THE AUTHOR

The turbulent career of John Bale touched upon many spheres of activity. As a cleric, polemicist, playwright and controversialist he has attracted much scholarly attention. He thus needs little introduction for students of the period. Yet some brief details of his life will illustrate the context in which our present subject, his play King Johan, came to be written.

Bale was born in Suffolk in 1495, and from the age of twelve he was educated in the Carmelite house at Norwich. By 1514 he was studying at Cambridge University, and he was to spend periods at both Louvain and Toulouse before he obtained his Bachelor's degree in 1529. Whilst at Cambridge he exhibited none of that incendiary brand of evangelism which was to mark his later career. There is no evidence to link him with the White Horse Group of avant garde scholars who met to discuss the latest religious ideas. Indeed his energies seem rather to have been channelled at this time into the strictly orthodox activity of compiling saints' lives, intercessionary prayers and an antiphon in praise of the Virgin. A promising career within his order seemed to lie before him. And indeed by 1530 he was made prior of the house at Doncaster. Yet signs of his future heterodoxy began to emerge from this point onwards.