Sovereignty and Human Liberty in a Man for All Seasons Annmicha Blugh College

Sovereignty commands an eminent position in A Man for All Seasons (1960) composed by playwright, Robert Bolt. This play revolves around a controversy engraved in most Euro-American history, involving sovereignty (loyalty to the Crown), religious faith, personal conviction and individual responsibility. Interwoven with other dominant themes such as Reformation, Church and State, Law and Order, and Marriage, the Liberty of conscience forms the axle on which the entire play turns. In his classical masterpiece, On Liberty (1804), John Stuart Mill declares that “this, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects (Mill 2001, 15). It is for this principle that Sir Thomas More stands and tragically falls, since he declines to relinquish his core principles and by extension, his own liberty of conscience for repute, kingly honor, privilege or life.

A nascent liberty of conscience materializes with the wave of the Reformation, signifying a period of tumultuous, radical change and instigating a paradigm shift in thought and...