A Man For All Seasons goes to the heart of our current political season
Last night, I re-watched A Man For All Seasons, which is an acutely timely movie. This telling of the fall of Thomas More focuses less on Henry VIII, and more on the corruption of institutions and people. Henry’s monomaniacal demand for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon played on people’s ambitions and weaknesses, turning them against people who stuck with their faith in both the wording and the spirit of the political and legal forms. The movie’s two poles of morality are More, whose adherence to principles in a debased age leads ultimately to his execution, and Richard Rich, a vacuous office-seeker who gets greater and greater rewards for his participation in the warping of the laws in pursuit of More.
In the final courtroom scene, Rich, recently appointed as Attorney General of Wales, perjures himself, claiming that More privately told him that Parliament did not have the authority to back Henry’s claim to be the head of a newly reformed English church. (More had remained silent on the subject, refusing to either support or deny Henry’s arguments for divorcing Catherine and beginning the split from “the Church of Rome.”) After his false testimony, More poses the following question to Rich after his testimony: “For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales?”
The parallel to today’s vacuous office-seekers is fairly obvious.
Another highlight from the movie (and the play on which it was based) is this exchange:
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is 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, do 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!”
The relevance of this warning to members of the Leopard Eating People’s Faces Party is also obvious.
There are many other salient moments for our times in the play. For example, the weak, useless, nervous courtiers accompanying Henry VIII, when we first see him, are both hilarious and disturbing. The different ways of bending to Henry’s will — enthusiastically, in the case of Cromwell; opportunistically, in the case of Rich; and ambivalently, in the case of the Duke of Norfolk — fit neatly into Tim Miller’s taxonomy of Trump collaborators. And there’s more (More?), such as stellar performances from great actors like Robert Shaw, Leo McKern, and John Hurt.
I strongly recommend giving it a watch, whether you’ve seen it before, or not.
