Representing God and Christ in John Bale’s Biblical Plays

Even before some attempt by city guilds to have their cycle play rewritten according to the Reformist tenets, the Biblical plays John Bale wrote in the late 1530s show the new religion at work. In them the very strong legacy of the Catholic mystery plays is still evident, but the divine characters they contain appear to be very different from their contemporary cycle homonyms. This results not only from the content of what they say, but also from the structure of their speeches. The article investigates the attitude of Pater Coelestis and of Christ towards their interlocutors in God’s Promises and The Temptation of our Lord, respectively. Basic principles of pragmatics and of conversational analysis are used in order to verify the theatricality and performability of the dramatic texts