Word: roper
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Founded 13 years ago, Encounter nurtured C. P. Snow's Two Cultures attack on the gulf between the arts and science; it introduced Nancy Mitford's delineation of what is U and non-U, and it published H. R. Trevor-Roper's celebrated massacre of Arnold Toynbee and his theory of history. Encounter also ran Katherine Anne Porter's contention that Lady Chatterley's Lover is a dull, dirty book after all, and it offered the first English translation of the pseudonymous Soviet critic Abram Tertz. Last week with its September issue, the magazine...
...ROPER: So now you'd give the Devil benefit...
...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...
Bolt's answer, as I find it in his text and the reading of it by the Summer School Repertory Theater, is two-fold. First, More believes, almost to the last, that his lawyerly skill will preserve his neck. We find him replying to Roper's fears of an adversary. "He's not the Devil, son Roper, he's a lawyer! And my case is watertight!" Faced with the possibility of a test oath. More, good lawyer that he is, wants to see the statute--"But what is the wording?...It will mean what the words...