“The Sacrilizing Sign: Religion and Magic in Bale, Greene, and the Early Shakespeare,” in The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 23, 1993, pp. 34-7.

In this excerpt, Tetzeli Von Rosador asserts that Bale's strategy in A Comedy Concerning Three Laws is self-defeating, observing that the attributes he assigns to the Catholicism he attacks—such as the use of ceremony, signs and representation—are essential elements of the Protestant play he has constructed.

[John Bale's Thre Lawes, of Nature, Moses, and Christ, Corrupted by the Sodomytes, Pharysees and Papystes.] is rigidly constructed. Each of its three middle acts presents one of the titular laws and its corruption by Infidelitas and his respective hench (wo)men. These processes are contained within Deus Pater's transcendental realm and government, as staged in Acts I and V.¹ Such a framing sets up two opposed worlds, that of the temporal and that of the transcendental, and...