...Corruption in the play “A Man For All Seasons” The main plot in the play “A Man For All Seasons” by Robert Bolt is corruption, more specifically political corruption. While the play focuses heavily on the social demise, and moral strength of the character Thomas More. It also covers the inverse process with other characters, such as; Richard Rich, Thomas Cromwell, and the king of England Henry VIII. In the play Thomas More stands as a beacon of selfhood and virtue, while the other three men used manipulation and disloyalty, to gain wealth and power, no matter what the consequences may be. The character Richard Rich did not start out corrupt in the beginning of the play, but became corrupt with prospect of becoming wealthy and powerful. Rich was denied a high-ranking position by More, and in turn accepted a position from Cromwell in exchange for assisting him in taking down More. Rich is aware that he is being used by Cromwell, but he is so obsessed with jumpstarting his career, and rise to power, he turns a blind eye to it. Throughout the play loses his innocence, he even stated that to Cromwell when he accepted the offer as post at York, and Cromwell ask why he looked so depressed, Rich’s reply was “I’m lamenting. I’ve lost my innocence” (Bolt 74). He is quickly reminded by Cromwell that he had lost it a long time ago, when he decided to assist him and the King in taking down More, who was supposed to be a friend of his. Now, what is pretty ironic about Rich’s situation...
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...room for the material. Without doubt, conflict between the two is inevitable. In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons, passion and power dominate the characters, therefore developing the recurring theme that power leaves no space for moral duty. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth exemplifies the theme of passion and power versus morality. The play begins when three witches promise Macbeth, thane of Glamis, that he will inherit Cawdor and later become King. “All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!” “All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!” (14) Once he is named thane of Cawdor, he becomes compelled by the thought of being crowned King. As the current King is still living, Macbeth finds himself thinking of the impossible, murder. As he contemplates whether he should kill the king or not, the desire for power slowly permeates his moral duties, making him more and more ruthless. He is no longer what he seems, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” (2) Macbeth, clearly mourning about his contemptuous thoughts, begins to suffer psychologically. He does not want to accept that he is capable of having such horrible thoughts, “Let not light see my black and deep desires.” (28) His deep desire for power and providing his children the guarantee to the throne affects him immensely. As Macbeth is a kind and good man, he does not have the ability to commit murder, however, his wife, Lady Macbeth, has a greater desire for power than he. She knows...
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...Panthers have had a great off-season in my opinion, as they have been able to address weaknesses that were exposed during last season. They have also been able to upgrade the special teams and offensive line with low-cost veteran players that have been around the block and are proven. They have also been able to sign quarterback Cam Newton and linebacker Thomas Davis to contract extensions. These two players are field generals and I don't know where this team would be without them. This off-season shows that the Panthers understand loyalty and are doing everything they can to put another winning product out on the football field. Thomas Davis impact on Panthers Thomas Davis signed a two-year $18 million dollar contract extension with the team a few weeks ago, ensuring that he will be a Panther for his entire career!! In sports that is it is rare nowadays to see a player stick with the team that drafted him, with the amount of money that is thrown and players faces these days. I'm glad Thomas Davis decided to stick around in the Queen city because he would be a pain in the neck to face as an opponent!! It’s a relief to know we won’t have to worry about that loyalty is just one of the many qualities Thomas Davis has....
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...of God, a person must trust, or have faith, in God’s will, power, and plan. It is this faith that God will provide and protect that proves time and again to be an essential part of being a true believer. Authors like John Steinbeck and Robert Bolt have used this faith as essential themes in their greatest works The Grapes of Wrath and A Man for all Seasons. Steinbeck and Bolt both portray what it means to be a believer in God through their main character’s actions and beliefs. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, portrays life of migrants during the time of the dust bowl and specifically focuses on the migrant family, the Joads. These migrants and their families are traveling westward to California, looking for new opportunities to improve their lives and to provide for their families. On their journey the Joad family encounters death, homelessness, starvation, and extreme poverty that they never expected when starting out on their trip. Every member of the family is extremely affected by these images but none more than Jim Casey, a preacher and friend of the family. At the beginning of the journey Casey considers himself to be a man of God, however after seeing the images of suffering in the American people, loses his faith in God. He can not believe that any God would subject his people to such cruelty and pain as he has seen. For a long time Casey is disillusioned with the idea of God and gives up on his faith. However, after seeing what this hopeless...
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...“Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a person who resists authority” –Oscar Wilde, this quote shows how throughout history there is always an individual who will stand up against a tyrant. This is also a feature of literature as well which is shown by: Brutus in ‘Julius Caesar’ who is fighting because of his ideals for a perfect life of liberty, Winston Smith in ‘1984’ who is fighting against a brutal totalitarian regime and Sir Thomas More in ‘A man for all seasons’ who is fighting due to his conscience being able to rule over his loyalty to King Henry. All three of these characters are in positions of power within the states they will later fight against: Brutus is one of Caesar’s key advisers who is described as patriotic as shown by the quote “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more” and is frequently referred to as an honourable man, Winston Smith is a technician within the Ministry of Truth and his job is to destroy any parts of history which disagree with the official party line and is described as having a “varicose ulcer above his right ankle” which forces him to “rest several times” on his way home and finally Sir Thomas More is Henry’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and is described as a kind and generous man who “would give anything to anyone” and very importantly he is a staunch Catholic, but what drives each of these men to strike out against the state they themselves are a part of? “Wherever there is a man who exercises authority...
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...How does the Common Man enable the audience to understand the complexities of More’s character? Though A Man for All Seasons in itself is a complicated and sustained view into the lives of those surviving in England under a corrupt system, the Common Man is a vital element in the play that documents the inner struggles of a man torn between ‘political realities’ of the day and his faith and knowledge of his own character. By acting as a make shift chorus, the Common Man is able to persuade the audience to remain detached in order to consider the many layered, multi-dimensional More and to consider his motivation and reasoning for his action of remaining ‘silent’. The Common Man also allows and encourages a very dramatic contrast of character between More and himself, along with what would seem characters of ‘all seasons’ in Rich and the State. By lacking in character development, the Common Man is able to successfully communicate the intricacies of More’s concise and important construction. From the beginning of the play, opening with a grand declaration of ‘the Sixteenth Century is the century of the common man’, the audience is immediately aware of his importance in not only beginning, but in the unfolding of events as a sort of commentator as the play progresses. He is meant, as suggested by his distinctive label of ‘the common man’ and his seemingly unidentifiable ‘black’ bit of cloth for a costume, to represent a jack-of-all-trades, a shapeshifter. Most importantly, he is...
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...Dead Man Walking They hail me as one living, But don't they know That I have died of late years, Untombed although? I am but a shape that stands here, A pulseless mould, A pale past picture, screening Ashes gone cold. Not at a minute's warning, Not in a loud hour, For me ceased Time's enchantments In hall and bower. There was no tragic transit, No catch of breath, When silent seasons inched me On to this death ... -- A Troubadour-youth I rambled With Life for lyre, The beats of being raging In me like fire. But when I practised eyeing The goal of men, It iced me, and I perished A little then. When passed my friend, my kinsfolk, Through the Last Door, And left me standing bleakly, I died yet more; The Dead Man Walking They hail me as one living, But don't they know That I have died of late years, Untombed although? I am but a shape that stands here, A pulseless mould, A pale past picture, screening Ashes gone cold. Not at a minute's warning, Not in a loud hour, For me ceased Time's enchantments In hall and bower. There was no tragic transit, No catch of breath, When silent seasons inched me On to this death ... -- A Troubadour-youth I rambled With Life for lyre, The beats of being raging In me like fire. But when I practised eyeing The goal of men, It iced me, and I perished A little then. When passed my friend, my kinsfolk, Through the Last Door, And left me standing bleakly, I died yet more; ...
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...life of Sir Thomas More. It’s noteworthy that an earlier form of the film had been written for BBC radio in the year 1954 and subsequently, a one hour version of the film was produced in 1957. These early versions of the film were starring Bernard Hepton. However, based on Robert Bolt’s success in earlier films, he finally took over this role from Bernard Hepton. The official version of the film was first performed in London during the opening of Globe theatre after which it found its way to other places such as Broadway. The film then had a successful run spanning over one year and its worth commending that it was commercially viable. Apart from making economic returns to the...
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...A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS A Man for All Seasons has probably enjoyed more popularity than any other English play since the war. After a run of 320 performances in the West End, it was a great success on Broadway, where it was voted the Best Foreign Play of the Year (1962). Bolt himself wrote the screenplay, cutting out the part of the Common Man, although the director was in favour of keeping him. The film was made in 1966, with Paul Scofield playing Sir Thomas More, as he had on the stage both in London and New York. It won six academy awards and had long seasons in cinemas in many parts of the world. In style, A Man for All Seasons is quite different from any of Bolt’s previous plays, but it represents a continuation of the same line of thinking about behaviour. Cherry was a man who had so completely lost touch with his ideal that he was incapable of seizing a real chance of joining fantasy and reality together by selling the house and buying an orchard. Dean was basically a good man and though he’d turned a blind eye on some of the things going on around him and made certain moral compromises for the sake of climbing the academic ladder, he’d never got completely cut off from the ideal (which is represented partly by astronomy). And the action forces him to a point where he digs his heels in and. shuts his ears to the counsels of opportunism (which are represented partly by Sir Hugo). A Man for All Seasons is a graph on which Bolt plots two curves: the steady rise of an opportunist...
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...The main plot in the play “A Man For All Seasons” by Robert Bolt is corruption, more specifically political corruption. While the play focuses heavily on the social demise, and moral strength of the character Thomas More. It also covers the inverse process with other characters, such as; Richard Rich, Thomas Cromwell, and the king of England Henry VIII. In the play Thomas More stands as a beacon of selfhood and virtue, while the other three men used manipulation and disloyalty, to gain wealth and power, no matter what the consequences may be. The character Richard Rich did not start out corrupt in the beginning of the play, but became corrupt with prospect of becoming wealthy and powerful. Rich was denied a high-ranking position by More, and in turn accepted a position from Cromwell in exchange for assisting him in taking down More. Rich is aware that he is being used by Cromwell, but he is so obsessed with jumpstarting his career, and rise to power, he turns a blind eye to it. Throughout the play loses his innocence, he even stated that to Cromwell when he accepted the offer as post at York, and Cromwell ask why he looked so depressed, Rich’s reply was “I’m lamenting. I’ve lost my innocence” (Bolt 74). He is quickly reminded by Cromwell that he had lost it a long time ago, when he decided to assist him and the King in taking down More, who was supposed to be a friend of his. Now, what is pretty ironic about Rich’s situation is that at the beginning of the play he was the one...
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...portrait of all of the women of Thomas More's family. Margaret Roper (née More) (1505–1544) was an English writer and translator. She was the daughter of Thomas More and wife of William Roper. During More's imprisonment in the Tower of London, she was a frequent visitor to his cell, along with her husband. After More was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to bless the Reformation of Henry VIII of England and swear to Henry as head of the English Church, his head, after being parboiled, was displayed on a pike at London Bridge for a month. At the end of that period, Margaret bribed the man whose business it was to throw the head into the river, to give it to her instead. She preserved it by pickling it in spices until her own death at the age of 39 in 1544. After her death, her husband William Roper took charge of the head, and it is buried with him. William Roper ("son Roper," as he is referred to by Thomas More) produced the first biography of the statesman/martyr, but his homage to his father-in-law is not remembered as well as Margaret's efforts at comforting and honoring More. In Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women, he invokes Margaret Roper ("who clasped in her last trance/ Her murdered father's head") as a paragon of loyalty and familial love. She published a translation of a Latin work Precatio Dominica by Erasmus, as A Devout Treatise upon the Paternoster. In a letter her father mentions her poems, but none is extant. In Robert Bolt's famous play A Man for All...
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...you can see by the welsh flag over here – that gave England – FIVE SOVERIGNS – and some of you may be able to recognize it just cause we seen it so many times now These five sovereigns being: 1. Henry VII ( reigned 1485-1509) a. A famous face for most 2. Henry VIII ( reigned 1509 – 1547) b. The man who the entire play were reading about is based on 3. Edward VI (reigned 1547-1543) c. Who is the youngest reigning sovereign EVER 4. Mary I (reigned 1553-1558) d. More commonly known as “Bloody Mary” – and we’ll talk about why in a bit 5. Elizabeth I (reigned 1558 -1603) e. The most normal one. And as you can see from these dates its self, the Tudor Dynasty lasted a 118 years until its dissolution in 1603. So, for the dynastic consideration portion of this presentation – forge and myself are going to be first of all explaining to you who each of these five people are and secondly we will be illustrating the changes or “dynastic considerations “each of these 5 people made. And finally of course we’re going to be relating each of these finding to “ A man for all seasons”. So let’s start with first of all: Henry VII Uh, Henry VII as we said before reigned from 1485-1509. He was the son of Edmund Tudor and Lady Margaret Beaufort. Henry Tudor was automatically made head of the house of Lancaster because of the imprisonment of...
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...ETHICS IN A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS Joe Casey Milltown Institute PREAMBLE I want to begin with some comments on what led me to the topic of ethics and A Man for All Seasons. I had been looking at some fairly heated exchanges in the late 1990s in the journal Philosophy and Literature between Richard Posner and Martha Nussbaum on the possibility of ethical criticism (Posner 1997, 1998; Nussbaum 1998). Briefly, Posner takes up what he believes to be an aestheticist stance that ethics has nothing to do with literature, so that ethical criticism is ruled out, whereas Nussbaum argues that literature can be ethical and ethical categories legitimately be applied to it. In the background is Nussbaum’s view that certain works of literature may be necessary for ethics (Nussbaum 1990). Neither position seemed entirely satisfactory. It appeared evident to me, as against Posner, that literature could provide ethical insights, but Nussbaum’s suggestion that ethics is dependent on literature seemed too strong. But whatever the merits of the latter thesis, the weaker thesis that literature can be ethically revealing is worth defending. At some level a great work of literature represents a form of human existence, to which we may respond as human beings. That there is a moral dimension to human existence I assume. Hence, it seems clear that literature may represent that dimension. Robert Bolt’s 1960 play can serve as an instance of how literature can stimulate...
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...The Beginnings of Santa Claus The evolution of the figure known as Santa Claus can be traced through religious, mythological, and cultural portrayals all the way back to the fourth century. It is amazing how the legend of Santa Claus has grown and evolved throughout history. And even more exciting how he has became a modern day icon during the Christmas season. What do you think of when you hear the words: strings of lights, carolers, snow, cookies and milk? Most often Christmas right? More often Santa Claus. Every boy and girl has felt the joy of Christmas eve, having family time, putting out treats for Santa, and then tossing and turning unable to sleep growing evermore restless about Santa's arrival. Although most know what Santa does during his sleigh ride, many may not know where his origin began. The jolly man we know has developed through the span of time and has gone through numerous changes. "The original St Nicholas is for the most part a shadowy figure, lost in historical mist and religious myths" (Myers) Despite the fact that the idea of giving gifts developed from Saint Nicholas in the fourth century, the first characters that resemble our modern day Santa developed in the seventeenth century. We acquire these figures from the English and also the Dutch. Although this man in not the same as the modern Santa, it is evident the these are his beginnings. "When the Dutch lost control of New Amsterdam to the English in the seventeenth century, Sinterklaas gradually...
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...St. Nicholas, also known as Nikolaos of Myrna, was born sometime around circa 280 in Patara, Turkey and passed away, some believe, on December 6, 343 in Myra, Turkey. St. Nicholas was born into a Christian family. Because of an epidemic, his parents tragically died leaving him to be raised by his uncle, The Bishop of Patara. From the inheritance of his parents, he gave the money to help the poor and sick. St. Nicholas’ spiritual life was caused by his family because his uncle was the Bishop of Patara and his parents were very religious Christians. Over the years, the word of his acts of kindness spread all over the world and he became known as the protector of children and was known for giving gifts. He was a popular saint in Europe until...
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