-
A Reassessment of John Bale's Rhetoric: Drama, Bibliography, and Biography
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 53, Number 2, Spring 2013
- pp. 259-275
- 10.1353/sel.2013.0012
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
This account of John Bale's rhetoric seeks to broaden appreciation of his skills as a writer by considering four works aimed at different audiences. The argument rests in part upon his versatility as a writer and his capacity to vary his style even within single works. In his long writing life, he had to develop new styles and circumstances, and his changing objectives required him to use new verbal and nonverbal methods. Besides his dramatic work that gave opportunity for flexibility in language, his ideological and polemical intentions led him to adapt models inherited from predecessors in a variety of modes.