“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 Lawsis 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.]

[John Bale's Thre Lawes, of Nature, Moses, and Christ, Corrupted by the Sodomytes, Pharysees and Papystes.] is rigidly constructed. Each of its three middle acts presents one of the titular laws and its corruption by Infidelitas and his respective hench (wo)men. These processes are contained within Deus Pater's transcendental realm and government, as staged in Acts I and V.¹ Such a framing sets up two opposed worlds, that of the temporal and that of the transcendental, and poses the question how the one is to be mediated through the other. The second act, presenting Naturae Lex and its disfigurement by Infidelitas, Idololatria, and Sodomismus, can be taken paradigmatically. It foregrounds the conflict of religion and magic, never totally absent in the rest of the play, most vigorously and extensively.

Like each of the three middle acts, Act II opens with the self-introduction and self-explanation of the Law governing it. Naturae Lex presents itself exclusively verbally with statuary dignity as a ‘knowledge […] whom God in Man doth hyde’ (l. 165).² The interiorized existence of this law and its reliance on words are starkly contrasted with the presentation of Infidelitas, who enters singing his pedlar's chant of ‘Brom, brom’ (l. 176) and offering quite different wares:

I wolde have brought ye the paxe,
Or els an ymage of waxe
          If I had knowne ye heare.
I wyll my selfe so handle
That ye shall have a candle
          Whan I come hyther agayne.

(l. 184)

Naturae Lex's words are opposed to Infidelitas's material objects. But it is not only the materiality of the objects which is emphasized. The deliberate choice of specific objects, ‘the paxe’, ‘an ymage of waxe’, ‘a candle’, makes clear that they are also used as signs—signs of the holy, as understood in Catholicism and magic.

It is Idololatria, ‘decked lyke an olde wytche’ (p. 121), who embodies this identification of Catholicism and magic most clearly in Bale's play. This is an identification regularly employed throughout the sixteenth century for purposes of antipapistical satire. Underlying the satire, however, the battle of signs, which is a battle over the policing of the sacred and thus a battle for power, becomes visible. Idololatria's powers, as pictured in her programmatic speeches, range from the working of ‘wyles in battle’ (l. 446) to curing the headache (ll. 537-38), from the minutiae of daily life to the fate of states. Her means are coercively deployed, visual, tangible signs. Hence Idololatria is furnished with ‘holye oyle and watter’ (l. 442), with ‘bedes’ (l. 502), with ‘a God […] of a chyppe’ (l. 668) and ‘a purse of rellyckes, / Ragges, rotten bones, and styckes, / A taper with other tryckes’ (ll. 679-81), while each of the Laws is equipped with but one visible object, the stony tables of Moses or a book: the word made visible as scripture.

Thus a very clear-cut opposition between Catholicism, magic, and visual signs and Protestantism, religion, and the word is firmly established. This opposition is extended, in the course of the play, by that between spiritual inwardness and ritual ceremony as the third Law, Evangelium, puts it:

My church is secrete and evermore wyll be,
Adorynge the Father in sprete and in veryte.
By the worde of God thys church is ruled onlye,
And doth not consyst in outwarde ceremonye.

(l. 1351)

Hence the attack of the Vices is in no small degree directed against the status and authority of the word or even the Word, when Infidelitas makes use of the ‘Tetragrammaton’ for conjuring purposes (l. 392). The word/Word is further corrupted by the Vices' incessant swearing, their parody of prayer (ll. 699-703) and of the creed (ll. 1163-76). In Ambitio's words:

The keye of knowledge I wyll also take awaye
By wrastynge the text to the scriptures sore decaye.

(l. 1101)

To counter this attack the forces of good have dramatically very little else at their command but to insist on the purity and power of the word/Word itself. While they are thus necessarily restricted to eloquence as their only action, the Vices truly come into their own by presenting a world of sensuality, of corporeality, including breaking wind (l. 194), making love (ll. 475-86), and feasting and drinking (ll. 1767-68).

Consequently, new forces begin to rank themselves on either side of the front: rhetoric, spirituality, and inwardness oppose action, corporeality, and ceremony. The latter, being quite obviously basic components of all dramatic representation, have (not unexpectedly) provoked numerous Protestant accusations of theatricality against Catholic magic or magical Catholicism, the Mass and transubstantiation being favourite points of attack. This is one of many sixteenth-century polemics, possibly Bale's:

To the good playne people ye turne your backes
And playe manye a pratye jugling caste /
Brandon the juglare had never goodlyer knackes
Than ye have at your masse / bothe fyrste and laste.(3)

The accusation rings through the sixteenth century, culminating in Samuel Harsnett's works who not only in his Egregious Popish Impostures but also in A Discovery of the fraudulent practices of John Darrel uses the extended conceit of ‘the Pope his play house’ and the Catholic religion as ‘a pageant of Puppites’.⁴ It is, however, not unanswerable. The tables can fairly easily be turned. For the word/Word staged is also the word/Word represented and handed over to any play-acting Tom, Dick, and Harry as an

infamouse companie of common minstrelles and entrelude plaiers, who be all brothers of youre fraternitie, membres of youre corporation, and in so good credite emongest yow, that they have their charge of dispensing the worde as well as yow.⁵

Intending to stage the Word, Bale has impaled himself on the horns of a dilemma. His somewhat simplistic Protestant dramaturgy demands clear-cut binary oppositions, pitting Protestant religion against Catholic magic,⁶ inwardness against ceremony, the Word against the visual, tangible sign, presence against representation. But he evokes the (Vices') world of ceremony, visible signs, and corporeality almost exclusively through words, yet still has to embody the Word in a dramatis persona—enter Deus Pater: ‘I am Deus Pater, a substaunce invysyble’ (l. 36). Whatever the outward appearance of Deus Pater may have been, by merely entering the platform even absolute Presence, ‘substaunce invysyble’, partakes of the theatricality of all dramatic performance. With the play's first paradoxical line Bale has unwittingly deconstructed all the binary oppositions he will be setting up in the course of the play and has entered the realm of representation, in which his signs, verbal or visual, both signify and construct, both present and stage the holy.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the act structure see Klaus Sperk, Mittelalterliche Tradition und reformatorische Polemik in den Spielen John Bales (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1973), pp. 75-78.

2. All quotations from the play are taken from The Complete Plays of John Bale, ed. by Peter Happé, 2 vols (Cambridge: Brewer, 1986).

3. For a perceptive comment on the relationship between ritual, juggling, and the stage see Thora Balslev Blatt, The Plays of John Bale: A Study of Ideas, Technique and Style (Copenhagen: G.E.C. GAD, 1968), pp. 132-35 (p. 132).

4. (London, 1599), sig. A3.

5. Thomas Dorman, A Proufe of Certeyne Articles (Antwerp, 1564), p. 123.

6. So far my reading tallies with that of Ritchie D. Kendall's in his brilliant study The Drama of Dissent, pp. 101-11. But even though Kendall has much to say on Bale's ‘deepest anxieties about the potentially satanic nature of play’ (p. 109) and, earlier on, about the slippery nature of language, he underestimates both the subversive power of theatrical representation as such and the problematics of staging the holy.