John Bale

John Bale (born Nov. 21, 1495, Cove, Suffolk, Eng.—died November 1563, Canterbury, Kent) was a 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.

Bale 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 imprisoned for his religious views, he took refuge on the European 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. His most ambitious effort was three biographical catalogs of English writers: the Illustrium majoris Britanniae scriptorum (1548; “Of Great Britain’s Illustrious Writers”); the revised and much-expanded Scriptorum illustrium majoris Britanniae catalogus (1557–59, reprinted 1977; “Catalogue of Great Britain’s Illustrious Writers”); and an autograph notebook, first published in 1902 by R.L. Poole and M. Bateson as Index Britanniae Scriptorum Quos Collegit J. Baleus (“Index of Britain’s Writers Collected by J. Bale”). Though not always accurate, this early literary history is invaluable to students of the medieval and early Tudor periods.