Answers and responses to Students ' Questions on the play A Man for all Seasons.

On 26/1/2001, Zulu15714@aol.com wrote:

I was wondering if you could help me with an essay I have to write:Thomas More is a hero.  How does his heroism compare with others who have shared this spotlight?  While T.S. Eliot's Thomas Becket moves within a different kind of play, he too is the hero.  How do these two corresponding heroes, occupying parallel situations, compare in terms of heroism? For that matter, what other major protagonists of major works have you read would serve as a better (or lesser) example of heroism than More?  Write a comparative analysis of these men. For the essay, I chose to compare More to Becket, Jim Casy from The Grapes of Wrath, and Mahatma Gandhi.

Thanks!Jessie

 

Heroes are not saints; heroes are not necessarily popular at the time; heroes usually have one superhuman quality in one area at least More did I guess. Heroes can be heroes accidentally but More was no accidental saint. Casy is hardly our hero but has literary appeal as a human character with faults and humility; he is a bit morose for me. Is Jesus a "hero"? this is not what we usually say is it? Beckett is heroic & legendary but hardly a hero. A hero usually gets to enjoy his fame, short though it may be.

a. Is More a hero? Bolt writes (page xiii) "Why do I take as my hero a man who brings about his own death because he can't put his hand on an old black book and tell an ordinary lie? Well of course it was no ordinary lie but a significant truth statement with God as his witness. Taking an oath is meant to be quite exceptional for a person is meant to be truthful by habit and virtue. Taking an oath is a symbolic public act and so can he heroic.

Further on, he writes in the same vein: "treating Thomas More, a Christian Saint, as a hero of selfhood. . . . Far from being one of society's sore teeth, he was indecently successful" (xiv). . . teat my characters in a properly heroic, properly theatrical manner." (xvii). Clearly Bolt was consciously crafting a hero, a singular man "with a adamantine sense of his own self", a clever urbane man caught up in a superhuman context. Bolt has no doubt he brought on his own death.

A dictionary definition (Collins Australian 1992) is :1. a man distinguished by exceptional courage, nobility, fortitude, etc. 2. a man idealised for possessing superior qualities in any field. 4 the principal male character in a play, novel, etc. More is a hero by these definitions.

b. Compare 'heroes'.

Trait	Thomas a'Beckett	Thomas More	Jim Casy	Gandhi	Bolt's The Common Man	Galileo	Jesus
courageous	yes	yes	no	yes	no	yes and no	yes
sought popular appeal	no	no, just admiration or puzzlement	yes	yes	no	no	no
got public acknowledgement	no	no	no	lived to know it	no	no	no
undertook an heroic moral action or stance	yes	yes	no	yes	no	no	yes
eccentric, i.e., indifferent to what peers thought of him	no	defiant, even to those close to him	yes	yes	no	no	yes

© G. Smith 2001

It is remarkable that a hero in one age can be taken as a hero in another. Yet heroism can come posthumously.

I would hold that heroes who take a courageous stand in a crisis need to be rated differently from someone who has to live out the consequences of a long held unpopular belief and stance. The first are not accidentally heroes for they do the superhuman where we cannot but the second must endure the hardship, doubt, rejection and misunderstanding over some time which can retest their heroism.

See similar material on heroes

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Page devised by G.Smith 27/1/2001.