Duty v. Conscience

A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt. "Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own," wrote Shakespeare in Henry V. The subject in A Man for All Seasons is Sir Thomas More, 16th century wit, lawyer, scholar, author (Utopia), Lord Chancellor of England, and Christian martyr. The King is Henry VIII, who had Sir Thomas beheaded when More--in denying the King's right to divorce Queen Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn--refused to sign an oath proclaiming the King supreme ruler of the church. More did not choose to lose his life; he did choose not to lose his soul.

Out of this clash between public duty and private conscience, Playwright Bolt has made a drama that relies on precision of language rather than eloquence, the prism of thought rather than the blade of action. Strangely and wondrously, for a Broadway stage, it is the mind that dances in Seasons; faith is the inner core, but intelligence is the outward proof of the hero's virtue. That a play so chaste in its lucidity should ultimately fill a playgoer's eyes with tears is partly a debt British Playwright Bolt owes to British Actor Paul Scofield.

It would be beggarly to call what Scofield does a performance; it is an incarnation. Under the seamed cliff of his forehead, his eyes lurk in shadowed caves, agile, probing, grave, blithesome and wise. Scofield's art conceals art and achieves a translucency of spirit that summons up noble half-forgotten phrases like "sweet reason" and "gentle honor." In a superb cast, George Rose is comic as a ubiquitous Common Man, and Keith Baxter makes the young Henry VIII an uncut diamond of the Renaissance new learning.

A Man for All Seasons is not a tragedy but a kind of militant retreat, with heavy losses, to a prepared position, the rock of More's religious faith. From the first, Bolt's hero shows that he is wise in the ways of the world, but not bound to the world's fawning favors. He urges a restless underling to become a fine teacher. "And if I was, who would know it?" asks the ambitious young man. Answers More quietly: "You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that..." In the end, More himself heartbreakingly loses not only King and position but friends and family as well.

Bolt's meaning is clear: one must resist the compromise that corrupts, the conformity with society that becomes deformity of the soul. But modern man's plight is more complex than Bolt's parable suggests: it is to locate the ground of faith on which to stand. Sir Thomas More was an exalting figure of probity, but he possessed the inner certainty that his final public was, indeed, God.

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