Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

A Man for All Seasons(Robert Bolt),.“The Hero as Rebel:Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons”by Scott Walters,University of North Carolina at AshevilleSir Thomas More, the Renaissance English writer, statesman, andphilosopher whose final years serve as the subject of Robert Bolt’s1961 drama A Man for All Seasons, has long been revered withinRoman Catholic circles as a martyr and a saint and, as such, a moralhero. However, to examine a literary character such as Bolt’s Morein terms of the hero’s journey, the first question we must address iswhether the character is, in fact, an archetypal hero at all. Bolt, a selfidentifiedagnostic, refers to the deeply religious More as a “hero ofselfhood” (xiv), a phrase that refers to the ideas of twentieth-centuryFrench existentialist philosopher Albert Camus as an exemplar of thisorientation. In fact, it is this type of existentialist hero, more than thearchetypal hero figure, that More represents in A Man for All Seasons.Joseph Campbell, whose classic book The Hero with a ThousandFaces definitively described the archetypal hero’s journey, defined theactions of a hero:A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a regionof supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered anda decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious123