An English theologian and dramatist; born at Cove, Suffolk, Nov. 21, 1495; died at Canterbury, November 1563. Originally a Catholic, he became Protestant bishop of Ossory, Ireland (1552). Besides numerous controversial works, he wrote in Latin a “Catalogue of the Illustrious Writers of Great Britain” (1548–49), the first history of English literature, and a number of interludes and moralities (i.e., religious plays) in the interest of Protestantism, the most important of these being the historical drama “King John.” On account of his bad temper he was known as “Bilious Bale.” Select works, Cambridge, 1849.
King John
This early application of historical events of itself is a singular circumstance, but it is the more remarkable when we recollect that we have no drama in our language of that date in which personages connected with, and engaged in, public affairs are introduced…. Bale’s play, therefore, occupies an intermediate place between moralities and historical plays…. On this account, if on no other, “Kynge Johan” deserves the special attention of literary and poetical antiquaries.
The “Kynge Johan” is the most original of Bale’s works. It is easy however to trace this and that element in it to foreign suggestion. The famous “Satire of the Three Estates,” for instance, which became known in England soon after its performance in 1539, at the earliest, and must have dazzled many others beside Bale with its polish and wealth of language,—evidently supplied the hint of the corresponding three classes of John’s subjects. The spiritual and temporal lords and the burgesses, and the suffering John Common-weale who pleads his wrongs before them, are the principal objects in Lyndsay’s satire; with Bale they are less important, but their resemblance is unmistakable. Lyndsay wrote as a high-minded layman, Bale as before all things an ardent churchman. To Lyndsay the worst of ecclesiastical abuses was the legalised oppression of the poor; to Bale this was but an incident of the appalling “Babylonian captivity” from which the true Church, as he thought, had just broken free. Of more importance, in my view, was another influence. It appears to me clear that the “Kynge Johan” owes much of its peculiar construction to a deliberate imitation of the “Pammachius,” and that it was this imitation which finally emancipated Bale from his clumsy efforts to build a Protestant drama on the ruins of the Catholic mystery.
Its right to be regarded as the first of our historical dramas has even been denied, on the plea that it is only a didactic interlude with a historical subject. This seems a little hard, for Bale is surely entitled to the credit of seeing that the didactic interlude—that is to say, the play in the only state it had then reached—was capable of being applied to historical subjects, and so becoming the historic play in time. His object here, as in all his other literary work, was no doubt polemical—to advance the cause of the Reformation by exhibiting the patriotic objection to the power of the Pope; and his play does not exhibit much dramatic grasp. But he had already written Protestant mysteries, and evidently had a pretty clear inkling of the popularity and possibilities of the drama.
General
| Good aged Bale, that with thy hoary heares | |
| Dost yet persyste to turne the paynefull Booke, | |
| O happye man! that hast obtaynde suche yeares, | |
| And leavst not yet on papers pale to looke: | |
| Gyve over now to beate thy weryed braine, | |
| And rest thy pen that long hath laboured sore. | |
| For aged men unfyt, sure, is suche paine, | |
| And the(e) beseems to laboure now no more; | |
| But thou, I thynke, Don Platoes part will playe, | |
| With Booke in hand to have thy dyeng daye. |
Probably he was a person more learned than discreet, fitter to write than to govern, as unable to command his own passion; and biliosus Balæus passeth for his true Character.
Lying Bale.
The fashion of acting mysteries appears to have expired with this writer…. A low vein of abusive burlesque, which had more virulence than humour, seems to have been one of Bale’s talents…. Next to exposing the impostures of popery, literary history was his favorite pursuit: and his most celebrated performance is his account of the British writers. But this work, perhaps originally undertaken by Bale as a vehicle of his sentiments in religion, is not only full of misrepresentations and partialities, arising from his religious prejudices, but of general inaccuracies, proceeding from negligence or misinformation. Even those more ancient Lives which he transcribes from Leland’s commentary on the same subject, are often interpolated with false facts, and impertinently marked with a misapplied zeal for reformation. He is angry with many authors, who flourished before the thirteenth century, for being catholics.
A foul-mouth’d railer against, and bitter enemy to the papists.
Obliged to fly from England on the fall of his first patron Cromwell, he employed some part of the leisure forced on him by his exile, in the composition of several Miracle-Plays, all of which were intended for instructing the people in the errors and abuses of Popery and in the distinctive tenets of the Reformation. Their chief merit consists in their being almost entirely free from the levities which degrade other works of the kind: and they scarcely seem, now, to possess a literary excellence justifying the satisfaction they gave to their venerable author, who has carefully enumerated them in his own list of his works.
A foul-mouthed ruffian.
His industry and energy seem never to have flagged; and although much indebted to Leland for the groundwork of his bibliographical collections, yet these were enlarged and improved by his own extensive researches. He was the first also to point out the value of the early English historians, and to urge in the most strenuous language their publication.
John Bale was indeed a railer, and not a very modest or clean one. The license of his day in the matter of expression was great, but he exceeded it. He smote with the readiest and most trenchant weapons he could find, and he did not stop to consider whether they were fashioned in the correctest taste.
Occasionally, however, the dreary waste is relieved by a sparkling interval. There are two songs in “Lusty Juventus” which step out of their lifeless surroundings, and challenge comparison with the new poetry of the period. They appeal to us as things of native growth against the imports of the Italian school. They are genuinely English, and have something of the quality of the snatches of song interspersed through the mature Elizabethan drama.
Bale was a man of great theological and historical learning, and of an active mind. But he was a coarse and bitter controversialist and awakened equal bitterness amongst his opponents. None of the writers of the reformation time in England equalled Bale in acerbity. He was known as “Bilious Bale.” His controversial spirit was a hindrance to his learning, as he was led away by his prejudices into frequent misstatements. The most important work of Bale was a history of English literature, which first appeared in 1548 under the title “Illustrium Majoris Britanniæ Scriptorum Summarium in quinque centurias divisum.” It is a valuable catalogue of the writings of the authors of Great Britain chronologically arranged…. The plays of Bale are doggerel, and are totally wanting in decorum.
