Themes

Abstract

The historical background of A Man for All Seasons is to be found in the 1950s rather than in the sixteenth century. It was the time of the British invasion of Egypt; the Soviet invasion of Hungary; the time of the development of The Bomb in Britain, and the movement against it; the time of the heightening of the Cold War between the ‘West’ and Russia, between the ‘Free World’ and Communism. In Britain, a key word of the decade was ‘committed’, and one group of ‘committed’ writers published their ‘beliefs’ in a book, typically called Declaration (Tom Maschler (ed.) MacGibbon & Kee, 1957). Here is how one of those writers, Doris Lessing, saw the 1950s:

We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive and precarious that it is a question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us; and we are haunted, all of us, by the threat that even if some madman does not destroy us all, our children may be born deformed or mad. We are living at one of the great turning-points of history. In the last two decades man has made an advance as revolutionary as when he first got off his belly and stood upright…And because of this, the great dream and the great nightmare of centuries of human thought have taken flesh and walk beside us all, day and night. Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares, and this is no time to turn our backs on our chosen responsibilities, which is what we should be doing if we refused to share in the deep anxieties, terrors and hopes of human beings everywhere. (page 16)