A Man for All Seasons: True to Yourself and a Good Friend to Others

Moral Guides
Thomas More’s upright moral sense and how he tries to find loopholes to defend himself. More strongly opposes Henry’s divorce but he rather than speak out against the Oath of Supremacy. More respects God’s law above all else, but he also does not pretend to understand it. Therefore, he sees man’s law best guide to action, even if it sometimes contradicts God’s law. His approach to moral action is sensible but not like Cromwell or Rich, if More sometimes seems like a hypocrite, it is because he is trying to keep his respect for the law and society balanced with his intelligence of himself. He obeys the law fully, and, in the end, the prosecution has to come up with false charges to execute him.
Corruption
A Man for All Seasons focuses on the rise of Richard Rich as much as it follows the fall of Sir Thomas More. As More’s persistent self gets him killed. Rich becomes wealthier and retrieves greater status by selling out his friend and his own moral principles. Although Rich at first laments his loss of innocence, by the end of the play he has no thought of innocence anymore. Near the end of act one, Rich gives Cromwell information about the silver cup –that was given to him by More- in exchange for a job. Rich laments that he has lost his innocence, and the scene suggests that Rich has sold his soul to the devil. Cromwell himself suggests the devil as he cunningly tricks Rich into selling out before cramming Rich’s hand into a candle flame.

The Self and Friendship
Through its portrayal of More’s personal relationships, the play shows that you can be true to yourself and a good friend to others. Overall More looks inwardly for his strength and comfort. He appears to be more of a teacher than a friend or a lover. He relies on his own conscience as his guide, and through tests and through the example he sets, he attempts to teach others to do the same which is how he shows his friendship and love. The play shows that More’s self-confidence is not

Bibliography: Critic: M. W. Fosbery A Man for All Seasons, then, is a play that displays the less appreciated intellectual challenges of natural law theory. It does this not by staging an opposition between natural law theory and legal positivism, as Antigone largely does, but instead by depicting the conflicts among characters who are all at least potential natural law heroes: Henry, Roper, and More. More stands above the other two whose certainties about divine law evade the epistemological challenges that Bolt 's More faces head-on. More, reshaped in Bolt 's drama, is a reluctant martyr who realizes a modern heroic ideal: making the ultimate sacrifice for ultimately uncertain reasons. The problem of certainty remains among the least appreciated challenges in the attempt to rehabilitate natural law theory 's power to reestablish an essential connection between law and morality Critic: William J. Free Robert Bolt 's quality as a playwright has always been something of a question mark in England. His plays have regularly received mixed reviews and his accomplishment has been rather swamped by the fame of his more fashionable contemporaries. Discontent with Bolt has ranged from the rather mild branding of State of Revolution, his 1977 dramatization of the Communist Revolution in Russia, as "entirely passive" to the more hostile tone of fellow playwright David Mercer 's comment that "His talent is so encapsulated in a kind of bourgeois mind that I doubt if it 'll ever come free."1 Most of the specific criticisms of Bolt seem to be versions of Kenneth Tynan 's complaint that in A Man For All Seasons Bolt does not make clear his position on the play 's moral and historical issues. Comparing A Man For All Seasons to Brecht 's Galileo, Tynan wrote: "it matters little [to Bolt] whether More 's beliefs were right or wrong; all that matters is that he held them, and refused to disclose them under questioning. For Mr. Bolt, in short, the truth is subjective; for Brecht it is objective. ..."2 The terms "subjective" and "objective" suggest a Marxist perspective in which the moral structure of history is considered an objective fact and the playwright 's duty is to make clear his commitment for or against that moral structure. Tynan is not demanding that Bolt be a Marxist: merely that he have his protagonist Thomas More expose the ideas underlying his moral position, thereby allowing us to judge Bolt 's understanding of history. Tynan 's criticism, which has been echoed many times, is simply that Bolt has dodged the issue and to that degree has weakened his play.