A Man for All Seasons
Robert Bolt · England, 1960 (set 1529–1535) · Non-African drama · WAEC set text 2026–2030
Why it is on the list
A play about conscience. Thomas More will not say the words that would save his life.
Setting
The court of Henry VIII. The King’s “great matter”: a divorce Rome will not give.
The story
- Henry VIII wants to set aside Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. He needs his Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, a man famous for honesty, to bless the break with Rome.
- More will not. He will not speak against the King either. His defence is silence: the law cannot punish what has not been said.
- Friends and family beg him to say the oath to the Act of Succession and live. Cromwell, Rich and Norfolk close the trap. Richard Rich, once a young man More tried to send away to teaching, perjures himself for a job in Wales.
- More is convicted of treason. He dies, still refusing to make his private conscience a public lie.
- The Common Man — Bolt’s device — plays steward, boatman, jailer, jury, headsman. Ordinary people keep the machine running.
Characters
- Sir Thomas More
- Lawyer, humanist, Lord Chancellor, martyr. His “self” is his oath to his own mind.
- Henry VIII
- Charming, dangerous, needs More’s approval because More’s name still means something.
- Thomas Cromwell
- The King’s fixer. Efficient, not cartoon-evil. The state in a man.
- Richard Rich
- Ambition without a spine. “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?”
- Alice & Margaret More
- Wife and daughter. Love that cannot understand why he will not just say the words.
- The Common Man
- Brechtian narrator/actor. He survives. That is his judgement on himself.
Themes
- Conscience versus the state.
- The letter of the law as More’s shelter — and its limits when men lie in court.
- Corruption: offices sold, oaths emptied.
- What an ordinary person does while a good man is destroyed.
In the exam
- Bolt is not writing a saint’s life only. More is stubborn, witty, and uses the law like a sword. Show both.
- The Common Man is extra marks. Say what Bolt gains by having one actor play the small parts.
- Context: Reformation, succession, treason. A paragraph of history is enough; then return to the scenes.