Robert Bolt Research Articles

The Interaction and Conflict Between Personal and Social Identities in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons

Her Devrin Adamı (1960), ahlaki ve dini ilkelerine bağlı kalmaya ve ideolojileri doğrultusunda kendisine başka bir kimlik oluşturma teşebbüsünde bulunan sosyal ve politik otoritelere karşı kişisel kimliğini korumaya çalışan Sir Thomas More’un hikayesini anlatan bir oyundur. Kişisel benliğine sadık kalmayı tercih eden bir Katolik olarak More, VIII. Henry’nin Aragonlu Catherine’den boşanmasının ve kralın İngiltere Kilisesi’nin başı olarak atanmasının geçerliliğini kabul etmeyi reddeder. Ancak, sosyo-politik otoriteler olarak görünen kral ve maiyetindekileri, More’u kişisel ilkelerini görmezden gelmeye ve önceliği İngiliz monarşisinin hegemonyasını desteklemek olan sadık, vatansever bir İngiliz siyasi adamı rolünü içeren toplumsal kimliğini kabul etmeye zorlarlar. Bu doğrultuda oyun, sosyo-politik ideolojilerin bireysel kimliğin oluşumundaki rolünü inceler. İnsanların cinsiyetinin, sosyo-kültürel geçmişlerinin ve milliyetlerinin bireyselliklerinin oluşumunda etkili olduğunu gösterir. Dolayısıyla oyun, kahramanın kendi ideolojilerini zihnine ve karakterine işleyerek kişisel kimliğini yeniden şekillendirmeye çalışan sosyo-politik otoritelere karşı direnme girişimlerinin sonuçsuz kalmasını gözler önüne serer. Bu çalışma, kimlikle ilgili tartışmaları göz önünde bulundurarak Her Devrin Adamı adlı eserin kimliğin sadece kişisel değil, aynı zamanda sosyo-politik ve kültürel bir boyutu olduğunu ortaya koymak için kimlik konusunu cinsiyet, din, hukuk gibi toplumsal kurumların ideolojileri bağlamında ele aldığını göstermeyi amaçlar.

Colin Bennett Keith

Compassionate, modest and dedicated, Colin Bennett Keith was the epitome of the quiet man who served the community as a general practitioner. He was born into two families with longstanding...

Death as Martyrdom: A Psychoanalytical Study of Robert Bolt’s a Man for all Seasons and T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral

This paper focuses on the protagonists of two dramas A Man for All Seasons and Murder in the Cathedral to be studied through the critical prospective of psychoanalysis. The protagonists of the dramas meet their death at the end of the play and their death is appreciated as martyrdom by the readers of the plays without seeing critically their mottos behind their death. Challenging that, this paper varies in the stance that Beckett’s death is a suicide rather than martyrdom, thus questioning the traits of the personalities of the protagonists and their mottos behind their deaths. Taking Freud’s Psychoanalytical theory as a theoretical framework; Jung model of Psychoanalysis for conceptual terminologies and conducting close textual analysis, this study aims to conclude with references. The study is significant in a sense that it widens the dimensions of comparative studies of the modern literary works through contemporary critical theories. It also highlights the application of psychology in the literature in general and the English literature in specific.

Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Work of Thomas More. Thomas Betteridge. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. ix+256.

<i>Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Work of Thomas More</i>. Thomas Betteridge. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. ix+256.

Thomas More: Why Patron of Statesmen? ed. by Travis Curtwright

Reviewed by: Thomas More: Why Patron of Statesmen? ed. by Travis Curtwright John Guy Thomas More: Why Patron of Statesmen? Edited by Travis Curtwright. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield. 2015. Pp. xii, 221. $85.00. ISBN 978-1-4985-2226-7.) In 2000 Pope John Paul II proclaimed St. Thomas More to be the patron of statesmen and people in public life. And yet scholarly investigations of More’s principles of statesmanship are still relatively few. In commissioning and editing this often stimulating collection of essays, Travis Curtwright seeks to fill the gap. He and his fellow contributors, several connected to the Center for Thomas More Studies at the University of Dallas, aim to revive interest in More by distilling from his writings and life experiences the very essence of this subtle, steely individual who began as a commercial lawyer and moral philosopher and ended up as Henry VIII’s only honest councillor. It is an approach that in the wrong hands could become clumsily instrumentalist and teleological. Fortunately, these contributors know the pitfalls and largely avoid them. Of the ten essays, the most suggestive are those dealing with More’s most famous book, Utopia (Louvain, 1516), with his declamation in response to Lucian’s The Tyrannicide, with his wider understanding of the values of law, liberty, duty, and justice (drawing not least on his relatively neglected Latin poems), and with his continuing commitment to political leadership, meaning his opposition to Henry VIII’s first divorce and break with Rome after resigning as lord chancellor. For Carson Holloway, analyzing the response to Lucian, More’s point was that a politician needs an accurate diagnosis of the true roots of political disease before he can [End Page 610] begin to cure it. The argument here is nicely shaded. For Gerard Wegemer writing on liberty and justice, however, it is starker. More, he believes, was a fully-fledged Ciceronian and so determined to bring philosophic insight to bear in public life within the limits of the practical—this even though James R. Stoner, writing on images of the statesman in Utopia, explains that Ciceronian statesmanship can never be the last word, given the prominence in book II of Utopia of Hythloday’s descriptions of the Utopians. Wegemer succumbs to a temptation to link More the author to an understanding of the choices of his political career that may be flawed. According to Wegemer, More did for Tudor England what Cicero did for the Romans. A reading first proposed by one of More’s earliest biographers, Nicholas Harpsfield, this interpretation was massively reinforced in the twentieth century by the dazzling scholarship on Utopia of Quentin Skinner. And yet it was said of More that he could always see both sides of the question. Some superlative recent journal articles, notably by Eric Nelson and John Michael Parrish, suggest that Utopia is more likely to represent, at the very least, the conflicting sides of More’s divided consciousness. No one today, except perhaps the novelist Hilary Mantel, whose bestselling Wolf Hall (London, 2009) is considered along with Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (London, 1954) in an essay by Louis Karlin, would agree with Sir Geoffrey Elton that More was driven into a political career chiefly by ambition, and that he lied about it to Erasmus. Elton, on that occasion, got his facts awry. Where Stoner hits the nail on the head is in characterizing More as a literary statesman as much as a practical politician. As a real-life politician, More got his head chopped off, as Hythloday (and Machiavelli) had already predicted would happen to scrupulous idealists serving a king rather (just perhaps) than a well-founded republic. By writing Utopia, More created an entirely new literary genre, one that has continued to rekindle the perennially central issues of social and political thinking ever since. And for that, his statesmanship should be honored. John Guy Clare College, Cambridge Copyright © 2016 The Catholic University of America Press

A Road Cut through the Law to Get after Orban?

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law! More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons (1960) Act I On 8 April 2014, the European Court of Human Rights (Second Section) gave a judgment in Magyar Keresztény Mennonita Egyház and Others v Hungary (Application nos 70945/11, 23611/12, 26998/12, 41150/12, 41155/12, 41463/12, 41553/12, 54977/12, and 56581/12), a case concerning the registration of churches under the controversial 2011 Churches Act. This is among a number of constitutional and legal changes in Hungary that have caused concern internationally, and was referred to in a letter to the Hungarian Government by the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in December 2011: The US government is deeply concerned that no modifications have been made to the Law on Churches. Outside observers note the rules for religions to gain recognition are prohibitively cumbersome, and the requirement for two-thirds approval by Parliament unnecessarily politicizes decisions surrounding a basic human right.1 I don't think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,’ Mr. Orban said in a speech earlier this week. He went on to cite Russia, Turkey and China as successful models to emulate, ‘none of which is liberal and some of which aren't even democracies.’

The Catholic Sage: Remarks on Southey’s Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society

This article addresses the general question of the status of Thomas More as a cultural icon by focusing on Robert Southey’s Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829). The discussion emphasizes the role of religion in Southey’s view of history and of More’s character, as well as the ways in which Southey’s work conveys a sense of the traditions of utopianism and implies a particular conception of intellectual authority. It is shown that, whereas authors like Thomas Stapleton, Anthony Munday, Robert Bolt and Hilary Mantel represented More as a man who challenged established opinions and authorities, either wisely or presumptuously, in the name of the authority of his own conscience, Southey was interested in overcoming the oppositional view of More’s character, career and moral legacy. The Colloquies accordingly express the author’s hopes of a future, eschatological state in which religious differences between Catholic and Protestant will be subsumed. It becomes clear that the work is as much a commentary on contemporary society, and especially on the condition of the Church of England, as it is an exercise in self-definition on the part of its author.

Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Early Modern Culture by Brian Cummings (review)

Reviewed by: Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Early Modern Culture by Brian Cummings Christopher Kendrick (bio) Brian Cummings. Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Early Modern Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xv + 367. $99.00. Brian Cummings’s new book contains an exceedingly rich collection of essays on writers and painters from More to Milton, Durer to Rembrandt, and on topics ranging from the forms of the soliloquy and of oaths to justifications of suicide and the experience of the body. As with his previous major book, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2003), what sets this work apart from others on the “early early modern” (ca. 1500–1660) is its practical understanding of the period as intimately co-determined by Reformation and Renaissance movements: of Reformation as caught up in and animated by humanist textuality, and humanism as shaped from within and from afar by theological crisis. Though the theoretical outlook of the book is largely directed against secularizing stories of Renaissance or Reformation, and apparently shares in the conventional anti-teleologism of our own moment, it’s important to note that Cummings communicates a conviction about the unity [End Page 585] of the Renaissance as a single period in a way that is fairly rare. Few critics find it quite so natural, these days—leaving aside the matter of scholarly competence, if that’s possible—to move in a single essay from Durer and More to Rembrandt and Milton. In traversing the whole field so compellingly even while cutting it off from the putatively secularized modern, Cummings reinforces one’s belief in the Reformed Renaissance as an episode in some historical grand narrative in need of construction. There are eight chapters in addition to the introduction, all of them free-standing essays. All are characterized by a high information-to-interpretation ratio, while offering layered, subtle readings of texts and sharp revaluations of oft-visited topics. The first chapter discusses Montaigne’s writing of himself in his Essais and a remarkable nude self-portrait by Durer (an ink and brush drawing, perhaps from 1503), and shows how both works, though sometimes treated as generic breakthroughs to the secular, are thoroughly informed by religious conceptions of mortality. Chapter 2 deals with Thomas More’s trial and conviction, and traces his move, under pressure of Henry’s break from Rome and perhaps against his will, to a notion of conscience more “plural, doubtful, fragile” (91), and less supported by the body of Christendom, the traditional church, than More had recognized as Lord Chancellor—to a notion of conscience as private, in fact, though Cummings does not quite say that. (In this chapter he is defending Robert Bolt’s play against the condescension of modern historians to its secularizing liberalism.) Chapter 3 traces the difficult paradoxes of identity enacted by Thomas Cranmer’s recantation, on the occasion of his martyrdom, of the previous recantation he had made in hopes of avoiding that occasion: which writing is the real Cranmer?; and treats as well the reverberation and reconstruction of this deed in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, where one begins perhaps to see a modern dissident Cranmer, persecuted for his ideological beliefs, through the public witness of the martyr. Chapter 4 makes an arresting case, in a discussion centered mainly on More, Foxe, and Shakespeare, for the apparent burgeoning of profane oaths as a reaction against all the oath-taking forced by religious political crisis on Tudor subjects, and sees a terrible, profane (hence still religious) space of privacy being wrung from or wrested for the subjected self, most memorably in Othello, Shakespeare’s most curse-infested play. Chapter 5 treats the form of the soliloquy, especially in Richard II, Hamlet, and Macbeth, and queries the notion that it might signify a new secular sense of the private self; rather it is an internal dialogue, staged before a dramatic audience but addressed to God, on questions of mortal being. Cummings turns next to the topic of providence and chance, and argues that—though Calvinist scripture, from the mid-sixteenth century, was rased of terms of chance (“cas,” “fortune,” “luck”)—still the more...

‘History Repeating Itself?’: Text and image, theatre and performance: Howard Brenton and David Edgar's appropriation of the historical drama

ABSTRACTThis article takes as its starting point the recent visitations made by Howard Brenton and David Edgar to the period of English history between 1530 and 1610, in Anne Boleyn (2010) and Written on the Heart (2011). It compares the two playwrights' use of past history to that tradition of ‘costume drama’ initiated by, amongst others, Robert Bolt with A Man for All Seasons (1960), and suggests ways in which the Brenton and Edgar plays are crucially linked in terms of their operation as political dramatists in a much changed world from that of the late 1960s when their first plays were staged. In this article I will be concerned with three main, but related areas. After considering this appropriation of the historical drama, I consider the implications of Brenton and Edgar, two playwrights whose earlier work had largely grounded itself in the here and now, turning to what might be thought of as a ‘retreat into history’. I then argue the need for a fresh look at the way in which political theatre operates in a world much altered from that in which Brenton and Edgar's careers first developed: offering points of connection with the development of that work, in part through their work on Bertolt Brecht. And finally, I will indicate ways in which the use of their material ties in with current (and contentious) debates about political drama and political performance.

Humanism and style: essays on Erasmus and More

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 1. Styles and Mixed Genres in Erasmus's The Praise of Folly Chapter 3 2. Some Medieval Elements and Structural Unity in Erasmus's The Praise of Folly Chapter 4 3. The Liturgical and Historical Context of Erasmus's Hymns Chapter 5 4. The Logic and Rhetoric of Proverbs in Erasmus's The Praise of Folly Chapter 6 5. The Epigraphs of More and Erasmus: A Literary Diptych Chapter 7 6. Style and Meaning in More's Utopia Hythloday's Sentences and Diction Chapter 8 7. More's Use of Patristic Evidence in the Eucharistic Controversy Chapter 9 8. The Heart of the Final Struggle: More's Commentary on The Agony in the Garden Chapter 10 9.Thomas More, a Man for All Seasons:Robert Bolt's Play and the Elizabethan Play of Sir Thomas More Chapter 11 10. Extraordinary Friends Chapter 12 Notes Chapter 13 Bibliography Chapter 14 Index

Unfinished business: Michael Wilson's “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” screenplay

Michael Wilson, a blacklisted expatriate American screenwriter, had received no credit for his work on the screenplay of David Lean and Sam Spiegel's worldwide success, The Bridge on the River Kwai. This paper describes Wilson's subsequent work for Spiegel and Lean on an adaptation of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Differences with Lean over story direction on what would become Lawrence of Arabia eventually led to Wilson's departure and replacement by Robert Bolt. Although his contributions to the script were officially hidden, Wilson successfully appealed to the British Writers' Guild in a screen credit arbitration. But not until three decades later after the film's release was his credit formally acknowledged in the United States.

Law Schools and Other Tyrannies

At one time the very idea of “the law” inspired respect, admiration, and even awe. One thinks of the thrilling words of Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons (1960). His future son-in-law Roper advises More to arrest a man who is likely to harm him at some point. More answers that the man must stay free even “if he were the Devil himself until he broke the law!” Roper balks at the idea of granting the devil the benefit of law, but More responds:

Lady Caroline Lamb Before Byron: The Godfrey Vassal Webster Affair

The romance between Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron in 1812 has been told in many forms, from novels like her own Glenarvon (1816) and Disraeli's Vivian Grey (1833), to Robert Bolt's 1972 feature film, recent genre fiction, and even imaginary lost journals. (1) But before Byron, from 1810 to 1811, Caroline had a long, messy affair with Sir Godfrey Vassal Webster, known only through letters, most unpublished, held in the British library, the public records office in Chichester, the private archives of Lord Bessborough and those at Chatsworth and Castle Howard. Because this affair with Sir Godfrey anticipates the one with Byron, the facts of the first have often been conflated with the second, which it resembles in uncanny ways: a titled and unattached young man with an aura of danger, repeated but broken promises to break off the relationship, public displays and uninhibited expressions of her emotional turmoil sometimes in verse. When Caroline met Webster in 1810, he was just twenty, intensely interesting to young women, a hero of the Spanish campaign whose reputation was so bad that even the Whips club, notorious for its low standards, had rejected him. Reputedly, he had brought back the skull of a French soldier which he had converted into a macabre-looking gold-encrusted drinking cup. Caroline was twenty-four and the mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, Augustus, who had begun to have grand mal epileptic seizures and was showing signs of mental retardation. She had been married to William Lamb for five years, residing in Melbourne House in a family that was atheistical, self-consciously blase about morals, and politically ambitious. Beloved by her husband, Caroline was eager to learn, hot-tempered, jealous, and childishly pious. Though she tried to embrace the urbane style and values of the Lambs, Lady Caroline still did not know how to handle the consequences. While her cousin, the Marquis of Hartington (nicknamed Hart, and later the 6th Duke of Devonshire) joked that she simply had no understanding of the proprieties, it was no laughing matter (Lady Caroline Lamb to the Marquis of Hartington. 21 January 1810. Devonshire MSS. Chatsworth [UK], 5th Duke's Group, f. 1966). (2) William was heir to the Melbourne title and estate and needed an appropriate wife. Alas, Caroline could not or would not adapt to the complicated social milieu of Regency London. For example, while most women of social standing avoided introductions to Lady Holland, who, as a divorcee was unwelcome at court, Caroline became her friend. Caroline met Sir Godfrey, Lady Holland's eldest son by her previous marriage, at Holland House, where a circle of political liberals regularly gathered. Thereafter Sir Godfrey gave her many gifts and accompanied her in public. Observing them at a party, Lady Melbourne wrote deriding her daughter-in-law's lack of shame or compunction, and her complete abandonment to Webster who seemed to direct every impulse of Caroline's mind. Yr behavior last night was so disgraceful in its appearances and so disgusting in its motives that it is quite impossible it should ever be effaced from my mind. When one braves the opinion of the World, sooner or later they will feel the consequences of it and although at first people may have excused your forming friendships with all those who are censured for their conduct, from yr youth and inexperience yet when they see you continue to single them out and to overlook all decencys imposed by Society--they will look upon you as belonging to the same class. (Lady Melbourne to Lady Caroline Lamb, 13 April 1810. British Library Add. MS 45546 f. 16.) (3) The affair entered the stream of gossip that always swirled around the Devonshire, Bessborough, and Melbourne families, and it caused her mother, Lady Bessborough, considerable pain. Caroline responded contritely to her mother-in-law, making the first of several promises to break off with Webster: My Dearest Lady Melbourne I must indeed have a heart of iron if it was not most deeply wounded and affected by your letter and conversation[,] (4) by my Mothers sorrow and by the unparalleld kindness and patience of my friends and will you then make me this offer, shall I again be receivd be loved be confided in by you all. …

Natural Law and the Problem of Certainty: Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons"

Natural Law and the Problem of Certainty: Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons"

The Medieval English Court of Chancery

The medieval English Court of Chancery is not a well-known institution. Its Victorian great-granddaughter—if to posit such a relationship does the antecedent justice—has a far broader public for its much darker persona, thanks to Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Even Chancery's Jacobean descendant looms larger in the historical memory than does its medieval forebear, if only for the celebrated battle between Chancellor Ellesmere and Coke, CJ. Perhaps with the brief tenure of St. Thomas More, brought into our own popular culture by playwright Robert Bolt and actor Paul Scofield, the early Chancery emerges for a moment, although the court under More was overshadowed by that chancellor's more difficult trials. In fact, the Chancery as a court has been subsumed in a multitude of studies on the Chancery as an administrative office. It appears in essays on government, councils and parliaments, writing offices and administrative centers. Yet the court that grew around the chancellor was not the sum, or even just a part, of his activity as the leading administrator of the realm. Still, with a few exceptions, the medieval Court of Chancery has never been afforded the same careful and discrete treatment its Elizabethan successor has received. The older court remains a footnote to administrative history, something just on the far side of the light cast by St German and Tudor records.

The Missionand Historical Missions: Film and the Writing of History

Because of the power of film, movies with historical themes affect public perceptions of the past more deeply than do scholarly reconstructions. Film makers and historians search for meaning in separate ways, but their quests can converge. Examples of different approaches to similar destinations are found in a newer film and older historical views of Catholic missions in South America. Released in 1986,The Mission, directed by Roland Joffé with a screenplay by Robert Bolt, displays paternalistic attitudes like those of an earlier generation of North American academic historians. The film's voice is a white European distortion of Native American reality. This essay will examine that voice, offer alternative explanations of historical events, and suggest a research agenda for future study of the Guarani missions of Paraguay, often mentioned in surveys but seldom studied by North American historians.

The Mysterious Origins of Lawrence of Arabia

THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF DAVID LEAN'S CLASSIC FILM, Lawrence of Arabia, in 1992, brought with it the restored print and the publication of several books and the screenplay, together with a number of other celebrations befitting this impressive picture and the work of its late director. The screenplay was written by Robert Bolt based on a previous script by Michael Wilson. Many previous attempts had been made over the years to bring Lawrence to the screen. One of the earliest was written by John Monk Saunders, the American screenwriter who wrote Wings and a succession of dramas dealing with WWI. This is how he envisioned scenes later immortalized by Wilson and Bolt. During the two years of the World War in which Lawrence of Arabia was engaged in the revolt of the Arabs against the Turks he make innumerable excursions into the desert, performing myriad exploits and met countless...

A Threat to Due Process—The War Crimes Act 1991

In Act One of ‘A Man for all Seasons’, Robert Bolt’s play about Thomas More’s pilgrimage to martyrdom, More’s impetuous son-in-law, William Roper, argues that the Devil does not deserve benefit of law. In the course of the discussion More pushes Roper into the stark claim that obstacle to the conviction of the Devil must be overcome, even if it meant failing to follow due process of law. Roper, in his hunger and thirst for justice, declares that he is prepared to tear down every law in England in so worthy a cause. More, with his finely-tuned jurisprudential mind, answers him: And when the last law was down and the Devil turned on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast—Man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it, d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake’. (Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, 1960, Act I)In this passage from Bolt’s play More focusses some of the issues raised by the recent War Crimes Act, which obtained the Royal Assent on 9 May 1991.’ The Act’s long title states that its purpose is ‘to confer jurisdiction on United Kingdom courts in respect of certain grave violations of the laws and customs of war in German-held territory during the Second World War.’

Thomas More, a Man for all Seasons: Robert Bolt’s Play and the Elizabethan Play of Sir Thomas More

Thomas More, a Man for all Seasons: Robert Bolt’s Play and the Elizabethan Play of Sir Thomas More

Twentieth-Century English History Plays: From Shaw to Bond

Acknowledgements - Introduction: The English History Play in the Twentieth-Century - George Bernard Shaw Saint Joan - Three Plays of the 1930s: Reginald Berkeley The Lady with the Lamp, Clifford Bax The Rose without a Thorn, and Gordon Daviot Richard of Bordeaux - T.S.Eliot Murder in the Cathedral - Three Plays of the 1960s: Robert Bolt A Man for All Seasons, Peter Shaffer The Royal Hunt of the Sun, and John Osborne Luther - Edward Bond Early Morning - Conclusion - Notes - Index