Anyone can get sick
After More returns home from his meeting with the Chancellor, he feels himself getting sick and his wife and daughter bring him tea to drink. His daughter points out that everyone can get sick and the remark here has a double meaning. Margaret points out that everyone can succumb to illness but the term illness is also used here in a metaphorical way, to suggest an illness affecting the moral compass of a person and that illness is greed.
A person’s legacy
The reason why the Chancellor feels it is alright to accept a possible divorce between the King and the Queen is that the Queen is unable to have children; thus, the country’s future is in jeopardy. A possible child is used as a metaphor for legacy and for the future in the play.
Religion and a boat
While the water in the play represents religion in general, the boat is a metaphor used to suggest different regions and confessions. When a man has his own boat, he can go wherever he wants but when he is forced to use someone else’s boat, he has to follow certain rules. When King Henry created a new religion, he built his own boat and took control over his destiny. By creating a new religion, he was no longer forced to listen to the Catholic Church and thus he became free to do whatever he wanted.
Water
Water is an important element in the play and more than just being a simple element, it is also a metaphor. The association between water and religion is documented as far as the Biblical times, before the birth of Jesus Christ and this association is present in the play as well. Numerous characters talk about water but instead of referring to the element, they refer to it in a metaphorical sense to suggest religion.
Losing one’s shape
At one point, a character in the play talks about his wife and how her body changed in the last few months. Her body began to lose her shape and become something entirely different from what it was before. In the same context, More talks about people who renounced their faith and started believing in something else. For him, this also meant that those people were losing their shapes as well. Thus, the comparison between these two types of transformation highlights the idea that a moral change can be just as visible as a physical one.
