Bolt's Sir Thomas More [in A Man for All Seasons] is an intellectual blessed with common sense and cursed with a conscience. He is witty, charming, and wise, and not especially eager to add to these the supererogatory virtue of heroism. His unshakable belief in Catholicism is coupled with an almost equal faith in the law …, which will protect his conscience provided it has the good sense of not going naked to its enemy. He is as loyal a minister to Henry as superior intelligence will permit, as good a husband and father as a man who lives most warmly with ideas can be, and surely the unworldliest man of the world. The play shows how this upright and religiously orthodox man, who cannot agree to Henry's remarriage and England's consequent divorce from the Church of Rome, is hounded into heroism. When no amount of prudence and legal...