John Bale and the Politicisation of Sacramentality

Abstract

John Bale (1495–1563) has long been granted an important place in the history of English drama. Critics have stressed how this religious polemicist and literary historian — at one stage a member of the Carmelite order, later a bishop of the Church of England — was the first dramatist to put an English king on the stage. King Johan, the play in question, has frequently been understood as introducing political concerns directly into the religious drama of medieval England. However, I would suggest that recent criticism has been overly enthusiastic in its exploration of Bale’s political stance, ignoring the way in which questions of ritual and theology inform his dramatic practice. Religion and politics are inseparable in the Henrician reformations of the 1530s: the major crises of the period — the king’s divorce and remarriage, the dispute between kingly and papal authority — represent an intermingling of ecclesiastical, theological and civic concerns. It follows that both Ivo Kamps’s contention that “Bale’s ultimate concern is not so much religious as political” (59) and David Scott Kastan’s claim that “[t]he emphasis of [King Johan] is more upon politics than theology” (269) make a distinction between fields of discourse which the play itself fails to validate.¹