A Man for All Seasons"

OMNI UM HORAR UM HOMO: "A Man For All Seasons" GERMAIN MARC'HADOUR phrase "A Man for All Seasons," made famous almost over- nightTHE by the success of Robert Bolt's 1960 play about Thomas More, and made ubiquitous by Fred Zinnemann's oscar-winning film of 1966, comes, as the playwright himself informed his public, from Robert Whittinton's Vulgaria, a school-book first printed in 152o and 1 often reissued in subsequent years. The London grammarian devotes a whole page to a bilingual encomium of More, rich in epithets which correspond to Erasmus' epistol- ary portraits of More,2 and ends his sketch with the all-inclusive: "a man for all seasons: vir omnium horarum. " He does not mention his debt to Erasmus, and he may not have had any source explicitly in mind, but scholars have been prompt to catch an echo of the preface to Moriae Encomium (first published in 1 i ), in which Erasmus applies to his London amicissimus the proverbial Latin compliment, calling him "omnium horarum hominem. " Quoting presumably from memory, Whittinton need not have put any significance in the change from homo to vir, although Erasmus was not a man to use the two words inter- changeably. And thus, says Paul Oskar Kristeller, Erasmus is the ultimate source of the modern English title of the play, through the intermedi- ary of the English and Latin passage of an obscure grammarian. Apparently the Erasmian origin of the phrase was unknown to the modern playwright and his literary advisers, and this is one of the many examples that show how the widespread ignorance of Latin and of its literature tends to conceal for most people, including those considered sophisticated and even educated, the true sources of our civilization.3 3 Instead of distributing over short sentences, like Whittinton, the various accomplishments which together constitute More's multitu- 1 Richard S. Sylvester, "The Man for All Seasons Again," HuntingtonLibrary Quar- terly, 26 (1963), 147-IS4. 2 The whole page about More is reproduced bilingually by Josephine Birchenough in Moreana, 59-6o (1978), 13S. 3 P. O. Kristeller, "Thomas More as a Renaissance Humanist," Moreana, 6S-66 (1980), IS, plus a pageful of notes on pages 21-22. [141] 142 dinous excellence, Erasmus sums up, in one elaborate sentence, the rare balance and completeness of the "wise fool" to whom he is dedi- cating his Folly: "Quanquam tu quidem, vt pro singulari quadam inge- nii tui perspicacitate longe, lateque a vulgo dissentire soles, ita pro incredibili morum suauitate facilitateque cum omnibus omnium hora- "4 rum hominem agere, et potes et gaudes. Each of these thirty-two words is carefully weighed. The omnibus placed in front of omnium is no mere superlative; it expresses a specific difference. Whereas your "man for all hours" will normally be the ideal round-the-clock companion of one person, or at most a small circle, More is capable of that polyphilia deprecated by Hesiod and others:5 the conviviality, flexibility, avail- ability that characterize the friend for all hours are so large in him that they can extend to everybody. Before we proceed, let me quote the sentence as Englished by Clarence H. Miller: "On the other hand, though your extraordinarily keen intelligence places you worlds apart from the common herd, still the incredible sweetness and gentleness of your character makes you able and willing to be a man for all seasons with all men." Miller wisely renders proverbial phrase with proverbial phrase. In a later writing, he points to the double edge of the compliment: "Quintilian (6. 3 . i i o) had said the phrase applies to someone equally at ease on serious and humorous occasions, but Erasmus also noted (and probably expected More to recognize, with a startled smile) that Sue- tonius had applied the same phrase, in an unsavory context, to two "7 drunken companions of the corrupt Tiberius. As a keen reader of Suetonius, whose account of Tiberius he found a source of precedents at more than one stage of his own life,8 More could hardly miss the 4 Opera Omnia Des. Erasmi, ASD, IV-3 (1979), 67-68. 5 "Nec ille metuit 3toÀu4>tÀ(avab Hesiodo parum laudatam. Nulli non patet ad necessitudinis foedus." (Allen, 4, 16/2). Ulrich von Hutten, to whom Erasmus is sending this portrait of More, had himself quoted Hesiod's line in his Aula Dialolqus (Paris edition of i S i9, f. 50). The rule was approved by Aristotle (Book IX of Ethics) and Lucian in his Toxaris (see f. xxx in Erasmus' version of that dialogue, Paris, i s 14 edition; Erasmi opera omnia, ASD, I, 1, 438, I I. 35-38). In no. 2537 of his Adagia,, Erasmus translates another line of Hesiod as follows: "Nec multis, ac nec nulli ditcaris amicus." (LB, 2, 856F). 6 The Praise of Folly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 2. 7 A review of Gordon Rupp's Thomas More in The Catholic Historical Review, 66 (April 1980), 305-30G. 8 Seean assessment of More's debt to Suetonius in R. S. Sylvester, ed., "The History .

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