ALICE: While you talk, he's gone!
MORE: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law.
ROPER: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you–where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast–man's laws, not God's–and if you cut them down–and you're just the man to do it–d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes. I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
Thursday, August 15, 2019
Anniversary …
… Today is the 95th Anniversary of Playwright Robert Bolt’s Birth. – Reason.com.
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Roper's subsequent life suggests that he was not, at least after his youth, the fanatical type. He survived into Elizabeth's reign, and held the office of prothonotary through four decades and four reigns. According to R.W. Chambers's Thomas More, Margaret Roper was allowed to take the oath with the qualification "as far as it would stand with the law of God"--a qualification not allowed to More and Fisher--and I imagine that William Roper got the same grace. I don't blame him for taking it. I'm grateful he survived to write More's life. But Bolt's Roper hardly seems to match the Roper of history.
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