Thomas More on Film: The Historians' Verdict

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What do you get when you bring together five top historians to debate depictions of Thomas More on film and TV? History with the gloves off - our third special episode of Not Just the Tudors Lates! This time, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb takes as her starting point the life of the scholar who wrote Utopia, the Lord Chancellor who became a Roman Catholic martyr and saint.

Suzannah is joined again by Dr Joanne Paul, Jessie Childs, Alex von Tunzelmann and Professor Sarah Churchwell to compare the various film versions of Thomas More’s story, where they have got it right - and often wildly wrong.

This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit.
0:03.2	To listen to all of our episodes, add free and watch hundreds of history documentaries,
0:08.4	download the History Hit app.
0:10.8	Or go to historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.
0:15.4	And if you're an Apple listener, you can subscribe for new,
0:18.8	add free episodes within the app.
0:21.1	Erasmus described him as more pure than any snow.
0:33.6	G.K. Cheston said he may be counted the greatest Englishman.
0:37.9	Jonathan Swift called him a person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced.
0:43.6	They were all talking of Sotomous Moore, a remarkable intellectual who operated at the
0:49.0	court of Henry VIII. He was the scholar who wrote Utopia, which published in 1516,
0:55.1	describes the alternate political world of an imaginary island.
0:59.2	He rose to become Lord Chancellor of the Realm and opposed the Lutheran Reformation.
1:04.2	He is venerated by the Roman Catholic Church as a saint.
1:07.8	To some, when he refused to swear an oath to the succession in 1534,
1:12.6	with its implicit agreement to enter the its position as supreme head of the church,
1:16.8	he died a martyr.
1:34.1	And yet he is a character who polarises opinion.
1:37.8	No where is this better seen than in his depiction on film.
1:42.4	On the one hand, for example, in Robert Bolts' 1966 film A Man for All Seasons,
1:48.0	he was the man of conscience.
1:50.6	On the other, in War 4 from 2018, based on Dame Hillary Mantell's novel of the same name,
	...

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