[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.”]

S. F. Johnson has pointed out that Bale's Kinge Johan is a protestantization of the miracle play, just as in other plays Bale had protestantized the mystery play—and that the polemical drama of John Bale represents a deliberate attack on the “popetly playes” of the medieval church and an attempt to replace that drama with a Protestant substitute.¹ It is the purpose of this paper to examine the polemical content and technique of these plays and demonstrate that Bale's overriding and constant concern was anti-Catholic polemic; that, contrary to recent criticism,² to further this sole concern he sacrificed consistency, historical accuracy, dramatic forms and traditions, save those which served him polemically, any interest in biblical dispensations or periodization of prophecy except to use them as polemical weapons—and that he had no use for historical, philosophical, or theological investigations of the nature of evil other than to demonstrate that the ultimate culmination of all evil was to be found in the Bishop and Church of Rome.

Beginning probably with the “mystery” or biblical plays The Chefe Promyses of God,³Johan Baptystes preachynge in the Wyldernesse,⁴ and The Temptacyon of Our Lorde,⁵ all three written before 1538, Bale introduced into what has been seen as a deliberate “cycle”⁶ progressively more numerous and more vehement Protestant colorations of his biblical material. Chefe Promyses sticks fairly closely to the biblical account of God's promises to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, and John the Baptist. The audience is warned not to trust in “fantasyes fayned” (sig. A2); Adam is a good Protestant who makes the point that he is justified by faith and not by works (sig. A4), echoed by Noah (sigs. B1v, B3) and Abraham (sig. C1v); image-making comes in for heavy condemnation (sigs. B3, D1), but this play is unique in Bale's extant corpus in not being blatantly propagandistic at the expense of its ostensible “plot.” Whether Bale wrote these plays in chronological sequence or not is impossible to determine, but by the time we come to Johan Baptystes Preachynge, the tone is decidedly polemical. There is greater emphasis on justification by faith alone (e.g., pp. 132, 140) and that only the Scriptures are authoritative (p. 131). The Pharisees and Sadducees of John's time have become the Catholic clergy of Bale's (p. 137), sodomites⁷ who corrupt Scripture to set up their own ceremonies and traditions for monetary gain (pp. 138, 147), who consider John a “heretic” (p. 141) and deride his doctrine as “new learning” (pp. 137, 139, 140, 142), a favorite pejorative term used by Catholics for the Reformed faith.⁸ Lest any spectator should have missed the point, Bale appears in his own person at the end of the play to say:

John was a preacher—note well what he did teach:
Not men's traditions …
To say long prayers, nor to wander in the desert …
The justice of men is but an hypocrisy …
Hear neither Francis, Benedict, nor Bruno …
Believe neither Pope, nor priest. …

(pp. 148-49)

The last play in the series, The Temptacyon of Our Lorde, abandons completely any pretense that the dramatization of the biblical material is anything other than a convenient point of departure for anti-Catholic polemics, and nothing is further from the truth than the assertion that the biblical “source is faithfully though lengthily reproduced.”⁹ Bale thoroughly perverts his source for polemical purposes, and at one point has Satan—who had been disguised as a Catholic hermit and then unfrocked (sigs. D1v-D2)—prophesy to Christ that

Thy vycar at Rome I thynke will be my frynde.

(sig. E3)

Satan's approach to the Scriptures, furthermore, is not only typically Catholic but also as extrascriptural as his prophecy concerning the Pope (sig. D3v), while he claims the allegiance of “false prestes and byshoppes” (sig. E3). Jesus, on the other hand, is a model Reformer (sig. D1), opposed by the “byshoppes” (sig. D2v), who denounces the clerical celibacy demanded by the Act of Six Articles of 1539 (sig. E1v). The play also warns of persecution to come as a result of the Act and counsels Christians patiently to suffer—“Resyst not the worlde. …”¹⁰ In view of the above, it is rather surprising to read about the three plays discussed that their “controversial elements are very subdued. … It is only when they are seen in connection with Thre Lawes that the biblical plays gain the controversial significance which, otherwise, is largely left to the imagination of the spectators.”¹¹

Into these biblical plays, then, Bale introduced Protestant colorations to make the point that the sixteenth-century Church of Rome was anti-Christian and that it was he and his coreligionists who were fulfilling the will of God. His methods were extremely simple. He anachronistically had the forces of good, such as Christ and John, preach Protestantism while attacking Catholicism and at the same time identified the forces of evil, such as Satan and the Jews, with the Church of Rome. Some of the specific techniques he used to accomplish this will be discussed later.

Even more important in A comedy concernynge thre lawes¹² (before 1538) and King Johan¹³ (ca. 1536), he transformed the morality play, which had been the specific vehicle through which the Catholic Church had inculcated doctrine, into a medium for advancing the Protestant viewpoint and denigrating the Church of Rome. Once again his technique was simple. As he had done in his biblical plays, so in his protestantization of the morality play he took advantage of a medium with ready-made good and evil characters—and it was this and only this facet of the morality that interested Bale—and merely turned the morality Vices into Catholics and the Virtues into Protestants, again by methods to be examined later. To these two essential tactics of his propaganda, he added in King Johan a dramatization of a Protestant version of history that he had inherited from the prose tracts of William Tyndale,¹⁴ which portray John as the secular antipapal hero, just as in his biblical plays he had made Christ into the spiritual leader of the crusade against Rome.

The ostensible plot of Thre Lawes consists of the corruption of the Laws of Nature, Moses, and Christ by what are anachronistically identified in all three cases as Catholic Vices—thus making Bale's favorite and constantly reiterated point that the Church of Rome has always been the servant of God's archenemy, Satan, and that it is not merely the current manifestation of evil in the world but rather the culmination of all the evil there ever was. The very structure of the play is made to serve Bale's anti-Catholic purpose, since the Law of Nature is corrupted by the unnatural acts of idolatry and sodomy, which prepares the way for the parallel corruption of the Law of Christ, with the implication that Catholicism is also unnatural. Again, the Law of Moses continually declares its own inadequacy perpetually to atone for sin through “darke ceremonyes” (sig. C6v). Moreover, even a cursory reading of the play reveals that Bale is not really interested in the tracing of God's will through the various biblical dispensations, but only in anti-Catholic polemic. Well over ninety per cent of the play consists of outrageously anachronistic fulminations against the Church of Rome.

King Johan is a combination miracle-morality-history play, whose object is to demonstrate that what Bale regards as the treasonous activities of the Catholic Church in his own time are merely the current manifestation of an ancient Catholic conspiracy against European and especially English rulers. The “tragedy” of John, as Johnson has pointed out,¹⁵ is brought about neither by Fortune nor any weakness in the hero, but rather through the machinations of the Church of Rome.¹⁶

Turning to examine some specific polemical techniques Bale employed in these plays, we find that they can be broken down into major and minor categories. The major category comprises the use of the mystery and morality play conventions, the polemical use of the morality play Vice, and the controversial use of history and the history play. Bale Protestantized the Catholic mystery play not by selecting biblical material different from that used by his Catholic predecessors but by utilizing the biblical material merely as a platform from which to launch anti-Catholic polemics. The intent of Johan Baptystes Preachynge is not to acquaint an illiterate laity with the Gospel narrative—no one was more insistent than Bale that one should search the Scriptures for oneself; it is, rather, to identify the Catholic clergy of his own day with those who killed Christ (pp. 137, 139, 140, 141, 142), who in their Mass and their claims for that ceremony perpetuate his murder and not his resurrection (p. 147), who vaingloriously seek to be justified by ceremonies and traditions with which they have burdened Christ's flock—not even motivated by a sincere belief in the correctness of their doctrine, but, hypocrites as they are, motivated by a desire for financial advantage (pp. 138, 147).

The fact that The Temptacyon scarcely deals with the biblical narrative as such might raise the question of why Bale bothered at all to tether his polemics to the Gospel account instead of dispensing with it completely and simply writing straightforward dramatic invective. To this question two answers suggest themselves. First, if the chronological order of his “cycle” is indeed the order of composition, then it would appear that Bale began his dramatic venture with relative caution, becoming increasingly polemical with each play. It would certainly have been prudent on Bale's part to be able to claim that he was doing nothing more than dramatizing biblical narrative.¹⁷ But much more important than that, Bale vehemently insisted on his anti-Catholic polemic having its roots in the Scriptures, for this permitted him to claim that in opposing Rome, he was merely denouncing what the Scriptures themselves condemned, and as has been pointed out, in The Temptacyon this great Bibliolater did not scruple to add to the text of Scripture to make that point. And so the medium of the “mystery” play served Bale actually to create a biblical narrative which was as “pliable” as the Bible created by William Tyndale.¹⁸

Bale approached the conventions of the morality play in exactly the same spirit as he had those of the mystery: those he found useful for his polemical purposes he retained; the others he discarded, for he was completely uninterested in these conventions for their own sake, just as he had absolutely no interest in founding any new dramatic genres.¹⁹

The most important convention of the morality retained by Bale is the Vice and his function. In the pre-Reformation morality, one of these functions had been to aid the Virtues in the preaching of truth, but what had been mere artlessness and lack of verisimilitude in the medieval play was transformed by Bale in his polemical moralities into a highly effective technique of controversy by having even the opposition in its candid and unguarded moments condemn itself and declare itself actually in agreement with the viewpoint of the playwright—a powerful endorsement of his position and an impugning of his opponents' honesty. Again, just as in the medieval play the identity and traditional motivelessness of the Vice—who is evil by definition and not by cause or circumstance—was naively announced by the Vice himself, so in his moralities Bale transforms the Vice's original simplicity into self-condemnatory satire, in that the Vice is made to brand himself as a Catholic through techniques to be examined later.

Bale's modification of the traditional Vice role can be seen in the fact that in his two moralities all of the evil characters are Vices. Thus in Thre Lawes, while Infidelity is the common denominator to the corruption of all three Laws, Bale himself refers to “the six vyces, or the frutes of Infydelyte” (sig. G1v). In King Johan, it is not just one character, Sedition, but also Clergy, Dissimulation, Usurped Power, Private Wealth, and Treason who fulfill the Vice function. For what Bale has done is to discard all the traditional elements of that role which did not serve his polemical purpose and retain only those which did, leaving him free to saddle any and all of his Catholic characters with Vice attributes. It should be noted that this treatment of the traditional Vice role described above is entirely typical of his general polemical technique: his constant aim is to have the best not just of both but, preferably, of a multiplicity of worlds. A good illustration of Bale's selective use of dramatic convention is his handling of the Vice's traditional disguise of his name to dupe his victim. The reason Sedition does not attempt to hide his name from John is not, as one critic has thought, that Bale wants to show that it is not by stealth but openly and insolently that Antichrist walks the earth,²⁰ but rather that the Vice's concealment of his true identity is normally part of his technique of seduction; and in King Johan there is no attempt to seduce the hero, who—also counter to morality tradition—never falls from virtue and remains perfect throughout the play.

Another aspect of the Vice's attempt to disguise his identity from his intended victim was through use of costume, and Bale avails himself of this tradition when it suits his purpose—even in nonmoralities such as The Temptacyon, where, as has been noted, Satan was masquerading in the attire of a Catholic hermit. As will be seen, Bale often uses the “disguise” of the Vice actually to reveal his true nature to the audience, but perhaps his single most brilliant use of the entire convention is his suggestion—through the Vice Sedition in King Johan—that not as pretense in a play but in actuality all Catholic clergy are Vices who disguise their malign designs on mankind under a cloak of holiness—their clerical vestments (2571-72; cf. 66).

Again Bale breaks with the tradition of the Vice—who is supposed to be an allegorical abstraction—when he identifies the Vice Sedition with Stephen Langton, the historical Archbishop of Canterbury of John's time. However confusing this may be to some critics,²¹ Bale has very clear polemical reasons for his melding of allegory and history. First, beyond the evident implications of the name itself, Bale makes sure that he has demonstrated Sedition to be a thoroughly evil character in the play before he is identified with the Archbishop, the Pope's puppet appointment to Canterbury. And second, the technique permits Bale maximum flexibility, in that his “confusion” of Langton with Sedition leaves him free to imply that certain actions he attributes to the former are historical, when in fact they never occurred.²²

Bale's use of secular and ecclesiastical history is the third major element of his polemical drama, and as might be expected, his basic attitude to the “convention” of history was the same as that to all the other conventions he inherited: he retained what he thought would be polemically useful and discarded—or changed—the rest. The best illustration of this historical selectivity is Bale's choice of material for King Johan. It was this monarch's opposition to Rome that attracted Bale—and nothing else in John's reign.²³

Bale approached English and European history with a very definite bias. Briefly stated, his theory of history—the rudiments of which he inherited from William Tyndale and which he perfected—maintained that for centuries the affairs of the European states had been conducted for the benefit of the Pope and that secular rulers were merely the puppets of papal policy, retained in power only so long as they obeyed the dictates of Rome, to be removed—as was King John of England—the moment they proved recalcitrant. Onto this secular conspiracy theory was grafted its ecclesiastical complement, namely, that the original purity of the Church of Christ—and of England—became corrupted insidiously and gradually through the machinations of Rome, which depended on Roman ritual, language, and dogma to achieve what sometimes force could not.

Clearly, Bale's most important polemical use of history in his drama was the creation of King John as the first English Protestant martyr, saint, defender of the divine right of kings, and champion of the English crown's claim to the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England. Bale's portrayal of John has puzzled at least one editor of the play, who finds that “what is not so clear is the motive or incentive that Bale had for ‘white-washing’ King John and writing him up as against the Church.”²⁴ As indicated previously, what is in fact completely clear is that the “‘white-washing’ of King John and writing him up as against the Church” is Bale's only motive at all for treating the events of John's reign, and as the first entry in a new calendar of English Protestant saints and martyrs, John had to be as perfect in all respects as were Bale's nondramatic contributions to this list, Anne Askew and Sir John Oldcastle,²⁵ or the later dramatic “creations” of Thomas Cromwell and Queen Elizabeth in Cromwell (1602) and Heywood's If You Know not Me (1605-6).²⁶ But Bale had an even more important motive in the creation of John than to demonstrate that he was a forerunner of those mentioned above and—especially—of Henry VIII, of whom he was clearly meant to be the prototype. That motive was to demonstrate the ancient nature of English Protestantism and how it was extirpated for four hundred years through the machinations of the Church of Rome.

And so we get a picture of John, who is always concerned about the welfare of his people, wishing “To reforme the lawes” and seek “trew iustyce” (21-22), who rendered justice impartially to clergy and laity alike (1280 ff.), who thinks of the welfare of “England” rather than his own (527), and who eventually makes the supreme sacrifice of resigning his office to the power of Rome for the sake of the people and the land he loves (1705-12). He is a saint, in fact, sometimes almost a Christ-figure, married to his Bride, England, as the Church is the Bride of Christ (1615). While his Catholic murderer dies “for the churche with Thomas of Canterberye,” (2132), John's final words are:

There is no malyce to the malyce of the clergye …
For doynge iustyce they have euer hated me …
I haue sore hungred and thirsted ryghteousnesse.

(2158-67)

And he is above all a Protestant saint, surely the most Bible-quoting monarch in all of English drama, an expert in the Pauline epistles (54-55), equally at home in the Old Testament (1404-7), insistent on Gospel preaching (1391), and, like Bale himself, with one sure touchstone for Church doctrine and practice:

Prove yt by scriptur, and than wyll I yt alowe.

(1435)

Bale's selectivity in dealing with the historical material available to him regarding John's reign goes far beyond ignoring neutral or negative aspects and extends to a wholesale refashioning of events and his hero's character. As Adams points out, Bale's claim that only the Catholic and “Roman” historian Polydore Vergil was responsible for John's negative reputation, and that all the other authorities he cites “attest to John's noble virtues … is at best highly misleading” (p. 27). In fact, as Adams goes on to demonstrate, the authorities Bale cites as ostensibly giving a more sympathetic—and, therefore, more correct—picture of John do no such thing, and “Bale was serving his own polemical ends in attempting to saddle him [i.e., Vergil] with the full blame for the traditional antipathy toward King John” (p. 30). Adams is entirely justified in adding that Bale's unwarranted citation of historical authorities here is “not out of keeping with his treatment of other historical authorities” (p. 29). In fact, it was one of Bale's favorite tactics in his polemical use of history.²⁷ Apart from the “creation” of the King John material, Bale's most striking polemical use of history in his plays involves his documentation of the conspiracy theory previously mentioned, namely, that the Catholic clergy have historically been a subversive element in England, and that if the Pope is momentarily unable to achieve domination of the realm by force, he will attempt to do so surreptitiously through the use of Roman rite, language, and doctrine.

As will be seen later, the oaths Bale assigned to his Catholic characters are of particular significance in themselves and merit separate treatment, but two are of special significance to his accusations of Catholic subversion, for they indirectly involve the greatest champions of the Church Bale opposed. The oaths are uttered by Infidelity in Thre Lawes, who first swears “by the blessed rode of kent” (sig. B5) and then “by the holy Nunne” (sig. D1v). These references by the Catholic Vice are clearly to Elizabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent, who was executed for treason after prophesying Henry VIII's death should he “divorce” Catherine of Aragon. But Bale is probably after a bigger catch than the unhappy Nun, namely, Thomas More and Cardinal John Fisher, the leaders of the Catholic opposition to the Reformation in England, who were executed for treason about the time Bale was writing his plays (1535). Both were implicated in the Nun's treason, and although More was eventually cleared—which Bale surely knew—he evidently could not resist the temptation to implicate the revered Catholic champion in treason even before the formal charge was made; for he accuses More of treasonous involvement with the Nun again in a later work.²⁸ To his list of prominent English Catholics who are current manifestations of the ancient Catholic conspiracy, Bale adds the name of Cardinal Pole (L, sig. F8v).

While the entire play dealing with the reign of John is meant to illustrate how Rome uses the threat of force to bring a recalcitrant monarch to his knees, even in that situation the point is made that this threat is credible only because of the hold Rome has over people through its doctrine and ceremonies. “I am Sedycyon, that with þe pope wyll hold” (90), proclaims the character who was born in Rome and who will become Steven Langton. And it is through the priestly power to forgive or retain sin that Rome shall rule England, he prophesies:

Quodcumque ligaueris I trow
wyll playe soch a parte
That I shall abyde in Englond, magry yowr harte,
Tushe, the pope ableth me to subdewe bothe kyng and keyser.

(97-99)

The Pope promises remission of sins to all “Crysten princes” who will undertake to invade England and slay John (1070-72). John's murderer is promised eternal salvation for his deed (2123-26).

Bale and other radical Reformers—especially Bale's close friend, William Turner²⁹—took the position that Henry VIII had been duped by his conservative bishops into halting the English Reformation when it had scarcely begun. They contended that Rome had lost only a battle and not the war, that through the retention of Roman custom and ritual in the Church of England, Rome retained a foothold in the realm, a beachhead from which to launch new attempts to restore the realm to Roman rule should the opportunity arise. That is the point, for instance, of Sedition's derisive question to John, who has just asserted that he intends to be master in his own household, including the English Church:

Ye are well content that bysshoppes contynew styll?
K. John. We are so in dede …
Sed. Nay, than, good inowgh.
Yowr awtoryte and
          powrr
Shall passe as they wyll …

(235-38)

So long as Roman rite and custom is retained in the Church, Rome rules:

Sed. In your parlement commaunde
yow what ye wyll,
The popes ceremonyes shall drowne the Gospell styll
          …
If your true subiectes impugne their trecheryes,
They can fatche them in anon for sacramentaryes …
Get they false wytnesses, they force not of whens they
          be …
Parauenture a thousande are in one byshoppes boke,
And agaynst a daye are readye to the hooke.

(2522-37)

In the above lines Bale is very probably making a scathing reference to the conservative provisions of the Bishops Book (1537), which “restored” the full complement of the traditional sacraments to the Church of England—as well as intending the expression as a Bishops' proscription list of Reformers. The juxtaposition of the two ideas is not unintentional. Bale cleverly portrays the radical Reformers as the true loyalists and the conservatives as crypto-Catholics when he has Sedition tell Imperial Majesty, i.e., Henry VIII:

Ye gaue iniunctyons that Gods wurde myghte be
          taught,
But who obserue them? Full manye a time haue I
          laught
To see the conneyaunce that prelates and priestes can
          fynde.
I. Maj. And whie do they
beare Gods wurde no better
          mynde?
Sed. For if that were knowne
than woulde the people
          regarde
No heade but their prynce …

(2508-13)

And by making the character Verity “a personification of Reformation doctrine,” as Adams describes him (p. 149), a servant of Henry VIII (2318 ff.) in King Johan, Bale flatters the King and perpetuates the useful fiction—from which he never departed, even after Henry's death—that Henry really favored the Reformers but was regrettably misled later by his conservative bishops.

In the minor category of Bale's specific polemical techniques have to be included his deliberate use of anachronism, ways of identifying the morality Vices as Catholics, and various techniques for condemning the opposition. Farmer's rueful comment that “Bale is not … always innocent of anachronism” (p. 309) is not only extreme understatement but also reveals a misapprehension of Bale's purpose, for the playwright's use of anachronism is so sustained and pervasive that it has to be regarded as one of his most important polemical weapons. The anachronistic elements in his mystery plays have already been mentioned. Ironically, by far the heaviest use of anachronism occurs in Thre Lawes, the play in which Bale is ostensibly treating the various dispensations of God's dealings with man. The most obvious and constant anachronistic reminder to the audience of what Bale's real subject was while the play was supposedly treating the Law of Nature and the Law of Moses is the dress of the Vices. Bale was very specific in indicating their attire (L, sig. G1v), and considering that the Laws of Nature and Moses were subverted by Vices dressed as friars, monks, bishops, and canon lawyers, it would have been very difficult for the audience to miss the point.

The play has scarcely begun when into the Garden of Eden intrudes the Catholic Vice Infidelity dressed as a friar and ready to peddle paxes and images of Catholic saints, whose specific virtues he extolls, while swearing by the yet nonexistent “masse” (sig. A6 ff.). As previously mentioned, how little Bale cares about consistency in general and biblical dispensations in particular in this play is demonstrated by the fact that one of the figures who subverts Law of Nature is the Vice Sodomy, dressed as a monk! It is fairly clear that in this instance Bale sacrifices overall consistency—not to mention verisimilitude—for the immediate polemical advantage to be gained by thus representing the opposition. And this is absolutely typical of his polemical technique: his prime objective is always and exclusively the polemical point. Bale is simply using the form of the dispensations, not to make the tautological point that evil has always existed, but specifically to show that the kind of evil that produces Catholicism has been present since the Creation. To reinforce this concept he makes certain to have identifiably Catholic figures in the Garden of Eden.

The Catholic Vice Infidelity uses necromancy—“I coniure yow both here” (sig. B2v)—to summon to his aid both Sodomy the monk, and Idolatry, dressed as “an olde wytche” (sig. G1v). The anti-Catholic point might be somewhat less obvious than is expressed by presenting a Vice dressed as a monk, but it would undoubtedly be apparent to the audience, for the charge of necromancy was a classic one made by the Reformers. One of its cleverest applications was to the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence, which was the subject of ridicule of an entire Protestant play, Jacke Jugeler.³⁰ But Catholic Eucharistic doctrine was not the only target of the Reformers' charge of necromancy; the cult of the saints was another, and this is the point of Sodomy's mock-encomium of Idolatry—all still ostensibly in the dispensation of Nature:

Mennys fortunes she can tell.
She can by sayenge her Auemarye,
And by other charmes of sorcerye,
Ease men of toth ake by and bye,
Yea, and fatche the deuyll from hell.
She can mylke the cowe and hunte the foxe,
And helpe men of the ague and poxe,
So they brynge moneye to the boxe
Whan they to her make mone.

(sig. B3)

With the true economy of the master craftsman, Bale makes four points in the satiric lines above: that Catholic saint worship is idolatry, that it is either superstitious nonsense or else involves sorcery, and that, whatever else it may intend, it makes money for the Catholic clergy, which is their prime motive for encouraging the practice. Not too modest to sing her own praise, Idolatry adds (and all this long before the birth of Christ):

Yong chyldren can I charme …
With crossynges and with kyssynges
With blasynges and with blessynges,
That spretes do them no harme …
With holye oyle and watter,
I can so cloyne and clatter
That I can at the latter
Manye suttyltees contryue.

(sig. B3v)

Examples could be multiplied, but one in particular, taken from the dispensation of the Law of Moses, makes the point perhaps better than any other. The Catholic Vice Avarice, attired as a canon lawyer, says of the Israelites:

Lete the cloysterers be brought vp euer in sylence,
Without the scriptures …
Se the laye people praye neuer but in latyne …
If they haue Englysh, let it be for aduauntage,
For pardons, for Dyrges, for offerynges and
          pylgrymage.

(sig. D3v)

Since Bale's Protestantization of the morality play consisted simply of his catholicization of the Vice, we will now examine how this process was accomplished. The simplest and visually most obvious method, that of costume, has already been discussed. In the case of the Vice's name, Bale once again turned what had been mere artlessness in the medieval morality—where each character, including the Vice, was named according to his quality and announced that name to the audience—into a polemical weapon. For instance, Sedition's announcement at the opening of King Johan,

I am Sedycyon, that with þe pope wyll hold,

(90)

establishes not only a pejorative name but also simultaneously suggests an inevitable relationship for the remainder of the play. Again, the mere fact that a character with the name of Dissimulation is singing the litany at another point in the same play brands that action as parodic, in addition to parodic elements in the litany itself (639-41). The same effect is obtained when Dissimulation offers prayer to the saints; the very name of the suppliant bears a negative implication about the efficacy of such action (648). That the pope is called Usurped Power encapsulates the entire Protestant attitude to both the spiritual and temporal claims made by the Bishop of Rome (837). Further identification is achieved by what might be called the “parentage” device, which is simply an extension of the Vice's revelation of his name. When John asks England the reason for her distressed state, England replies:

The faulte was in þe clergye
That I, a wedow, apere to yow so barelye
K. John. Why in þe
clargye …
They are thy chylderne; þou owghtest to say them
          good.
Eng. Nay, bastardes they
are, vnnatvrall …
The wyld bore of Rome …
Lyke pyggys they folow …

(58-72)

Another method Bale used to identify the Vice as a Catholic was by assigning him specifically Catholic oaths. While in the pre-Reformation morality the Vice condemned himself first by swearing at all, and second by demonstrating his allegiance to Satan by the nature of his oaths, Bale identifies the Vice as a Catholic by having him swear by the Mass. The frequent repetition of Catholic oaths in Thre Lawes (sigs. A7, C5v, C8, E1, E2, F4) and in King Johan (ll. 50, 230, 280, 633, 916, 971) serves to remind the audience of the Vices' allegiance after initially establishing it. But as we have already seen, Bale also makes a more sophisticated use of the Catholic oath than using it merely as a method of identification. The oaths involving the Nun of Kent served to remind the audience of Catholic treason in high places. The oath is associated with Catholic malice and cruelty, when as the Vices are about to burn Law of Christ as a heretic in Thre Lawes, Infidelity comments:

By the messe I laugh, to se how thys gere doth wurke;

(sig. F2)

and with murder, when John's poisoner is made to drink his own poison:

By the masse, I dye, I dye!

(2121)

Occasionally Bale uses the Catholic oath ironically, as when Sedition swears “by Iesus” (43), and, even more clearly, “Be my fayth and trowth” (47), to be followed shortly by “by þe messe, ye may beleve me!” (50).

Having established the Vices as Catholics, Bale's next task is to demonstrate that it is their Catholicism that is the specific origin of their evil. And while—as in the pre-Reformation morality—some of the condemnation of evil consists of straightforward denunciation by the good characters, most of it, and by far the most effective, takes the form of having the Catholic Vices inadvertently and unconsciously condemn themselves.

One of the forms this self-condemnation takes is the Vices' parody of Catholic ritual, through which Bale aims to make the original rite appear ludicrous while implying that the parodic substitutions represent the celebrants' true intent. Much of this type of parody in King Johan has been analyzed by Edwin Miller,³¹ but at least one important example of parody seems to have escaped his attention. At a point in the play before they have succeeded with their plot against John, the Catholic Vices, Usurped Power and Private Wealth, sing the following:

Us. P. (syng this) Super flumina Babilonis
suspendimus organa nostra.
Pr. W. (syng this) Quomodo cantabimus
canticum bonum in terra aliena?

(764-65)

The correct reading of Psalm 136:1-4 (Vulgate) is canticum Domini, for which Bale has substituted canticum bonum. The substitution seems harmless—and meaningless—until one remembers the convention associated with the morality Vice and his song. As Bernard Spivack has pointed out,³² the morality Vice typically sings a song of triumph in his perverse joy at being successful in his machinations or in anticipation of assured success. In his perverted scheme of values, his song celebrating evil becomes a “good” song. But at the point in the play where the parody appears the Vices have not yet succeeded, and their song is a song of frustration and complaint. They cannot yet sing their celebratory song in England (“in terra aliena”), because John has indeed made it a “strange land” for them by standing in the way of their malice and frustrating their evil intent. It is only when they have perfected their plan for John's downfall that they sing in gleeful anticipation of certain success (s.d. after 11. 828 and 1055), and then, finally, to celebrate that success itself:

By the messe, Pandulphus, now maye we synge
          Cantate,
And crowe Confitebor, with a ioyfull Iubilate!(33)

(1692-93)

A similar pattern is followed in Thre Lawes (sigs. C1, D5, F6v). The foregoing is yet another example of Bale's highly selective utilization of the morality play tradition.

In his anti-Catholic polemical drama, Bale used as weapons against the Roman Church the very same dramatic forms he had inherited from that source. Whereas the Catholic mystery play had taught an illiterate laity the principal stories of their faith from the Old and New Testaments, Bale protestantized the mystery play to teach his audience justification by faith alone. While the medieval play taught the glories of martyrdom and the intercessory power of the saints, Bale adapted it to create the first Protestant “saint” in King John, martyred by that same Church because he held England dearer than life and believed that there was no intercessor but Christ. And Bale took the pre-Reformation morality play, the vehicle through which the Catholic Church taught that outside of that Church there was no salvation, and turned the play around to demonstrate that that very same Church was really the Synagogue of Satan, and thereby converted the morality into the single most potent anti-Catholic weapon in the Protestant arsenal.

As this study has sought to demonstrate, Bale was completely uninterested in the internal and overall consistency of his polemics or in historical or chronological accuracy—indeed, he fashioned anachronism into a deliberate device—or in dramatic forms and traditions other than those which he found useful polemically. But he was devastatingly consistent in the pursuit of his objective in all of his plays that have survived—which was to demonstrate that the Church and Bishop of Rome were the root cause and current repository of all evil.

Notes

1. S. F. Johnson, “The Tragic Hero in Early Elizabethan Drama,” Studies in the English Renaissance Drama, ed. J. W. Bennett et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1959), pp. 157-71.

2. See Thora B. Blatt, The Plays of John Bale (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad, 1968), pp. 35 ff., 71, 83-84, 107-8, 111-12, 127; Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Oxford: Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics, no. 8, 1978), pp. 1-89; Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1976), passim; John Bale, King Johan, ed. Barry B. Adams (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1969), pp. 62-63; Robert Potter, The English Morality Play (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 97. Thora Blatt's attempts to prove that Bale was consistent in his interpretation of biblical prophecy succeed only in accomplishing the opposite of what she intends. As proof of Bale's consistency, she cites a passage from Bale's The Actes of English Votaryes, Part 2 where Bale is “explaining” a previous interpretation of the book of Revelation he now wishes to change:

   I tolde ye afore, that Sathan was tyed vp for that tyme. Not from doynge of myschefe, for that he hath wrought in all ages of the world. But he was sequestered from doynge thys greatest mischefe of all, in the Christen church. …

   (quoted in Blatt, p. 39)

   Bale's “explanation” here is the most blatant sophistry. He has changed his original absolute “was tyed vp”—after he no longer needs it—to the now convenient relative “was tyed vp. … Not from doynge of myschefe. … But … from doynge thys greatest mischefe of all. …” Furthermore, the “different application of the Apocalypse in the two works” (Blatt, p. 38) is simply another device of Bale's to further his favorite polemical strategy of “eating his cake and having it too.” In any case, Katherine Firth has established conclusively that Bale's identifications of the papacy with apocalyptic anti-Christian images do vary according to the polemical needs of the moment from one of Bale's works to another; indeed, that he is not even consistent with the same work—although this may not have been her intention. See Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 43, 51-53, 54, 55, 79.

3. The text used is that of STC 1305. Hereafter cited as CP.

4. The text used is in J. S. Farmer, ed. The Dramatic Writings of John Bale (London: Early English Drama Society, 1907). Hereafter cited as JBP.

5. The text used is that of STC 1279. Hereafter cited as T.

6. See Blatt, Plays, pp. 86-87.

7. P. 139. Contrary to Blatt's opinion, the anti-Catholic context makes it unmistakably clear that Bale is here using one of his favorite characterizations of the Roman clergy in both the literal and spiritual sense. See Blatt, Plays, p. 97.

8. An entire Protestant polemical play was written on this subject, with the ironic title New Custome. See Rainer Pineas, Tudor and Early Stuart Anti-Catholic Drama (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1972), p. 8.

9. Blatt, Plays, p. 98.

10. Sigs. C4v-D1. Blatt (pp. 97-98) thinks that in this passage Bale is rebuking Henry, in that Bale refers to the persecution as coming from “rulers.” However, as has been demonstrated elsewhere, Bale is almost certainly referring to “rulers” of the Church, i.e., the bishops. See Rainer Pineas, “John Bale's Nondramatic Works of Religious Controversy,” Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962): 220.

11. Blatt, Plays, p. 99.

12. The text used is that of STC 1291. Hereafter cited as L.

13. The text used is King Johan, ed. Adams.

14. See Rainer Pineas, “William Tyndale's Influence on John Bale's Polemical Use of History,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 53 (1962): 79-96. Leslie Fairfield contends that it is “probably taking too narrow a view” to say that Bale derived his concept of King John for his play on that monarch specifically from Tyndale (pp. 155-56). His argument is less than convincing—if for no other reason than that he does not even attempt to account for those lines in Bale's play that are merely versifications of prose lines in Tyndale's Obedience.

15. See above note 1.

16. The fact that King Johan is both a morality and a history play seems to have caused certain critics some difficulty. For instance, Boas finds it puzzling that not only is there a mingling in the play of historical and allegorical characters, but that also in some cases these two sets of characters are identical. See Frederick S. Boas, An Introduction to Tudor Drama (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1933), p. 113. This same situation leads Blatt to the conclusion that “it is evident that Bale thinks of the evil characters as being first and foremost perennial representatives of evil; their occasional appearance as historical characters in a specific situation is used by way of exemplum to lend credence to their existence on a ‘higher’ plane” (p. 112). To have missed the point here, as both Boas and Blatt have done, is to have missed the polemical purpose of Bale's play, which claims that the historical is the very personification of Sedition.

17. On the danger Bale faced, see Farmer, Dramatic Writings, p. 303.

18. See Rainer Pineas, “William Tyndale's Polemical Use of the Scriptures,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 45, no. 2 (1962): 65-78.

19. Blatt's judgment is that “Bale was not original enough to invent a wholly new type of play” (p. 127). Potter thinks he can detect in Bale's King Johan “some experimental modifications in the dynamics of morality characterization. Not all of these are entiely successful. The potential effectiveness of the play's beginning is marred by the premature (dramatically unmotivated) diatribe which colors every attack upon the Church. Such violent rhetoric is untraditional and unseemly for sympathetic representative figures like England and the King. Moreover, the traditional encounter of tempter and mutable humanity loses its effectiveness when the tempter, instead of dissembling, proclaims his viciousness for all to hear” (p. 97). For a discussion of the polemical morality, see Rainer Pineas, “The English Morality Play as a Weapon of Religious Controversy,” Studies in English Literature 2 (Spring 1962): 157-80.

20. Blatt, Plays, p. 108.

21. See Adams, King Johan, p. 165.

22. Cf. King Johan ll. 2000-4 and Adams's note to King Johan, p. 186.

23. While “John's early life, his relations with Richard, his dealings with Arthur, all afford matter for dramatic treatment,” they do not afford matter for polemical treatment, and therefore one is not justified in claiming that Pafford and Greg were too hasty in assuming that “Bale has exhausted all the suitable historical material in the play which has survived” (Adams, p. 22). See also Honor C. McCusker, John Bale, Dramatist and Antiquary (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), p. 89.

24. Farmer, Dramatic Writings, p. 320.

25. See Pineas's article cited in note 10, above.

26. See Pineas, Anti-Catholic Drama, p. 11.

27. See note 10, above, and Fairfield, John Bale, p. 114 ff.

28. See The First Examinacyon of Anne Askewe (Wesel, 1546), fols. 4v-5.

29. See Rainer Pineas, “William Turner and Reformation Politics,” Bibliothèque d'humanisme et renaissance 37 (1975): 193-200, “William Turner's Polemical Use of Ecclesiastical History and His Controversy with Stephen Gardiner,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 599-608, and “William Turner's Spirituall Physik,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 14 (1983): 387-98.

30. See Pineas, Anti-Catholic Drama, pp. 7-8.

31. See Edwin S. Miller, “The Roman Rite in Bale's King John,” PMLA 64 (1949): 802-22. Miller says that the attack on the Roman rite in King John is of three kinds: by “good” characters, by papal characters, and by parody (pp. 803-4). It would seem, however, that this analysis—which makes no distinction between sources and methods of attack—is incorrect and overlooks an important technique of controversy. For the use of the Vice and the use of parody are not two separate ways by which the Roman rite and Catholicism are being attacked in King John—or, for that matter, in other Protestant moralities. The whole force of the attack is derived from the fact that it is the papal characters themselves who are made to parody their own ritual.

32. Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 121.

33. This explication corrects the interpretation of these lines in the article on the polemical morality play (see note 19, above).