would like to raise a warning about the fictional Thomas More, the More who comes to us most notably through Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. I have read the play and watched the movie, but the real St. Thomas More is not completely found in either place. Something of his shadow appears in these works. But not the man. To take an old line, the More that Bolt offers us in this story is not More “as he understood himself.”
What Bolt gives us is a More made more palatable to our own time, because his mind is furnished with familiar clichés. The telling moment comes in an exchange with the Duke of Norfolk on the meaning of the Apostolic Succession, and therefore the authority of the Church. Bolt presents More as saying:
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