SOURCE: “The Polemical Drama of John Bale” in Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition: Essays in Honor of S.F. Johnson, edited by W.R. Elton and William B. Long, University of Delaware Press, 1989, pp. 211-227.

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...