King Johan, Volume 10

John Bale

Huntington Library, 1969 - Drama - 211 pages

Contents

• KING JOHAN: 70
• NOTES: 148
• APPENDIX A: 197

About the author

The life of John Bale embodied the turbulent contradictions of the early Reformation. Reared from age twelve as a Carmelite friar, he converted to Protestantism as an adult and soon became one of its most ardent polemicists. Much of Bale's work consists of vituperative prose attacks on the institutional corruption of the Roman Church, a style for which he received the nickname "Billious Bale." Bale was also an energetic dramatist, whose zeal in staging Protestant propaganda earned him the sponsorship of Oliver Cromwell. While Bales's drama bears evidence of the medieval morality plays, he is remarkable for authoring the first Tudor history play, King Johan (1539), which displays the English monarch as a proto-Protestant enemy of the papacy. In his choice of topic and invention of genre, Bale anticipated the history plays of William Shakespeare. Bale's martyrology A Brief Chronicle Concerning the Examination and Death of Sir John Oldcastle (1544) may have provided the Bard with a source for his portrait of Falstaff.

Bibliographic information

• Title: King Johan, Volume 10; Huntington Library publications, San Marino Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery (Calif); King Johan, Barry B. Adams
• Author: John Bale
• Editor: Barry B. Adams
• Contributor: Barry B. Adams
• Publisher: Huntington Library, 1969
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Mar 3, 2008
• ISBN: 0608031658, 9780608031651
• Length: 211 pages
• Subjects: Drama / General