"A Man for All Seasons" A Play By Robert Bolt (Later Made Into The "Best Picture" Of 1966)

Alan: The following dialogue between Sir Thomas More and Will Roper is breathtakingly insightful - genius of a very high order.

Had I penned anything so luminous, I could die happy.

The closest I have come lately -- and only by virtue of content, not style -- is my probe of Perfectionism's catastrophic downside. 

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A Man for All Seasons

Play of Man and Conscience, Directed and Acted Admirably

NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED July 15, 1966

Near the end of the first act of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England is on stage with his wife Alice, his daughter Margaret, and his future son-in-law, William Roper. Just leaving is Richard Rich, later to prove the mortal enemy who by perjury sends More to his death. Rich has aroused the suspicions of all, and Alice, Margaret, and Roper urge More to arrest him because be is a bad and dangerous man. More refuses, saying that Rich has broken no law. Exasperated, More's wife bursts out:

ALICE: While you talk, he's gone!

MORE: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

ROPER: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down--and you're just the man to do it--d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes. I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Sir Howard Beale, the Australian ambassador to this country, took the late Mr. Justice Frankfurter to see Bolt's play in New York in 1962. Beale recounts that the Justice could scarcely contain his excitement during the scene just set out, and as it ended Frankfurter whispered in the dark. "That's the point, that's it, that's it!"