JOHN BALE (1547)

Bishop, Protestant controversialist, and dramatist whose Kynge Johan is asserted to have been the first English history play.

He is notable for his part in the religious strife of the 16th century and for his antiquarian studies, including the first rudimentary history of English literature.

He was educated at a Carmelite convent in Norwich and at Cambridge. He was the prior of Carmelite convents at Maldon, Doncaster, and Ipswich at various times but became a Protestant and at some date (probably 1533) left his order, married, and became rector of Thorndon, Suffolk. Frequently attacked and once imprisioned for his religious views, he took refuge on the Continent from 1540 to 1548 and from 1553 until after the accession of Elizabeth in 1558. In 1560 he was appointed to the staff of Canterbury cathedral.

Bale´s voluminous writings are characterized by a fiercely partisan spirit, crude but vigorous satire, and frequent scurrility. His plays, only five of which survive, are thought to belong to the early 1530s. They employ the old forms of miracle and morality play as vehicles of Protestant propaganda. The most vehement is its attack on the Roman church is A Comedy concernynge thre lawes, of nature, Moses and Christ (1562). Kynge Johan identifies the personified abstractions of the morality play with real persons.

Bale wrote many other polemical works, chief among which are the Brefe Chronycle concernynge the Examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr of Christ Syr Johan Oldecastell (1544), The Actes of Englysh Votaryes (1546), the First Examinacyon (1546) and Lattre Examinacyon (1547) of Anne Askewe, and The Image of Both Churches (1548).

His most ambitious effort was three biographical catalogues of English writers. the Illustrium majoris Britanniae scriptorum (1548); the revised and much expanded Scriptorum illustrium majoris Britannie catalogus (1557-59); and the autograph notebook, first published in 1902 as Index Britanniae Scriptorum Quos Collegit J. Baleus.

Thoug marred by inaccuracy, this early literary history is invaluable to students of the medieval and early Tudor periods.