In the following excerpts, Mattsson explores Bale's use of the medieval King John to further the cause of the burgeoning Protestant Reformation by dissecting King Johan into such subject areas as royal power, the church, the barons and private morality. Mattsson emphasizes Bale's manipulation of history and his use of the ancient king's story as an analogy to comment on Henry VIII's struggle with the Catholic Church.
In the following essay, McEachern focuses on Bale's use of the image of the Whore of Babylon in The Image of Both Churches as a symbol of the corruption and duplicity of the Catholic Church.
“Engendering England: The Restructuring of Allegiance in the Writings of Richard Morison and John Bale,” in Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. XX, No. 1, Winter 1996, pp. 50-77. In this excerpt, Vanhoutte explores Bale's attempts at building nationalism through engendering England as a maternal figure in King Johan. Vanhoutte claims that King Johan's “primary goal may be … to impress upon its audience that ‘the Reformation will be defeated if it is nothing mor...
In the following essay, Pineas argues that Bale was “completely uninterested in the internal and overall consistency of his polemics or in historical or chronological accuracy,” but that he was unerringly consistent in his overriding objective to “demonstrate that the Church and Bishop of Rome were the root cause and current repository of all evil.”
In this excerpt Collier examines Bale's seminal use of historical figures and events in his plays and the bridge his works created between medieval theater and modern drama.
Introduction to The Vocacyon of Johan Bale, edited by Peter Happé and John N. King, Renaissance English Text Society, 1990, pp. 9-13. In this excerpt, the authors provide an overview of The Vocacyon of Johan Bale, one of the first attempts at autobiographical narrative in English literary history, albeit covering only one year of Bale's life. The authors focus on the biblical allusions and polemical wrath of Bale's work.
“The Sacrilizing Sign: Religion and Magic in Bale, Greene, and the Early Shakespeare,” in The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 23, 1993, pp. 34-7. In this excerpt, Tetzeli Von Rosador asserts that Bale's strategy in A Comedy Concerning Three Laws is self-defeating, observing that the attributes he assigns to the Catholicism he attacks—such as the use of ceremony, signs and representation—are essential elements of the Protestant play he has constructed.
