Shakespeare’s play describing Henry the VIII describes the events of Henry’s court from a different perspective than in A Man For All Seasons.  In it, he focuses at first on the strong influence Cardinal Wolsey has upon the King, which greatly upsets the court. Shakespeare proceeds to depict Wolsey as a meddler who seeks to dissolve the King’s marriage to Katherine in order to procure an alliance with the French. He also portrays Anne Boleyn as one who cares little for title or nobility. Later, the King finds Wolsey’s wishes for a union with France and his financial holdings in letters and dismisses him and makes it known he wishes to marry Boleyn, not the French king’s sister. Next, Bishop Gardiner begins plotting against Boleyn, the new pregnant King and Cranmer, her ally and archbishop of Canterbury. Furious with Cranmer’s treatment after being accused of being a heretic, Henry makes him the godfather to his newborn daughter. Cranmer prophesizes that this newborn child, the future Queen Elizabeth, will one day achieve greatness and peace.

            Shakespeare wrote during the reign of Elizabeth and her successor, King James I. The play was first produced in 1612-13 during the reign of King James. History suggests that Cranmer’s forecast is accurate. Elizabeth’s reign was one of the most successful in English history. Accordingly, it was in his best interest to off lofty praise of them, as they also supported theater. Shakespeare, writing in Post-Reformation England is writing a history of a time period not far removed and must have been weary of the sensibilities he could arouse.

            Neil Sinyard argues that Fred Zinnemann’s protagonists share in a courageous struggle. Through High Noon, From Here to Eternity, Nun’s Story and A Man For All Seasons, one witnesses remarkably striking similarities among the individuals and the methods Zinneman uses to enhance them.

            To Zinnemann, there existed realities worse than death for a hero. Sinyard notes that High Noon’s heroic Marshal “elaborated a characteristic Zinnemann protagonist: a loner with a strong sense of duty who knows he could not live with himself if he were to go against his conscience” (67).  In From Here to Eternity, though the protagonist Prewitt accomplishes relatively little, like many of Zinnemann’s other protagonists, his individualism forces others to confront uncomfortable decisions. In A Man For All Seasons, Zinnemann assumes the audience knows nothing and depicts More as a “hero of selfhood” who refuses to accede to political or social pressures. Zinnemann’s protagonists are inspirational because their decisions have a transcendent resonance with the audience. Each hero ends up confronting evil alone and without any assistance.

            Zinnemann used creative visual imagery to enhance his protagonists and enhance their accessibility. In High Noon, he uses close-ups of a clock as the climax approaches.  Though a Western, the central theme is a struggle of characters, not the landscape, and the flatness of the film projects that. The opening shot of From Here to Eternity shows the conflict of the individual with the group and the contrast between the purposeful path of one man and the rigidity of a group. In Nun’s Story, Zinnemann uses visual imagery to portray the horrors of war through twisted trees. With More, as he approaches his doom in the courthouse, he enters through a narrow path symbolizes the difficult path of his morality.

            In short, Sinyard concludes that the enduring appeal of Thomas More, who epitomizes the personal characteristics of Zinnemann’s other protagonists, is his courage and fortitude in standing for what he felt was right even though it cost him his office and ultimately his life. What makes Zinnemann’s characters enduring and strong is that they “stay on their path that is their concept of destiny”(79) and their willingness to sacrifice everything for principle(93).

            Joel Super describes A Man For All Seasons as a documentary fiction, with recurring themes appealing to the director. He also elaborates on the film’s production and appeal.

            Super notes that AMFAS was, in part, an independent film because Columbia felt the film had limited appeal. Thus, the film had a small budget and was filmed in England, much to Zimmerman’s delight because it limited influence from the studio. Zinnemann took advantage of location in shooting this film. He shoots in bucolic environments to help the audience gain a sense of the underpopulated world(168) and uses mise-en-scene techniques to emphasize the gravity of developments.

            Though his works may seem to be genre films, he largely avoids them. Furthermore, Super argues that Zinnemann consistently had a broad appeal because of his respect for the audience and interest in the subject. Along those lines, filmgoers enjoyed that his films broke from the relentless and nonsensical innovation of his contemporaries and the strong acting and directing he offered.

            More than anything else, this film reinforces Zinnemann’s interest in the theme of a “solitary individual of integrity against the corrupt and cowardly world” (158).  Though More is like other Zinnemann protagonists in that he is left without friends, he is of the upper strata and suffers at the whim of a powerful bureaucracy. The success of the film draws on Zinnemann’s strength as a documentary fiction technician. Zinnemann casts unknowns in the lead parts, like Brando in The Men and Montgomery Clift in The Search to create an element of freshness due to his firm belief that stars detracted from the story. So to in A Man For All Seasons, Zinnemann cast relatively unknown actors, and they all give fresh, powerful performances.

            Ultimately, A Man for All Seasons is a Zinnemann film that utilizes politics to provide a narrative to a story largely devoid of action, stars and genre appeal that engenders itself, largely with the power of precise and intelligent dialogue, to a large audience.

For what reason did the story of Sir Thomas More generate such global appeal following the release of Zinnemann’s movie? In his article in Moreana, a journal devoted to the study of Sir Thomas More, France Reynolds strives to articulate the nature of More’s universal appeal and how the movie expresses it.

Reynolds attempts to discover how the struggle of a Catholic Briton, four-hundred years after his death, could appeal to a universal audience. He notes that the struggles facing More do not apply to most of the audience. The issue of struggling against a monarch is irrelevant, and the tenants of Catholicism matter little to people of other faiths. Thus, More appeals to the audience because he embodies the universal and widely admirable characteristics of integrity and the love of truth and justice.

Additionally, Bolt’s liberal use of historical material allows him to use the play as a conduit for his own ideas. Thus, A Man for All Seasons, much like Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, “translate(s) past events into present-day terms”(936). Bolt takes liberty with historical fact in his interpretation of the trial to underscore More’s isolation and make his plight more understandable to the audience. In reality, there were no spectators at the trial, and Cromwell was a judge, not the prosecutor. Additionally, the prosecution is conducted in the American style. However, Bolt only does this because, as a dramatist, he wanted to emphasize the ideological struggle between More and Cromwell. More symbolizes conscience, a man who sacrifices ephemeral possessions to protect his immortal self, while Cromwell stands for the cynic who will sacrifice his soul. Ironically, Cromwell’s triumph over More is fleeting, as he too later faced the executioners.

Reynolds holds that the personality of More is so captivating that all fall under his spell. More endures because of the universal feeling of over-governance, and admiration for his courage and fortitude(39).

In his critique, Patrick Whitely analyzes the struggle between More and Henry VIII’s and their divergent interpretations of the natural law and the forces of legal positivism working against it in A Man for All Seasons.

Patrick Whitley defines natural law as a moral proposition rooted in moral absolutism, while legal positivism has no necessary relationship between law and morality. The play Antigone  clearly depicts the struggle between natural law and legal positivism, as it dramatizes “the superiority of the natural law by depicting Antigone’s moral victory and Kreon’s remorse over his audacity” (761). Unlike this play, AMFAS poses the question whether natural law is irreconcilable with legal positivism.

The struggle in AMFAS is Cardinal Wolsey’s political realism and More’s view that laws worthy of obedience must be morally legitimate. Thus, Wolsey, though a Cardinal charged with enforcing the Church doctrine, serves the King’s interest first against the Church (765). Henry cannot be considered a positivist because he cares deeply about More’s moral dilemma, but still operates under his belief in the divine right of kings, seeking to align “his understanding of divine law with the operations of positive law…”(770). Thus, it is Henry’s conduits, Cromwell and Rich, who magnify the philosophical divide. The difference between Henry and More is that Henry believes he has access to “direct knowledge” from God and that actions for the good of the state must be taken, regardless of whether the act is good or bad, while More merely knows that he must act in obedience to his beliefs. Ultimately, More is a reluctant martyr, who recognizes the modern heroic ideal of certain sacrifice for indeterminate reasons (782).

            In this article, Paul Green attempts to synthesize and reconcile Thomas More’s written views of suicide and his own personal demise as portrayed in A Man For All Seasons.

            More expresses his thoughts about suicide in Utopia and A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. In reality, suicide, even by condemned heretics, troubles More because he believes heresy itself is curable but suicide rendered the soul irretrievable through his analysis of Church doctrine (136). Although More permits suicide in the Utopia only because the Utopians are not Christians, he further limits suicide to Cicero’s premise that “death was to be sought only when pain was so excruciating that a man could no longer function normally” (139)  and when the sustenance of one’s life has exacted a tax on society. Like St. Augustine before him, More repeatedly pronounces suicide to be in violation of the sixth commandment (142). In Dialogue, More encourages man to “accept adversity as part of a divine scheme (144). Thus, with the soul as a battlefield between good and evil, Man must depend on human wisdom and divine grace to fight off suicide, as well as the threat of eternal damnation (147).

            More draws a sharp distinction between suicide and martyrdom in his writings. One definition familiar to him considers suicide to be a self-centered act, whereas martyrdom is derived from a sense of duty (148). More repudiates aggressive martyrdom (153), and he dies in accordance with his view that death should not be recklessly sought or provoked, but thrust upon him. More did not seek martyrdom, but it was thrust upon him because of his refusal to recant his silence toward the King’s wishes for the Church. Because, ultimately, the only alternative to death was to recant, More earnestly knew he was sentenced to a martyr’s death.