For reasons which I have already indicated, the controversial plays of the period between 1520 and 1553 may be considered here. The first of these in chronological order is Bale's _King Johan_, about 1540-47, with later insertions in the author's hand. Its relation to Lyndsay's satire of the _Thrie Estatis_ is well known; and Professor Herford[72] has indicated its indebtedness also to the _Pammachius_ and the Protestant version of the antichrist legend. It is a dramatic satire on the abuses of the church, its riches, orders, brotherhoods, confessionals, simony, free thought, mummery (judaistic and pagan), Latin ritual, hagiolatry, and papal supremacy. Few more excellent embodiments of the Vice have been preserved than the Sedycyon of this play, who in every estate of the clergy plays a part, sometimes monk, sometimes nun, or canon, or chapter-house monk, or Sir John, or the parson, or the bishop, or the friar, or the purgatory priest and every man's wife's desire:-- "Yea, to go farder, sumtyme I am a cardynall; Yea, sumtyme a pope and than am I lord over all, Both in hevyn and erthe and also in purgatory, And do weare iij crownes whan I am in my glorye." In spite of Professor Schelling's[73] recent rejection of _King Johan_ from the list of chronicle plays, I cannot but agree with Dr. Ward that this moral is of considerable importance in the history of that species. That it uses history merely as the cloak for a religio-policical allegory, and that it does not quite succeed in drawing together the points of fact and fiction in the development of action and character,--these defects do not alter its significance as the first English play to incarnate the political spirit of its age in a form imaginatively attributed to an earlier period of native history. Although it is not a comedy, it concerns us here as a drama of critical and satirical intent. It is succeeded by plays like _Lusty Juventus_ and _Respublica_, which deal more or less with political affairs, and interest us because they enliven the controversial by the introduction of the realistic and comic, and, accordingly, in an age when polemics was politics, contribute to the improvement of comedy by shaping it more or less to a medium for the dissemination of practical ideas. Moreover, though Bale had no disciples in the attempt to construct an historical protestant drama, he may be said to have prepared the way for a protestant series of another kind. This is what Professor Herford has well called the biblical _genre_ drama; it is pedagogical and controversial, and, like the _King Johan_, its representatives, also, such as the _Darius_ and _Queen Hester_, had their precursors, and probably their models, more or less distant, in the idyllic or heroic miracle of the Dutch and German humanists.