that regards clerical insistence on Church prerogatives versus the state is also likely to be suspicious of Fisher’s advocacy of this as concealing criminal activity.

He also, as recent More biographers Richard Marius and Peter Ackroyd make clear, engaged in activities that not merely Henry but nearly any medieval monarch would regard as treasonous—chiefly, contacting Eustace Chapuys, ambassador from the court of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, about a possible invasion of England by this aggrieved nephew of Catherine’s.

But the assumptions of Fisher’s world about loyalty are not ours, and if he did not possess More’s supple intelligence, anguished loyalty to the king, and all-too-human love for the good things of this world, he had something else: a stubbornness that stiffened his backbone when everyone else was losing theirs. Alone among all the bishops in England, he withstood Henry’s five-year campaign of intimidation to bring the Church to heel if he didn’t gain his divorce. And, though he insisted on the Church’s autonomy within England and wrote fiercely against what he perceived as the heresies of Martin Luther, he was also a bitter critic of weakness in the Church both among fellow English bishops and even in Rome itself (where, he charged, leaders of the Church “neither fast nor pray, but give themselves up to luxury and lust.”)

Like More, Fisher endured months of confinement that weakened him and would have destroyed other men, but he did not bend. Allowed a few words before his execution, he prayed that Henry would receive good counsel. His body was so emaciated that onlookers marveled that his corpse (left naked after the execution on the scaffold until sunset) could emit so much blood. His parboiled, severed head was exhibited on a pike by London Bridge as a warning that anyone who followed his example would be treated as a traitor.

Nowadays, posterity has a far different idea of which of the two—the unflinching man of God or the intolerant royal—truly lost his head as a result of the Anne Boleyn affair.

Theater Review: "A Man for All Seasons," by Robert Bolt, at the Roundabout Theater Co.

Like many New York theatergoers, I suspect, I found it hard to efface the memory of Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons when I heard that Frank Langella would be tackling the role.

Don't get me wrong: I'd admired Langella's command of the stage all the way back to Dracula when I was in high school – or, over 10 years ago, his great comic turn as Noel Coward's alter ego Gary Essenden in Present Laughter.

But when I headed to one of the last previews before opening night a few weeks ago in the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of the Robert Bolt historical drama, I didn't know how he might measure up. Perhaps my uncertainty stemmed from those roles' generous, unapologetic slabs of ham, whereas More requires a martyr’s self-abnegation.

I needn't have worried. Langella allows us to see this hero of conscience with fresh eyes. From the moment he appeared onstage at the Roundabout's flagship venue, American Airlines Theater, he presented a character who, oddly enough, had something in common with his more flamboyant roles.

A Character Who Fills the Room…An Actor Who Fills the Stage
At his full 6-ft.-4-in. frame, Langella fills a room, making it easy to understand how the statesman and intellectual he plays has become accustomed to the best of everything—the best books, the best wines, the best house, the best family, the best society, and the best perquisites of power. Like the "wise men" of recent Washington vintage, he gets called on whenever a head of state desperately needs a calm, experienced counselor. (And, in truth, the only unconvincing note in this astute performance comes when his More enters the living room just after having performed daily vespers.)

But the way of the cross that England's most powerful statesman must undergo forces More to lose everything but what he grasps most stubbornly: the autonomy of his own soul.

At one point or another, that assertion of will drives to distraction everyone in his orbit: the wife, daughter, son-in-law, best friend, and Archbishop of Canterbury, all of whom try to convince him to go along with Henry VIII’s demand for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

But More will not be yield. An Atticus Finch of Renaissance England, this lawyer-hero might appear almost insufferably decent, but for this fact: his stand is so lonely that it exposes to danger not only himself, but also his family.

In a thousand natural ways, director Fred Zinnemann "opened up" the film (which I saw again, one week after the Roundabout production, for the fourth or fifth time, with my friends Brian and Wilhelmine, at Suffern, NY's wondrous Lafayette Theater).

For example, in the final courtroom scene, he began with More stepping through a narrow passageway into a wider frame—like an ancient Christian entering the Coliseum before being tossed to the lions—before concluding with a master synchronization of Scofield's magnificent voice and body movements. (I discussed this in a prior post.)

The 1966 movie became one of the most deserving Best Picture winners in Oscar history with its expert direction by Zinnemann, a sterling cast, and a screenplay by Bolt that often flashes with Shavian wit.

Reworking Familiar Material
But Zinnemann also, by necessity, reshaped and narrowed this play that depends heavily on words – not just those its playwright gives his protagonist, but the words that More is forced to weigh.

Hughes' stage production restores much of this material (notably, the seriocomic appearances of Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys) while accepting one of the film's major departures: the disappearance of the "Common Man" character who popped up periodically, a la Bertolt Brecht, to comment sardonically on events.

Fortunately, Hughes figures out stage counterparts for some of the notable scenes in the film. On screen, Henry’s vast entourage and More’s family realize the two friends’ growing estrangement on the divorce issue when the voice of the monarch (a scene-stealing turn by Robert Shaw) comes carrying all the way across the grand lawn of More’s estate and into the house.

On stage, the unequal power dynamic between the two men is suggested by the constantly shifting commands of Henry (played by Patrick Page, who looks like a younger version of Tim Curry) about when and how more should sit. As we watch, we become acutely aware what’s dawning on More: the royal is utterly unable to contain enthusiasm, ego or anger, and is all the more dangerous for this capriciousness.

In addition to Langella and Page, several other actors acquitted themselves with unusual skill:

* Zach Grenier brought a growling menace to More’s Machiavellian successor as Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell.
* Jeremy Strong adeptly handled Richard Rich, the kind of small man who rises to the top during political upheavals—as long as they don’t scruple about conscience. He demonstrated how painful—literally—Richard’s political education in Cromwell’s service could be during the act-ender in which he screamed as Cromwell turned his hand for a long period under a candle.
* Hannah Cabell, as Margaret More, the daughter who, centuries ahead of her time, made her father proud with her learning—and endured the anguish of watching him caught up in the viper’s nest of the Tudor court.

A Controversial Production
Reviewers have divided sharply on the need for the revival at all. The naysayers have several issues, the two most common being the lack of a dramatic arc (i.e., we know just what will happen) and the play’s exaggeration of More’s virtue. This hero acted in the name of an absolutist institution, the Roman Catholic Church, they say, and in a supreme irony this politician who hounded Protestants himself became a martyr. Bolt seems to be anticipating their objections right in the play, when he has the all-too-worldly Cardinal Wolsey sniping at More for the latter’s “moral squint.”

I’ll dispose of the “no dramatic arc” objection first. We know what happened to Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, but that has never stopped countless actors from tackling these parts.

As for the second charge: 1) The critics are seeking the kind of impossible goody-two-shoes they blame Bolt for foisting on the world; 2) Protestants of the 16th century persecuted Catholics with a vigor that equaled Catholics’ harassment of themselves; and 3) In judging historical figures, one must assess not just whether they measured up to the standards of our time but if an alternative ethical standard existed in their own to which they could look. As Jason Kuznicki on the "Positive Liberty" blog has convincingly argued, “Until the Enlightenment, wherever an official tolerance existed, it was almost always a particular and revocable license to practice one specific minority religion, and to do so only under highly restrictive conditions.” Unlike late 18th-century America, say, where Thomas Jefferson could have looked to a significant abolitionist strain if he wanted to free his slaves, no tradition of tolerance existed in early 16th century England or the continent that might make him question his pursuit of heretics.

The concern for the rule of law that Bolt’s More enunciated in A Man for All Seasons was something he practiced in his own life. As Peter Ackroyd relates in The Life of Thomas More, the author of Utopia was far more careful, objective and worldly-wise in reviewing cases, for instance, than his predecessor as Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey.

In an excellent post-show discussion, Anne Prescott, a Renaissance literature professor at Columbia University, pointed out the ways that the show diverged from history. Some were amusing (the real-life More preferred beer to wine and grew a beard in the Tower of London), some involved poetic license (four children were reduced to one—More's scholarly daughter Margaret), and some took substantial liberties with characters (in real life, the martyr referred to Protestants with excremental imagery).

For all of that, she noted, Bolt’s play, unlike many others, got the essentials of his life right. I couldn’t agree more. Listen to the trial scene in either the play or move, then compare it to the actual transcript of the proceedings. Tell me if he doesn’t adhere to it with an extraordinary level of fidelity.

The audience seems far more attuned to many reviewers to the value of Bolt’s message. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, the critic-blogger Terry Teachout pointed out the continuing relevance and universal of More’s great response when his son-in-law William Roper says he’d “cut a great road through the law” to eliminate one of Henry’s spies: “"And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you -- where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"

“Bolt didn't write ‘A Man for All Seasons’ in order to persuade those who saw it to go out and vote Labour,” Teachout observes. “His purpose was to make viewers of all political persuasions reflect on the dangerous consequences of using extralegal means to pursue desirable short-term ends. The result is a deeply political play that is neither liberal nor conservative -- and one that succeeds as a work of art.”

Or, as I overheard a middle-aged female moviegoer say to her friend the day I saw the film at the Lafayette: “I wish our leaders in Washington could see this.” While not the kind of incubator for totalitarianism that Henry’s England was (Prescott noted that one of the king’s contemporaries pointed out that he possessed the dangerous desire to “make windows into men’s souls”), contemporary Washington is filled with opportunists of all political stripes—a metropolis of Richard Riches rather than Thomas Mores.