Breathing

 

At the end of the play, the executioner walks onstage and pulls off his mask. It’s Everyman again. He holds his hands to his chest and says, “I’m breathing. It’s good to breathe. If you want to keep on breathing, don’t make trouble – or if you must, make the kind of trouble they expect.”

Such is the “moral”, so to speak, of A Man For All Seasons. We have watched how Sir Thomas More was humiliated, imprisoned and finally executed, becoming a martyr to his conscience and his faith. All through it, Everyman has watched each stage of the story, pointing out how Sir Thomas is making life difficult for himself, how much easier he would have things, if only he would co-operate with the people in authority over him. In the end, of course, he cannot and will not endorse what he believes is wrong, and dies for it. His reward is a place in history, of course, as well as sainthood (it has been observed more than once that Utopia is the only science fiction novel written by a canonized saint), but in life he still suffers and he still dies, and as in the play, Everyman just wants to go on breathing.

Well, that’s not quite true. There are many other things Everyman wants. But there are very few things he wants anything like as much as he wants to go on breathing. It takes something tremendous to get Everyman to put his life, or his freedom, or even, really, his convenience, at risk. Something tremendous, and then, often as not, something tremendous but stupid, tremendous but exactly the wrong thing, or at the very least something tremendous but trite.

So Henry keeps changing the rules, and Everyman wants to go on breathing, and the hard part isn’t even facing the axe: it’s facing the years of humiliation, loss of friends and hardship that come before. Those are usually enough to turn the average Thomas into an Everyman. Only a few of us manage to be something more.

 

 

https://janicefalls.wordpress.com/2019/09/12/ancient-language-by-hannah-stephenson/

 

[One of the members of the group observed, “Breathing is the first thing they ask, ‘Is she breathing?’ and it’s the last thing they ask.” Having watched breath leave the body more than once (but once, especially), I really felt that.]

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "It takes more than breath to make life."