A Man for All Seasons vs Wolf Hall

I caught some of the 1966 movie A Man for All Seasons on TV over the weekend and was surprised to see how well it’s held up. Of course, having an all-star cast including Paul Scofield, a gloriously bloated Orson Welles and a fresh-faced John Hurt helps, as does a cracking screenplay adapted by Robert Bolt from his own play. Yet much as I enjoyed watching it, there was still something that niggled about the whole thing just as it did when I first had to read the play and watch the film back in school twenty-odd years ago.

What bugged me was the man for all seasons, himself: Thomas More.

Although he’s the moral centre and unassailable Man of Conscience in the play and film, I’ve always felt there was something unbearably self-righteous and smug about the character of More as Bolt portrays him. All that talk of hiding in the law, the semantic games and the refusal to speak openly have always made him seem more pedant than hero to me. And although Scofield’s performance in the film gives the character some warmth, on the page itself More comes across as a cold, aloof, insufferable prig.

I don’t know - perhaps the play would have been better served if Bolt had spiced things up a bit by introducing a few of More’s real-life foibles, such as hairshirts, self-flagellation and his sadistic love of torturing and killing heretics?

Whatever the case, it was only when I read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall that I felt I had found someone who was as annoyed by the More of A Man for All Seasons as much as me. Not only is Wolf Hall a novel which takes a great deal of pleasure in putting the boot into More, it also spends quite a bit of time gleefully puncturing much of his self-righteous certainty. In fact, so sustained is the attack on More in the book, that at times it feels like Mantel is deliberately writing with A Man for All Seasons in mind.

Here is Cromwell on More’s refusal to take the oath:

...this silence of More’s was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves.

Mantel’s decision to make Thomas Cromwell the heroic central character of her book also speaks volumes. While in Bolt’s play Cromwell is the arch-manipulator and villain, in Wolf Hall he is a rough and ready, self-made Renaissance man, open to new ideas and experience. He is a precursor to modern man and, as such, utterly unlike Thomas More.

[Cromwell] never sees More...without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.

Most revealing of all, however, is the fact that Mantel’s most cutting attack on More comes from the mouth of Cromwell in the form of a theatrical metaphor describing More’s silent refusal to take the oath. Reading it feels like a deliberate ‘fuck you’ to Bolt’s play and film:

Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent, I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depend on it, we will all be feeling our age before this pageant is played out. And what I hate most of all is that Master More sits in the audience and sniggers when I trip over my lines, for he has written all the parts. And written them these many years.

I’m not sure if A Man for All Seasons is taught in schools anymore, but if it is it would be fun to see this quote plastered on the back of every copy. I, for one, wish I'd had it to hand back in my school days.