Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: Textual Introduction
¶ Textual Introduction
Para1On May 14, 1594, the London Stationers’ company registered a playbook
entituled the Historye of ffryer BACON and ffryer BOUNGAYEon behalf of the printer Adam Islip. Islip’s name was subsequently struck from the Hall Book and the entrance transferred to Edward White—an agreed upon substitution, it seems, for the two stationers soon collaborated to issue The ǀ HONORABLE HISTORIE ǀ of frier Bacon and frier Bongay (Greene). A fleur-de-lis on the title page of this quarto identifies Islip as its printer; he had recently purchased the device along with his type from the senior stationer John Wolfe (Arber 2: 649, 3: 700; Hoppe 267). Copies of Q1 were sold at White’s shop under
the signe of the Gunin St Paul’s churchyard, advertised as having been
plaid by her Maiesties seruantsand
made by Robert Greene Maister of Arts.Greene’s name appears again on the book’s final leaf along with his Horatian motto,
Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci(
he who mingles profit with pleasure wins every point), leaving no question about his authorship. Four impressions of Q1 survive, none wholly intact. Those held by the British Library (C.34.c.37), Houghton Library (HOLLIS number 005653520), and the Huntington Library (HEH 30167) are cropped and missing leaves. The best-preserved copy is in the rare book collection at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (shelf-mark Phi.B.1.3.4) and serves as the basis for this Queen’s Men edition.
Para2Islip’s quarto shows few obvious signs of error. It collates signatures A to I continuously
and running titles are printed without interruption from A3v to I2r. Speech is represented
in roman type, with speech prefixes, stage directions, and Latin expressions in italic.
Catchwords are occasionally inconsistent (e.g. seedes / seeds Dr-v, Well / Warren D4r-v, If / Is Er-v), a few letters have been turned or elided, (e.g. Greene D2r line 3, E3r line 1, G2v line 27, G4r line 4, G4v line 15, H3r line 36) and Islip appears to have been working with a damaged ſſ ligature (Greene D3v, G1r, G4v). Omitted space resulted in several crowded lines (e.g. Greene D3v, E2r, F4v) and one line has inadvertently been set twice (Greene G3r). Skeltonic verse spoken by the clown Miles is rendered as prose (e.g Greene D3v), either crushed for the sake of economy or simply typeset as the compositor found
it in the manuscript. Variants unique to the Huntington Library copy indicate at least
one stoppage in presswork; these corrections were minimal however, amounting to the
righting of an inverted letter, a redistribution of space across congested lines, and the
excision of a single word, is (Greene C2v). Only rarely is substantive misreading apparent, as in Hellens cape for
Helen’s scape(Greene C3r), Scocon for
Saxon(Greene D1v), and Essex for
Sussex(Greene D3r). The relative absence of corruption suggests Islip had access to an orderly and legible manuscript.
Para3On the nature of this underlying copy, however, there is little agreement. The discernments
of past editors have tended to hinge, in particular, on the interpretation of a unique
stage direction printed in the left margin of signature G2v—
Sit down and knocke your head—a signal to the actor playing Miles to fall asleep during his nocturnal watch over the brazen head in Scene 10. W.W. Greg’s early edition for the Malone Society (1926) regards this notation as
an addition actually made in the playhouseand concludes on this basis that Q1 was typeset from a prompting manuscript that a theatrical bookkeeper used to regulate performance (Greg vi). Daniel Seltzer would later cautiously agree in his Regents edition (1963) that Q1 was
very likely printed from theatrical copy,adding the caveat that the marginal text is
not the sort of instruction which would have been any use to the prompter(Seltzer xi). Bookkeepers’ inscriptions in surviving play manuscripts tend, by contrast, to be anticipatory, serving to remind players of impending entrances or that stage properties or music were to be made ready. Seltzer’s
overall impression,nevertheless, is that
the printer did have at his disposal a copy which had been used by actors,and he proposes that
Sit down and knocke your headmay be
an example of direction in rehearsal(Seltzer xi). If this is correct, and Q1 enshrines action improvised while Friar Bacon was being prepared by the actors, then Miles’s accompanying cry—
passion a God I haue almost broke my pate!(Greene G1r)—would seem to preserve an interlinear addition as well.
Para4The claim that Q1 was set from an
actual promptbookfailed to persuade the play’s next editor, J.A. Lavin, whose New Mermaids edition (1968) argues that textual irregularities in the quarto point to a source closer to Greene’s own papers. Stage directions, for instance, occasionally fail to indicate that a character has entered. We hear nothing of the rustic Richard before he steps forward from an undifferentiated crowd of
other clownesto converse with Lacy and Margaret in Scene 3; and the Duke of Saxony is repeatedly addressed as though standing among the European dignitaries at the English court, yet is nowhere described as entering in Scene 4, Scene 8, Scene 11, and Scene 15. Lavin supposed that a bookkeeper worth his salt would have resolved such ambiguities in the practical interest of producing a coherent promptbook (Lavin xxxiii).
Para5As further evidence of authorial copy, Lavin adduces writerly references to the status,
mood, and motivations of characters in Q1’s stage directions: as the play opens, for
instance, Edward enters
male contented(Greene A2r); Miles is described as Bacon’s
poore scholer with bookes vnder his arme(Greene A4r); Margaret is several times introduced by the epithet
the fair maid of Fressingfield(Greene D3r, D3v, E1v, G2v, G3r, H3r); and in the penultimate scene the devil enters explicitly
to seeke Miles(Greene H2v). Cues for action are frequently so immediate as to be of no obvious value to a prompter:
Heere Bungay coniures and the tree appeares with the dragon shooting fire(Greene E2v);
Here he begins to breake the branches(Greene E3r);
Here the Head speakes, and a lightning flasheth forth and a hand appeares that breaketh downe the Head with a hammer(Greene G1r). In one instance, a stage direction is printed after the action it calls for; in Scene 4, after Joan and Thomas converse for eight lines, we read:
All this while Lacie whispers Margret in the eare(Greene B3r). Elsewhere, directions hint at an author disposed to prose narrative:
Enter Fryer Bacon drawing the courtaines with a white sticke, a booke in his hand, and a lampe lighted by him, and the brazen head, and Miles, with weapons by him(Greene F4v). Cumulatively, Lavin interpreted these textual features as evidence that
the printer’s copy was a transcript (probably of Greene’s fair or foul papers) in which the play had been only partly prepared for acting(Lavin xxxiii, 72 n.49).
Para6A second look lends some credence to Lavin’s theory, while suggesting further that
the transcript he envisions may have been in Greene’s own hand. We can expect a holograph
to have born Greene’s signature and motto on its final leaf, as witnessed by Q1. Moreover,
the imperative mood of the text’s marginal direction (
Sit down and knocke your head) is consistent with others attributed to Greene early in his playwriting career. For example, stage directions in Alphonsus King of Aragon (acted c. 1587, printed 1599) regularly address the players using the second-person pronoun:
After you haue sounded thrise, let Venus be let downe from the top of the Stage(Greene A3r);
sinke downe where you came vp(Greene E1v);
Make as though you were a going out(Greene E2v);
Lay hold of Fabius, and make as though you carrie him out(Greene G1v). It has been suggested the directorial impulse evident in these signals may reflect a certain unease about leaving theatrical business to the players, whom Greene later disparaged in print as mere
Puppets […] that spake from playwrights’ mouths,and
antics garnished in our colors(Melnikoff 41–43; Greene F1v).
Para7A contemporary remark about Greene’s handwriting yields another clue that support
Lavin’s reading. When the writer and scribe Henry Chettle acquired a copy of A Groats-worth of Witte in 1593, he characterized it as
ill written,adding that because
sometimes Greene’s hand was none of the bestit was necessary to transcribe his papers into more legible copy before they could be licensed and printed (Chettle A4r). As noted above, there is no indication that Q1’s compositor was ever seriously confused by his copy, from which we may infer the use of a manuscript tidier than Greene’s foul papers. This fairer transcript, if not the work of a theatrical scribe, may well then have been the product of Greene’s own study, copied out with a degree of care to ensure the manuscript submitted to the Queen’s Men was intelligible. Second thoughts and minor revisions on the part of the author during this process could account for the internal evidence noted by Lavin. It would also be an opportune moment for a dramatist inclined to regulate stage business to inscribe an additional injunction in the margin—
Sit down and knocke your head.Fair copy, as Bowers reminds us,
may be taken as less than absolutein that
few authors can resist the opportunity to revise during the course of copying, and a conscientious author after copying might make some number of further revisions involving interlineation, marginal addition, and the like(Bowers 19–20). A case in point—and a possible contemporary analogue for Q1’s copy—is the manuscript of John a Kent and John a Cumber, a neat and legible holograph that displays marginal inscriptions, passages marked for deletion, and the autograph of its author and putative scribe, Anthony Munday (Huntington Library HM500).
Para8Seltzer and Lavin’s theories of copy owe much to Greg’s influential distinction between
theatrical and authorial manuscripts (Greg 105, 112–113, 142). Seltzer reads
Sit down and knocke your headas a notation made during rehearsal and so is inclined to infer Q1’s derivation from a species of promptbook. Lavin, on the other hand, proceeds from the premise that a bookkeeper would have purged Q1’s textual irregularities when preparing a promptbook and so envisions a direct transcript of Greene’s own papers (possibly on its way to becoming a prompting instrument). Recent studies of surviving manuscript playbooks have done much to complicate dualism of this kind: marginal notations, once seen as good evidence of prompt copy, turn up in fact in manuscripts that otherwise appear authorial; and conversely the untidiness and loose ends once taken to be indicative of an author’s papers have been shown to be a feature of manuscripts also bearing prompters’ annotations (Werstine 107–199). Seltzer and Lavin, to their credit, resist reductionism, but their accounts stop short of acknowledging that multiple scenarios of transmission may have produced Q1 (see Bowers 10–12, 111–113).
Para9Bearing in mind that Friar Bacon was acted by the Queen’s Men, the most accomplished traveling company of the 1580s,
Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean have since proposed that Q1 may be based on
a script carried by the company on tour. It is noteworthy that a second Queen’s Men
play, King Leir, was entered to Islip/White at the same time as Friar Bacon, as were three other playbooks possibly from the same repertory: Peele’s David and Bathsheba and two lost plays, a
famous historye of John of Gaunteand
a pastorall plesant commedie of Robin Hood and Little John(Arber 2:649; McMillin and MacLean 101). The publisher Thomas Creede secured the right to print several Queen’s Men plays that spring as well, including A Looking Glass for London, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and The True Tragedy of Richard III (Arber 2: 645, 648–649, 654, 656; Pinciss 322). Records kept by the theatre owner Philip Henslowe give the impression of a company in transition, if not disarray. During the Easter season (April 1–8) of 1594—a month before selling these bundles of plays to the press—the Queen’s Men gave performances of both
friar baconeand
kinge leareat Henslowe’s Rose playhouse (Foakes 21). After only a week, however, their engagement was disrupted, possibly by plague. One month later, on May 8, Henslowe loaned £15 to a kinsman to purchase a
share to the Quenes players,which he says
brocke & went into the contrey to play(Foakes 7, 21). And less than a week after that, on May 14—the same day Islip and White registered their right to print Friar Bacon—Edward Alleyn and the freshly liveried Admiral’s Men began their celebrated tenure at the Rose (Foakes 21). G.M. Pinciss has speculated that Henslowe and Alleyn may have retained and sold a copy of Friar Bacon after the Queen’s Men’s departure (Pinciss 322–324). Later quartos do advertise the play as having been acted by Prince Palatine’s Servants, a Jacobean company largely made up of former Admiral’s players. However, Henslowe’s records give no indication of Friar Bacon ever being acted again at the Rose, which one might expect given its popularity; so if he or Alleyn did possess a copy of Greene’s play—and not (as is more likely) a different play altogether featuring the same character such as John of Bordeaux (Alnwick Castle MS 507)—it is likely they acquired a copy nearer the Christmas season of 1602 when Henslowe paid Thomas Middleton 5 shillings to write
a prologe & A epiloge for the playe of bacon for the corte(Foakes 207). Until then, Greene’s play arguably remained the property of the Queen’s Men. Whether the royal actors ever performed again commercially in London is not known, but its continued presence in provincial records until 1603 suggests no waning of its reputation as
the best known and most widely travelled professional company in the kingdom(McMillin and MacLean 67, 184–188).
Para10The question remains: why would the Queen’s Men sell their playbooks in 1594? Was
it to generate capital for their tour that spring? To publicize offerings they meant
to bring with them? Whatever the explanation, we may safely assume they wished to
protect their
allowedbooks, which bore licenses granted by the Master of the Revels, and therefore probably sold secondary copies. McMillin and MacLean argue that these were scripts tailored to the company as it existed during an earlier tour, and that theatrical cuts account for textual irregularities observed in Q1. Onstage traffic is often heavy in the play as we have it, they point out, with large groups of characters entering and exiting in juxtaposition. At the same time, there is a vestigial quality to certain characters—the ghostly Duke of Saxony mentioned above, for example, and the unnamed
friendof Margaret’s father who utters only a single line in a single scene (13, Sc13 Sp3). Taking these to be truncated roles, McMillan and Maclean posit a play initially grander in design but abbreviated to meet the requirements of a reduced touring cast. They demonstrate that the play’s 32 speaking roles can be performed by 14 actors doubling or tripling their parts (McMillin and MacLean 100–106, 190), which may in turn explain why even significant characters sometimes disappear whenever the stage becomes too populated. Warren and Ermsby, for instance, attend the Prince Edward throughout much of the action, yet neither appears onstage in the crowded Scene 11, presumably because those actors were needed to double as Bungay and one of the dueling country gentleman in Scene 12. Rafe and Bungay’s unusual absence from the play’s final procession (Scene 15) is likewise clarified if the Rafe-actor has just roared offstage in the role of the devil in Scene 14, and if the Bungay-actor was needed to double as either Warren or Ermsby. McMillin and MacLean reinforce their claim by showing that four other Queen’s Men plays sold to publishers in 1594 reveal a similar pattern of
disappearances.The Queen’s Men were, as they point out,
an unusually large companywhich
divided into branches as a way of spreading their influence (and increasing profits). They must have had different versions of their plays for these different circumstances(McMillin and MacLean 107–108, 112). The reorganization of personnel in 1594 likely made it necessary to prepare fresh touring scripts that could be played by the men and boys now available. Theoretically, this would have rendered any older abbreviated scripts in their possession suitable for sale. In the case of Friar Bacon, this may then have been copy upon which a unique marginal stage direction (such as we find in Q1) was inscribed as the production evolved, literally somewhere along the road.
Para11If the provenance of Q1’s manuscript source remains speculative, we may at least be
certain of the acumen shown by the publishers who acquired it. Edward White was a
thirty-year veteran of the London bookselling business, whose specialization in ballads,
religious tracts, and crime and witchcraft pamphlets shows that he catered shrewdly
to popular tastes (Kirschbaum 314–318). He was also well acquainted with Greene by 1594. According to Thomas Nashe, when
Greene’s prose writing began to garner the attention of the reading public in the
1580s,
glad was that printer that might be so blessed to pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit(Nashe E4v). White purchased more of Greene’s work than any other publisher, bringing to press Morando, the Tritameron of Love (1584, reprinted by John Wolfe in 1587), Euphues his Censure to Philautus (printed by Wolfe in 1587), Perimedes the Blacke-smith (also printed by Wolfe 1588), Philomela, The Lady Fitzwater’s Nightingale (1592), and Greene’s Orpharion (1599). In addition to his knowledge of Greene’s literary reputation, White was attuned to the emerging market for printed drama, and he appears to have networked with professional players. Several very popular plays appeared for the first time in print in White’s bookshop, including Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592, followed by seven impressions over the next two decades), Arden of Faversham (1592), Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594), and Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1594). There is reason to think, then, that White would have considered a comedy of magic and romance by Greene a desirable commodity, and if the substitution of his name for Islip’s in the register of the Stationers’ company was not merely a mundane error, it probably reflects the more experienced publisher’s deliberate pursuit of the copyright.
Para12Two other early editions of Friar Bacon were produced in the seventeenth century, both reprints. When White died c. 1612,
the play passed to an erstwhile partner Edward Allde, and in 1630 Allde’s widow Elizabeth
issued a second quarto based on Q1 (McKerrow 5–6). The title page of Q2 replaces Islip’s fleur-de-lis with the well-known woodcut
depicting the brazen head perched on a shelf of books uttering its cryptic wisdom
in speech ribbons, while below Miles plays a pipe and tabor and Bacon and Bungay fend
off sleep. Allde had previously used the block for this image when printing a prose
rendition of the same story, The Famous History of Friar Bacon (1629). Q2 describes Greene’s work as having been
lately plaid by the Prince Palatine his Seruants,but it remains unclear whether the decision to reprint the text was motivated by Jacobean and Caroline revivals onstage, or whether Allde’s recent edition of the prose Famous History stirred fresh interest in the legendary character. By 1640, the copyright had passed to Allde’s son-in-law Richard Oulton, who then sold it to Moses Bell, a printer in Christchurch Newgate Street (Arber 3:700–701, 4:507; McKerrow 6; Plomer 20). In 1655, Bell’s wife Jean (or Jane) printed a third quarto based on Q2. Q3 replicates Allde’s corrections and errors and introduces new incidental variants. Like Q2, it features the Famous History woodcut on its title page and ascribes the play to Palsgrave’s Men, an advertisement long out of date in the wake of the breakdown of Stuart theatrical patronage during the English civil wars.
¶ Date
Para13Friar Bacon was probably written between 1588 and 1591, but such evidence as there is for dating
the play is circumstantial. F.G. Fleay founded an early and influential school of
opinion by drawing attention to Prince Edward’s remark that
next Friday is Saint James’s(Sc1 Sp42) and observing that the feast of Saint James fell on a Friday in the year 1589. Fleay surmised that Greene used an almanac to synchronize the play with the calendar of saints and dates the play accordingly to July of 1589 (Fleay 264–265). Notwithstanding the cleverness of this solution, there is reason to doubt its veracity. What would account for the scrupulousness of such a reference when the text of Q1 makes no other pretenses to temporal specificity? In fact, the opposite is true: Greene’s pseudo-historical romance unfolds in a realm largely beyond historical time and space, and the reference to the feast day serves in this case simply to evoke a festive summer atmosphere for the play’s idealized countryside scenes. Cum hoc ergo prompter hoc—one suspects Greene was not as meticulous as Fleay imagines.
Para14Other commentators have read the play’s jingoistic tone as evidence that it was composed
during the celebratory fervor that followed the destruction of the Spanish Armada
in July 1588 (Seltzer ix). Patriotic enthusiasm can be felt, for instance, when Bacon’s expels Vandermast
from Oxford and during the glorification of Queen Elizabeth as
Diana’s rosein the final scene; such moments do appear consistent with an allayment of Protestant fear of the threat of foreign invasion. But again, skepticism is warranted. Bacon’s desire to
compass England with a wall of brass(Sc2 Sp9) may have spoken more profoundly to audiences prior to the launch of the Armada. How one reads the magician’s
deep prescienceof a national peace on the horizon is also relevant: from his medieval vantage point, Bacon’s prophetic final speech invokes the future reign of Elizabeth as an era when
stormy threats of war shall cease / the horse shall stamp as careless of the pike,and
drums shall be turned to timbrels of delight(Sc15 Sp9). It is a rather devious prognostication in that it may refer with proleptic irony to a post-Armada moment in which Greene’s audiences were enjoying a brief respite from their ongoing wars of religion; but if so, it is curious that the speech features no references to water, wind, or waves such as appear in other celebratory verses occasioned by the victory (Wilson 289–302; and compare especially with the address to Elizabeth that concludes the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedy of Richard III). On the other hand, it may also be read as a promiseof that future, a speech act assuring providential protection to playgoers still surrounded by the
stormy threats of warwhose situation remained dangerously uncertain. Such encouragement would have been within the Queen’s Men’s purview as they broadcast their message of nationalistic Protestantism along provincial touring circuits in the later 1580s. Does Bacon’s prophecy express genuine confidence arising from recent victory? Or does it voice the hope of a culture still gripped by a siege mentality? It is a crux that prevents us from anchoring the play with any certainty to the late summer and autumn of 1588.
Para15We are on no firmer ground when trying to date the play in relation to contemporary
plays. Editors once considered it an
inference equivalent to moral certaintythat Greene wrote Friar Bacon in response to Marlowe’s necromantic spectacle Doctor Faustus (Churton Collins 2–3). Yet the occasion of Faustus’s composition is itself an unsettled matter, with dates of 1588 and 1592 conventionally proposed. This leaves Friar Bacon effectively unmoored regardless of whether Greene sought to capitalize on Marlowe’s success (Ward xxi-xxvi; Greg, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus 7–10; Assarsson-Rizzi 14–15). And even the question of who inspired whom has deepened. No one would deny that echoes exist between Friar Bacon and Doctor Faustus, but imitation and pastiche were commonplace in the repertory theatre of the 1580s and 1590s; playwrights and players vigorously recycled plots, character types, and visual motifs to keep pace with audience demand. Claims for originality become hard to prove in this context, and often express only modern aesthetic preference. The effort to date Friar Bacon in relation to Fair Em, the Miller’s Daughter of Manchester (printed 1591) is a case in point. Both plays involve men of nobility who pursue the same woman: the triangular love intrigue between William the Conqueror, Lubeck, and Mariana in Fair Em bears more than passing resemblance to the dynamic between Prince Edward, Lacy, and Margaret. The women sought after are similar, too, emerging from humble circumstances and revealing, in respective ways, hidden qualities of inherent nobility. Because Greene happens to have ridiculed an unidentified writer for
underhand brokeryin a pamphlet printed the same year as Fair Em (Greene A4v), some assume that the plagiarist must have been the
inferioranonymous writer of Fair Em, and on this basis date Friar Bacon to 1591 (Ward cxlvii-cxlviii; Churton Collins 4). But, of course, even if it could be proven that Fair Em was modeled on Friar Bacon and was newly acted the year it was printed, this would do nothing to fix the date of Greene’s play, which, given the nature of repertory theatre, may by then already have been onstage for months or even years. Further complicating the claim of influence is the fact that neither play was exhibiting originality in staging erotic triangles: the motif had already appeared prominently in Greene’s prose work Ciceronis Amor (printed 1589) and was a staple of stage romances throughout the 1580s and 1590s, featured in plays as diverse as John Lyly’s Campaspe, Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI, and the anonymously-authored A Knack to Know a Knave (Dean 41–42; Hieatt 183–187).
Para16The Famous History of Friar Bacon, widely held to be Friar Bacon’s primary source, is no more reliable a recourse for dating the play. Characters
and action common to both the prose work and the play indicate a definite relationship
between the texts, but the only extant editions of The Famous History regrettably post-date the play by several decades. After being entered the Stationers’
Register on January 12, 1624, the earliest surviving editions of the chapbook were
printed in 1627 and 1629, and so it is generally held that Greene must have encountered
the work in a sixteenth-century manuscript since lost (Arber 4:110; Seltzer xii; Lavin xiv; Assarsson-Rizzzi 24–28). Although the Caroline chapbook offers an idea of what Greene’s putative source
may have looked like, the loss of its source manuscript(s) prevents us from determining
how extensively the prose texts that survive may have been altered by accretion or
revision during the decades separating the 1580s and 1620s. In a most elaborate study
of this dilemma, John Henry Jones has argued that a glimpse of Greene’s lost Elizabethan
source remains available to us in a rare edition of The Famous Historie printed c. 1715 by Thomas Norris (British Library, catalogue mark 1077.g.32). The
Norris text contains a few details not found in any extant Caroline edition, some
of which accord closely with Greene’s play (e.g. Bacon’s explicit association with
Brasenose, Hercules’s wearing of a lion’s skin). Jones interprets this to mean that
Greene’s sixteenth-century source was preserved in more or less uncontaminated form
by a line of manuscript transmission distinct from the extant Caroline editions printed
as books (Jones 54–72). From this premise, he then argues that a topical allusion exclusive to the Norris
text allows us to date Greene’s Friar Bacon quite precisely. All extant versions of The Famous History contain an episode in which Bacon humiliates an antagonist by magically summoning
his disreputable sexual partner, a kitchen maid carrying a basting ladle. Norris’s
edition is unique in describing this woman as having recently been
busy about dressing the dinner at Sir William Belton’s, a hundred mile distant.Jones contends that this phrase can only have been meaningful to readers in the spring of 1590 when one Sir William Fleetwood, the Recorder of London—the alleged satiric target of the passage—played a role in sequestering a large store of illicit meat during Lent. Fleetwood’s reputation for eloquence, Jones claims, is the basis of a pun on bel tone (Belton) and the allusion to
Sir William Belton’sshould be read as a coded reference to Newgate Prison, where the confiscated meat was conveyed to feed prisoners rather than be allowed to spoil. Furthermore, Jones argues that Greene intended to satirize Fleetwood again when composing the second scene of Friar Bacon, in which the Hostess and her shoulder of mutton are conjured to humiliate Burden. Only in changing the meat’s origin from
Sir William Belton’sto the
Bell at Henley,we are told, the playwright was
playing safe,deviating from the bel tone pun in his source to avoid being sniffed out by the canny Fleetwood, who
would not have missed the allusion(Jones 65). Jones insists the link between
Sir William Beltonand Fleetwood’s
bel toneis
very secureand that Friar Bacon must have been written shortly after the Lenten controversy of March 1590. While obviously a deeply resourceful argument, it seems far from probative. Apart from a Latin elegy that likens Fleetwood to Pericles, no evidence is cited to show that Fleetwood’s bel tone was ever so widely acknowledged that audiences could make the linguistic leap necessary to identify him as
Beltonor, for that matter, bring him to mind using an even more oblique allusion to the
Bell at Henley.The less convoluted explanation—that
Sir William Beltonwas a person known to the public when Norris’s eighteenth-century text was printed—is simply dismissed by Jones without explanation as indefensible (Jones 62). Yet as Richard Levin has shown, the content of The Famous History underwent demonstrable changes over time. An edition issued in 1683, for example, incorporates the names Margaret, Lacy, and Prince Edward from Greene’s play while adding to the text incidents drawn from John of Bordeaux (
Friar Bacon […] and the 1683 Editionpassim). Any variations in post-Caroline editions of the chapbook—regardless of whether they seem to inform Greene’ play—stand a good chance, in fact, of being later interpolations and cannot safely be assumed to derive from a separate line of manuscripts tracing back to Greene’s era.
Para17An earlier, and arguably more reliable, terminus ad quem for composition may be established by beginning instead with a premise from theatre
history. Assuming Greene did not intend to sell Friar Bacon to more than one company (as he allegedly did Orlando Furioso), we can expect him to have had specific actors in mind as he drafted his script.
There are two prominent comic roles in Friar Bacon—those of Miles and Rafe—which is consistent with what we find elsewhere in the Queen’s
Men’s repertory (for example, Derrick and John Cobbler in The Famous Victories of Henry V). Several actors in the company were known for their comic talent, including John
Adams (fl. 1576–1588), Robert Wilson (d. 1600), and John Singer (d. 1609). But unquestionably
the player most lauded for moving audiences to laughter was Richard Tarlton (d. 1588).
A playwright hired during Tarlton’s tenure with the company would need to furnish
the actor with a suitable part, and as Richard Levin has shown, there are intriguing
resemblances between the crab-faced, mustachioed image of Miles in the woodcut adorning
The Famous History (1629) and Q2 Friar Bacon (1630) and depictions of Tarlton such as appear in John Scottowe’s Alphabet Book (British Library Harleian MS 3885, f. 19: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=21899). The Famous History’s woodcut likely does not purport to represent an actual moment of performance in
a theatrical space. At least one discrepancy stands out immediately: only in the chapbook
does Miles play a tabor and pipe, dance, and sing while watching over the brazen head
(C1v-C3); Greene’s character, by contrast, stuffs his arms with a
brown bill,pistols, and other weapons (Sc10 Sp6, Sc10 Sp12). Acknowledging this, Levin proposes more specifically that both the Caroline chapbook and its woodcut may have been
Tarltonized—which is to say, conceived or revised in such a way as to call to mind the stage persona of the clown, whose signature extemporizing, witty versification, and musicianship remained famous years after his death. The woodcut might be evidence, then, of an affinity in the popular imagination between the character of Miles and the enduringly popular actor, a creative misremembering, years after the fact, of Tarlton’s participation in the play (Levin 85–89).
Para18There are further hints that Greene may have tailored the part to Tarlton. One of
the performer’s hallmarks was his ability to make a memorable entrance, thrusting
an outlandish face through a curtain, for instance, to announce his presence to the
audience. Over the course of Friar Bacon, Miles enters three times overburdened with stage properties (books, dishes, weapons),
enabling the actor in each case to generate excited laughter by threatening to let
them fall farcically to the floor (2, 8, Sc6 Sp28). His inept juggling of weapons in Scene 10 would have been especially rich with comic irony for audiences aware that Tarlton
had been made a Master of Fence in 1587 and possessed great skill with a blade. Peter
Cockett has drawn attention to a similar moment that potentially connects the player
to the role. Before exiting on the back of the devil in Scene 14, Miles expresses a sardonic desire to work as a tapster in the dry heat of hell (Sc14 Sp8). For those familiar with the clown’s public ethos, the moment may have resonated
self-reflexively again as Tarlton belonged to the Vintner’s Company and was owner
of both the Saba Tavern on Gracechurch Street and an ordinary on Paternoster Row (Cockett).
Para19Co-sanguinity between dramatist and player might furthermore be suggested by scoffs
on the part of Gabriel Harvey, one of Greene’s antagonists in print. Harvey sneered
at what he took to be the dramatist’s
fond disguising of a Master of Art with a ruffianly hair, unseemly apparel, and more unseemly company,and he leveled particular scorn at Greene’s
vainglorious and thrasonical braving, his piperly extemporizing and Tarletonizing(Harvey B2r). The playwright certainly had ample opportunity to observe and later socialize with the iconic actor. Tarlton visited Greene’s native Norwich as a member of Sussex’s Men in 1574, shortly before the sixteen-year old was to leave for Cambridge (REED: Norwich 57, 375). The actor also toured extensively with the Queen’s Men in the vicinity of both universities during Greene’s student years (REED: Norwich 65–76, 84; REED: Cambridge 1:311, 313, 319; REED: Oxford 1:203). Greene had ventured into the London theatre world by 1587, writing Alphonsus, King of Aragon (possibly for the Queen’s Men) at a time when Tarlton’s company was performing at city inn-yards like the Bull in Bishopsgate Street and the Bell Savage near Ludgate (Kathman 68–75). Taken together, circumstantial evidence of this kind lends weight to the hypothesis that Greene intended to give scope to Tarlton’s comic ability when writing Friar Bacon—and if so, he had to have done so before September 3, 1588 when the popular clown was buried in the parish of St Leonard’s Shoreditch.
¶ Sources
Para20It is generally agreed that the play’s primary textual source is the peculiar hybrid
of pseudo-biography, romance, and jestbook material known as The Famous History of Friar Bacon. As mentioned above, the earliest surviving editions of this prose work date to the
1620s, and Greene is commonly thought to have been familiar with an earlier manuscript
of the text that has since been lost. Of The Famous History’s seventeen prose episodes, five closely resemble scenes in Greene’s play:
The points of similarity and difference between chapbook and play have been well documented
(Assarsson-Rizzi 24–43). Less attention has been given to the question of why Greene may have gravitated
toward this material in the first place. The commercial viability of plays dealing
with necromancy, romance, and chronicle history is one straightforward answer; another
may have to do with Greene’s intensive academic experience while in residence at Cambridge
and Oxford between 1575 and 1588. During this scholastic period, he would refine the
extensive cultural knowledge that informs Friar Bacon’s wide-ranging allusions, be they classical (e.g. to Aesop’s Fables, Ovid’s Metamorphoses), scriptural (Psalm 133), historical (Holinshed’s Chronicles), esoteric (the Corpus Hermeticum), or vernacular (Barclay’s translation of The Ship of Fools, Skelton’s Ware the Hawk). Considering his intellectual background, it is difficult to imagine Greene approaching
any text, even The Famous History, as a mere stockpile of ready-made incidents for theatrical adaptation. On the contrary,
his deliberate arrangement and amplification of selected episodes from the source
text—the brazen head, the showdown with Vandermast, the telescopic glass, the romantic
medieval setting—suggests an expectation that they would resonate in specific ways
among commercial theatre audiences while also befitting the ideological agenda of
the company that acted the play, the Queen’s Men.
the failed attempt to engineer a brazen head and encircle England with a wall of brass
(B4v-C4v)
the contest of magic between Bacon, Bungay, and Vandermast (D1v-D2v)
Bacon’s disruption of a marriage spied through a magical glass (F1r-F3v)
use of the magical glass to spy on feuding country gentlemen, prompting a fatal duel
between their sons (G1v-G3v)
Bacon’s renunciation of magic (G2v-G3v)
¶ The Brazen Head
Para21The fifth episode of The Famous History (
How Friar Bacon made a brazen head to speak […]) concerns England’s vulnerability to foreign incursion and Bacon’s desire to fortify the nation with his magical power. With the help of Friar Bungay,
a great scholar and magician (but not to be compared to Friar Bacon),Bacon fashions a head of brass, convinced that
if he could make this head to speak (and hear it when it speaks) then might he be able to wall all England about with brass.A devil shows the friars the alchemical secret for animating the head, and after weeks of strenuous work they finally retire to rest, leaving Bacon’s servant Miles—said to be jovial but
none of the wisest(The Famous History of Friar Bacon B1v)—to wake them if the head should speak. Under Miles’s watch the brazen head speaks seven words—
Time is. Time was. Time is past.There is
a terrible noiseand
strange flashes of fireand in a cloud of smoke the head suddenly smashes to the floor. Recognizing his missed opportunity, Bacon is despondent and strikes Miles mute with a spell:
Thus that great work of the learned friars was overthrown (to their great griefs) by this simple fellow(The Famous History of Friar Bacon B4v-C3v).
Para22Stories of oracular statues date back to antiquity (Lagrandeur 408–410) and an inquisitive, eclectic reader like Greene stood to encounter brazen heads
in occult texts such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (first printed 1533 and widely dispersed in manuscript), in popular romances such
as The Life of Virgilius and Orson and Valentine, and in technical works like William Bourne’s Inventions or Devices Very Necessary for all Generals and Captains or Leaders of Men (c. 1578, printed 1590). Greene’s first play Alphonsus (1587) notably features a brass idol in the shape of a head that speaks prophetically
and spits fire, pointing perhaps to an abiding interest in the motif. Oxford, where
the playwright earned his second M.A. degree by incorporation in July 1588, may have
provided the first stimulus. There, at Brasenose College, a series of bulbous-nosed
heads of brass carved into the hall and gate have been linked with local legends that
connect a magical head with the celebrated Oxford alumnus Roger Bacon (LaGrandeur 48–50).
Para23The historical Roger Bacon (c. 1214-c.1296) was an accomplished medieval logician,
mathematician and theologian who eagerly probed the intellectual and natural boundaries
of his time. It was precisely this erudite adventurousness that eventually wrapped
him in colorful necromantic legend. His Oxonian contemporary Robert Grosseteste, Bishop
of Lincoln (d. 1253) is similarly remembered for having forged a
head of brass […] for to tell / Of such things as befell.Grosseteste is said to have labored seven years on the project, but then
for lachness sloth / Of half a minute of an hour […] He lost all that he had do(Gower L4r). Another thirteenth-century brazen head (and indeed a whole body) was ascribed to Albertus Magnus of Cologne, the fate of which, as in Greene’s play, was to be smashed to pieces by a hammer (Molland 450). Notably, each of these legends are rooted in the aspiration for what Magnus would term
experimental knowledge(Thorndike 290). The birth of natural philosophy (what we would now call scientific study) required that nature be investigated directly and empirically. In the thirteenth century, however, the epistemological line demarcating the natural sciences from occult philosophy remained faint. Consequently, despite taking pains to deny that he could summon and control spirits, the historical Bacon inspired deep religious ambivalence for his experiments in alchemy, mathematics, and optics—not to mention his speculations about automated chariots, flying machines, and other wondrous contrivances (Bacon 521–551). Such practices were fertile ground for suspicions of sorcery and demonism to grow (Thorndike 476–479; Power 658–664).
Para24By the mid-sixteenth century, an increasing number of scholars began to recognize
Bacon’s endeavors for what they were, including the physician and mathematician Robert
Record who wrote:
it shall be plainly perceived that many things seem impossible to be done which by art may very well be wrought. And when they be wrought, and the reason thereof not understood, then say the vulgar people, that those things are done by necromancy. And hereof came it that Friar Bacon was accounted so great a necromancer, which never used that art (by any conjecture that I can find) but was in geometry and other mathematical sciences so expert that he could do by them such things as were wonderful in the sight of most people. (Record tiiiv)Even so, the popular Tudor image of Bacon remained that of a praestigiator ac magus necromanticus—conjurer, magician, and necromancer. Manuscript books of spells (grimoires) with titles such as De necromanticis imaginibus (
Of Magical Images), Practica magiae (
Practical Magic), and De occultis operibus naturae (
The Secret Works of Nature) circulated under his name, written by authors eager to capitalize on his notoriety (Bale f. 114v-115r; Coxe B1v). One book of magic preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library (MS V.b.26) shows that by the 1580s, Bacon’s very name had become a word by which spirits might be conjured (see the Supplementary Materials). The myth of Bacon as a harnesser of preternatural forces became so engrained in cultural memory that as late the mid-seventeenth century Sir Thomas Browne could report that
Every ear is filled with the story of Friar Bacon that made a brazen head to speak(Browne 323).
Para25It is intriguing that the failure of the brazen head project and the disappointment Bacon experiences as a result seems
most to have captured Greene’s imagination. Noticeably, the playwright shifts the
head’s animation and destruction from its early position in The Famous History (episode 5) to a late, critical juncture in the play (Scene 10); and where the chapbook apportions blame for the failed magical endeavor explicitly
to Miles—
Thus that great work of the learned friars was overthrown (to their great griefs) by this simple fellow—Greene opts instead to emphasize Bacon’s own culpability. The stage friar knows precisely which night the head will utter its
strange doubts and aphorisms(Sc2 Sp9) but his fatigue prevents him from bearing witness. Reassigning responsibility in this way allows Greene to underscore the human limitations to which his more complex and hubristic character is ultimately subject. Furthermore, by shifting the episode nearer to the turning point in which Bacon’s use of the magic glass provokes tragic violence (Scene 12), Greene tightens the causal relationship between necromancy, discontent, and spiritual peril. Agrippa may have provided a model for him in this respect; having achieved notoriety for De Occulta Philosophia, the famous scholar later published a pointed retraction:
I being also a young man wrote of magical matters three books in a sufficient large volume, which I have entitled Of Hidden Philosophy, in which books whatsoever was then done amiss thorough curious youth, now being more advised I will that it be recanted with this retraction; for I have in times past consumed very much time and substance in these vanities. At the length I got this profit thereby, that I know by what means I should discourage and dissuade others from this destruction. For all they that presume to divine and prophesy not in the truth, not in the virtue of God, but in the illusion of devils, according to the operation of wicked sprites, and exercising deceits of idolatry, and showing illusions and vain visions, the which suddenly ceasing they vaunt that they can make miracles by magical vanities, exorcisms, enchantments, drinks of love, agogimes, and other devilish works, all these with Jamnes and Mambres and Simon Magus shall be condemned to the pains of everlasting fire. (Agrippa 63)Not by accident perhaps, this sequence in which magic is at first alluring and promising but results ultimately in disappointment and the need for repentance is strikingly parallel to the reported experience of many Elizabethan scholars. During Greene’s years at Cambridge and Oxford, students and masters alike were enticed by questions at the heart of occult subjects such as the predictive power of astrology, alchemy, and catoptromancy (divination by glassy surfaces). Magical pursuits and their tenets were not officially sanctioned, but neither were they entirely disentangled from the disciplinary practices gradually evolving into modern sciences. Henry Briggs (1561–1630), for instance, was a distinguished mathematician who matriculated at Cambridge in 1577, two years after Greene. During his student years, he is said to have
thought it a fine thing to be of God’s counseland
to foreknow secrets,and he
resolved to have that knowledge what labor soever it cost him.Much like Bacon, however, Briggs reportedly
found his expectation frustrate:
when he had tired his body and wits in vain, he was much dejected with the frustration of his expectation. At last he repaired to a man in Cambridge famous for this art, and a practitioner in prognostications by it; to him he made his moan what pains he had taken to be an expert astrologer, and how the uncertainty of the rules in that art did now defeat his hopes. The astrologer’s reply was that the rules of that art were uncertain indeed, neither was there any cure for it: whereupon Mr. Brigs relinquished that study. (Geree 14–15)Another of Greene’s fellow students at Cambridge, the Puritan William Perkins (1558–1602), is said to have been
much addicted to the study of natural magic, digging so deep in nature’s mine to know the hidden causes and sacred qualities of things that some conceive that he bordered on hell itself in his curiosity […] the blackness did not affright him but name of art lured him to admit himself as student thereof(Fuller 432). Perkins wrote penitently in 1585:
I have long studied this art, and was never quiet until I had seen all the secrets of the same: but at the length, it pleased God to lay before me, the profaneness of it, nay, I dare boldly say, idolatry, although it be covered with fair and golden shows(Perkins B1r). Among the most respected scholars during Greene’s time at Oxford was Thomas Allen (1540–1632), a mathematician and bibliophile whom contemporaries described as
a second Roger Bacon.There were whispers that Allen had conjured spirits on behalf of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and his personal library contained the works of Grosseteste, Bacon, and more arcane treatises on occult philosophy (Feingold 84–85; Watson 291). Allen’s library was open to the academic community and may well be where Greene encountered many of the hermetic concepts he would later weave into Friar Bacon, most explicitly during Bungay’s showdown with the contending magician Vandermast.
¶ The Contest with Vandermast
Para26The seventh episode of The Famous History (
How Friar Bacon overcame the German conjurer Vandermast and made a spirit of his own carry him into Germany) tells of a formidable sorcerer who is called upon to entertain an English court in a recently conquered French town. When Vandermast promises to conjure spectacles never before seen by human eyes, the king summons two English champions, Bacon and Bungay, to match him in the
art of magic.Vandermast first conjures the spirit of Pompey the Great but is trumped when Bacon raises Julius Caesar to reenact the battle of Pharsalia. To prove his own skill, Bungay then conjures
the Hysperian Tree, which did bear golden apples […] and a waking dragon that lay under the treeonly to watch helplessly as Vandermast calls upon Hercules to subdue the dragon and plunder the tree. The episode concludes when Bacon steps forward to reassert English dominance:
he bid Hercules carry Vandermast home into Germanyand
the devil obeyed him and took Vandermast on his back, and went away with him in all their sights(The Famous History of Friar Bacon D1v-D2v). Commentators have traced the genealogy of the magical contest to ancient narratives in scripture and romance (Ward xxvii; Levin 201–207). It has also been observed that by ignoring the initial conjuration of Pompey and Caesar, Greene’s play places greater emphasis on Bacon’s final show of superior power, sacrificing a moment of spectacle to heighten the dramatic impact: just when it seems Vandermast has vanquished Bungay, the English champion Bacon arrives to seize a patriotic victory from the jaws of defeat (Assarsson-Rizzi 31–32).
Para27To this we may add that onto the magical contest Greene conspicuously maps the structure
of sixteenth-century academic disputatio. Relocating the action from France to the
academic stateof Oxford, the play reimagines the first phase of the contest between Bungay and Vandermast as a logical
disputeon the
the doubtful questionof
whether the spirits of pyromancy / or geomancy be most predominant in magic(Sc8 Sp8). Educated playgoers would recognize this as a formal disputation on a set topic (or questione), a practice at the heart of the university curriculum. Such debates were a species of drama in their own right, their verbal thrusts and parries appealing both to elite and public audiences (Shuger 313–320; Rodda 7–67). The occult terms that Bungay and Vandermast bandy about pretentiously do not appear in The Famous History; and while obscure now to a modern reader, there is reason to think they were less so to Elizabethan audiences. Between 1586 and 1594, convocation scholars at Oxford debated topics no less fanciful, inspired by questiones such as
an ulla sit vis incantationis?(
whether there may be power in magical incantations),
an divinatio astrologica sit probanda(
whether divination by astrology may be approved), and
an chymicus sit philosophus(
whether an alchemist may be considered a philosopher), the latter seemingly concerned with the transmutation of metals by the putative power of the philosopher’s stone (Clarke 171–173). Academic argumentation could often be cautiously conservative, though as Mordechai Feingold notes,
some freedom for divergence was allowed and the respondents were not categorically ordered to refute the tenets of the occult sciences(Feingold 78–79). Perhaps the most controversial of these debates occurred at Oxford in 1583 when the infamous Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno defended heliocentrism and hermetic philosophy before a crowd of English doctors,
stripping up his sleeves like some juggleras he lectured according to one witness (qtd in McNulty 303). Bruno would remain in residence Oxford until 1585, and it has been suggested that Friar Bacon may glance satirically at his proud demeanor with its disputation scene (McCallum 212–217). Whether Greene witnessed the Italian dispute or not, the dramatic energy and performative nature of such heavy-weight contests was not lost on him. Indeed, Greene knew the pressure of disputatio first hand (being a requirement for his degrees), and as the Critical Essay elsewhere in this edition argues, the consistently dialectical way in which Friar Bacon represents characters and themes points to the practice’s important shaping influence on the play’s composition.
¶ The Glass Prospective
Para28Friar Bacon’s representation of a second magical device, the
glass prospective,also shows signs of having been shaped by Greene’s intellectual milieu. The instrument appears in two episodes of The Famous History. The first (
How Friar Bacon did help a young man to his sweetheart […]) concerns the secretive effort by Bungay to marry an aggressive knight to a reluctant bride named Millisant. A second gentleman, who Millisant actually loves, appeals to Bacon for help and is shown
a glass wherein anyone might see anything done (within fifty miles space) that they desired.At the sight of the ceremony unfolding at a distance, the beloved gentleman is heartbroken, so Bacon, pitying him, transports them both through the air to the chapel in an enchanted chair. Before Bungay can finalize the marriage ceremony, we are told that
Bacon spoiled his speech, for he struck him dumb so that he could not speak a word.A mist is then raised to cover the young lovers’ escape and Bacon conjures a spectacular masque to celebrate their union (The Famous History of Friar Bacon F1r-F3v). In the second episode (
How two young gentlemen came to Friar Bacon to know how their fathers did […]), it is revealed that Bacon’s magical device has
pleasured diverse kinds of people […] so that from far they would come to see this wonderful glass.When two young scholars request its use, they watch in horror as a dispute between their fathers in the provincial countryside boils over into murder. Enraged, the students violently assault each other:
presently they stabbed one the other with their daggers, and so fell down dead(The Famous History of Friar Bacon G1v-G2v).
Para29Greene cleverly fuses the two episodes to his central erotic plot. Margaret replaces
Millisant, while Prince Edward and Lacy take the place of the anonymous suitors vying
for her in the first episode; the dueling fathers from the second episode are reimagined
as Lambert and Serlsby, two more rivals for Margaret’s hand in marriage. Significantly,
Greene follows the second episode closely by emphasizing Bacon’s remorse after the
glass instigates homicide. As The Famous History puts it:
This made him to grieve exceedingly […] and judging that the students had received the cause of their deaths by this […] he broke his rare and wonderful glass.The prose source offers no indication of what the glass may look like, raising the question of what sort of property Greene had in mind as he adapted these episodes. All references to the
prospective glassin the play are themselves imprecise. It is said to be (or to contain) a
crystal(Sc12 Sp34) and deictic cues offer only vague hints as to how it functions, as when Bacon instructs Edward to
Stand there and look directly in the glassor to
Sit still and keep the crystal in your eye(Sc5 Sp57).
Para30Greene will have understood something of Roger Bacon’s fascination with perspectiva—the study of light, vision, and optical phenomena—a theoretical and practical science
with ancient Greco-Arabic roots for which the medieval friar collected an array of
lenses, mirrors, liquid flasks, and even a crystal sphere, which he later gifted to
the Pope (Lindberg xx-xxv; Molland 453–454). As Greene may also have known, the narrative of the university students who request
Bacon’s help to spy on events at home germinated in Bacon’s own lifetime. According
to the chronicler Peter of Trau in 1385:
Bacon was so complete a master of optics that from love of experiment he neglected teaching and writing and made two mirrors in the University of Oxford: by one of them you could light a candle at any hour, day or night; in the other you could see what people were doing in any part of the world. By experimenting with the first, students spent more time in lighting candles than studying books; and seeing, in the second, their relatives dying or ill or otherwise in trouble, they got into the habit of going down, to the ruin of the University, so by common council of the University both mirrors were broken. (qtd in Power 660)The second
mirror,with its power to magnify objects great distances away, receives further explication in Bacon’s major treatise on optics, the fifth part of his Opera Majus, entitled Perspectiva:
For we can […] arrange lenses and mirrors in such a way with respect to our sight and objects of vision, that the rays will be refracted and bent in any direction we desire, and under any angle we wish we shall see the object near or at a distance. Thus, from an incredible distance we might read the smallest letters and number grains of dust and sand owing to the magnitude of the angle under which we viewed them, and very large bodies close to us we might scarcely see because of the smallness of the angle under which we saw them […] Thus a small army might appear very large, and situated at a distance might appear close at hand, and the reverse. So also we might cause the sun, moon, and stars in appearance to descend here below, and similarly to appear above the heads of our enemies, and we might cause many similar phenomena, so that the mind of a man ignorant of the truth could not endure them. (qtd in Van Helden 28)The Perspectiva was widely read and lectured upon in the centuries after Bacon’s death. In the 1550s, for instance, the mathematician and astrologer John Dee (1527–1608) acquired a copy in manuscript and housed it in his extensive library at Mortlake (Dee 19–22). Some considered Dee a magus in his own right; his collection of esoteric artifacts at Mortlake included an obsidian scrying stone—a carved disc of volcanic glass polished to mirror smoothness, now at the British Museum (https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/john-dees-spirit-mirror). Shadowy spirits, it was believed, might be summoned to the surface of such stones and secret knowledge of the past, present, and future divined. According to Dee’s memoranda, Queen Elizabeth became fascinated by his scrying stone and visited his house to inspect it in 1575.
The Queens Majesty […] willed me to fetch my glass so famous,Dee writes,
and to show unto her some of the properties of it, which I did; her Majesty being taken down from her horse […] did see some of the properties of that glass, to her Majesty’s great contentment and delight(Dee 17). Modern scholars most often envision Friar Bacon’s
glass prospectiveas a
magic mirrorresembling a hand-held vanity, and sometimes as a more generic
crystal ball(Seltzer 30; Lavin xvi-xvii, 32, 80), yet the notoriety of Dee’s
glass so famoussuggests that a scrying stone may have been Greene’s original model for the stage property.
Para31Bearing in mind Greene’s exposure to intellectual communities familiar with Bacon’s
Perspectiva, another possible model for the
prospective glassis worth considering. The adjective
prospectivein early modern usage usually meant
forward-looking(Sc12 Sp4) and in this sense would be accurately applied to a property such as Dee’s obsidian
glass so famous,with its supposed power to glimpse the future. However, by the later sixteenth century
prospectivewas also used interchangeably with
perspective,a word that refers both to the distortion of sight, and to its magnification (OED perspective, adj. 2).
Perspective glasswas a phrase used in the 1580s to describe the experimental arrangement of concave mirrors and convex lenses—the revolutionary technology known as the reflecting telescope (OED perspective, n. 2.a). In a book published in 1579, the mathematician Thomas Digges (c.1546–1595) gives an account of experiments conducted by his father Leonard Digges (c.1515–c.1559) in which
perspective glasses duly situate upon convenient angleswere used
to discover every particularity in a country round about, wheresoever the sun beams might pierce.Digges states that:
(Bacon only excepted), I have not read of any in action ever able by means natural to perform the like; which partly grew by the aid he had by one old written book of the same, Bacon’s Experiments, that by strange adventure, or rather destiny, came to his hands, though chiefly by conjoining continual laborious practice with his mathematical studies. (Digges 189–190)He further reports that his father had:
not only discovered things far off, read letters, numbered pieces of money with the very coin and superscription thereof cast by some of his friends of purpose upon downs in open fields, but also seven miles off declared what hath been done at that instant in private places. […] But marvelous are the conclusions that may be performed […] you may not only set out the proportion of an whole region, yea represent before your eye the lively image of every town, village, &c. […] but also augment and dilate any parcel thereof […] so that you shall discern any trifle, or read any letter lying there open, especially if the sun beams may come unto it, as plainly as if you were corporally present, although it be distant from you as far as eye can descry. (Digges 189–190)Before his death in 1559, the elder Digges arranged for his son to study under John Dee, making it probable that the Bacon manuscript that informed these experiments was Dee’s own copy. The degree to which these Elizabethan experiments with proto-telescopes became common knowledge cannot be told, but informal word of mouth or plain curiosity about scientific matters may well have recommended Digges and his books to Greene.
Para32It is worth observing again the parallel between actual Elizabethan scholars and Greene’s
representation of his necromantic protagonist. Onstage, Bacon (as in The Famous History) is an enthusiastic patriot determined to discharge his magical skill in the service
of his country:
Polymaths such as Dee and Digges similarly directed their scientific ambitions toward the benefit of the state. Optical knowledge was in part considered valuable because of its projected naval and military applications; at a time rife with Protestant anxiety about the threat of Catholic conspiracy and invasion,(Sc2 Sp14)[…] I will strengthen England by my skillThat if ten Caesars lived and reigned in Rome,With all the legions Europe doth contain,They should not touch a grass of English ground.
perspective glassesheld enormous potential as a means of surveilling foreign and domestic enemies—a notion implicit when Digges speaks of their capacity to disclose
what hath been done at that instant in private places.About a decade before Friar Bacon debuted on stage, the Gravesend mariner William Bourne (fl. 1570s-1580s) drew up a Treatise on the Properties and Qualities of Glasses for Optical Purposes at the behest of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the queen’s principal secretary. The document illustrates the government’s growing curiosity about the concept of the telescope, and also the aura of the genuinely marvelous that surrounded the technology. Bourne writes:
there is diverse in this land that can say and doth know much more in these causes then I, and especially Mr. Dee and also Mr. Thomas Digges […] yet I am assured that the glass that is ground, being of very clear stuff and of a good largeness, and placed so that the beam doth come through, and so received into a very large concave lookinge glass, that it will show the thing of a marvelous largeness in manner incredible to be believed of the common people. (British Library MS Lansdowne 121, item 13, qtd in Van Helden 34)There were still refinements to be made by master lens crafters in the Netherlands, and the more advanced apparatus that Thomas Harriot and Galileo Galilee would point toward the starry sky remained on the horizon. Whether a crude prototype of the telescope would even be recognized as such by Elizabethan playgoers remains unclear, but the concept was undoubtedly in the air for the intellectually adventurous to seize upon. When Bacon instructs Prince Edward to
Sit still and keep the crystal in your eye(Sc5 Sp57) were early audiences introduced to a stage property meant to evoke this nascent technology? If so, it may have seemed to many (in Bourne’s words)
incredible to be believed,the reflecting telescope being a technology so new and awe-inspiring as to be indistinct from magic itself.
¶ Chronicle History
Para33Into the magical, romantic, and comic churn of Friar Bacon, Greene also introduces the flavor of the medieval past. While ostensibly set in
the thirteenth century, the prose Famous History is populated largely with unnamed and generic characters. Greene opts to replace
many of them with historical surrogates drawn from the work of Tudor chroniclers such
as Raphael Holinshed and John Stow (Round 20–23). That he understood the Plantagenet dynasty’s place in English history is plainly
evident, however fidelity to the past is rarely his priority; biographical and chronological
information is typically warped or sacrificed altogether in the interest of maintaining
the play’s romantic flavor. Consider, for instance, Edward Plantagenet (1239–1307),
heir to the throne of Henry III and one of the play’s central roles. Sixteenth-century
chronicles provide a comprehensive portrait of this controversial figure: they tell
of the prince’s tall and slender physique, which earned him the moniker Longshanks; that in youth he was wayward and brutal, once ordering a man’s ear severed and eye
gouged out for only a slight offence; and that he rose to be a proud and cunning courtier,
hailed in medieval songs as fierce like a lion but also changeable like the leopard.
He loved chivalric tournaments, fought bloody battles against noble factions opposing
his father, and embarked on a crusade to the Middle East. Upon being crowned Edward
I, he was deemed an eloquent and pious ruler but also a bellicose and ruthless one
for his dispossession and banishment of Jews from the country, and for his punishing
military campaigns against France, Wales, and Scotland—the intensity of which, in
the last instance, earned him the cognomen Scottorum malleus (
hammer of the Scots).
Para34Greene jettisons virtually all of this information and subordinates what remains to
the generic requirements of comic romance. He certainly understood, for example, the
young Edward’s reputation for being volatile and mercurial, and these characteristics
are retained insofar as they serve a dramatic purpose. In the play’s first scene,
Edward enters in the midst of a transformation—the
frolicvenison hunter has grown suddenly melancholy,
like to a troubled skyready to storm (Sc1 Sp1). Greene’s representation does not ignore the psychological credibility of melancholia, but realism is subsidiary: Edward has been transposed from the pages of Holinshed and Stow primarily because he fits neatly into position as an imposing blocking figure in the romantic emplotment borrowed from The Famous History, and perhaps too from Lyly’s Campaspe (1584) and his own Ciceronis Amor (1589). Edward will spontaneously change once again during a moment of crisis in Scene 7, mastering his indecorous desire for Margaret and devoting himself instead to the princess Eleanor of Castile. Again, although Greene gives the impression of historicism, the character’s metamorphosis is primarily a function of the comic romance that structures the action: history demands that Edward marry Eleanor, but Greene’s greater concern is the dramatic tension that the arranged marriage creates between the prince’s illicit private desire and the more impersonal claims of honor and royal duty. Much the same can be said of other historical personages in the play, whose postures and motivations are casually beholden to their chronicle origins but more deeply conditioned by the intertextual frameworks Greene has pre-fashioned for them. We might reasonably ask, then: why include the trappings of chronicle at all?
Para35There appears to have been a vogue for plays featuring Edward Plantagent around the
time Friar Bacon was written. The character fascinated theatre audiences as a uniquely English embodiment
of physical and political might. He plays a prominent role in Peele’s The Chronicle History of Edward I (printed in 1593), and the Admiral’s Men evidently performed a lost play known as
longe shanckeat the Rose in 1595 starring the imposing actor Edward Alleyn (Foakes 30–36, 47–48). It was opportune for Greene, then, that the Plantagenet icon happened to be a contemporary of Roger Bacon. As the playwright must also have recognized, plays on English dynastic history were a central and innovative part of the Queen’s Men’s repertory, stemming from the company’s agenda to propagandize in the name of its patron while touring the nation’s provinces (McMillin and MacLean 166–167). Greene’s inclusion of chronicle material in Friar Bacon was probably therefore symptomatic of his commission to add to this repertory; however, in bringing his chronicle matter in line with the company’s mandate, Greene faced the stubborn fact that the Plantagenet story unfolds in ways antithetical to the Queen’s Men’s core ideological message. Elizabethans remembered Henry III (1207–1272) for his piety and desire to harmonize his court, but they also knew that his royal authority had been threatened by economic and political instability. Taxation had alienated his subjects, compelling the king to cede power to a strengthened parliament; he was forced to resign English claims to Normandy, Anjou, and Poitou, bringing to an end the Angevin empire; and factionalism at his court culminated in armed revolt by his barons against him. The Queen’s Men, by contrast, sought to articulate a vision of the nation in which a Tudor dynasty would reign over a unified and stable Protestant kingdom nestled in a larger providential order (McMillin and MacLean 26–27, 166–167). Rather than wrestle into comic form historical troubles that lent themselves far more readily to a tragic perspective, Greene appears simply to have effaced them, strategically whitewashing in particular the internecine violence of the thirteenth century, covering it over with a poetic vision of a cohesive English state devoted to common ideals (Round 23; Dean 46; Bergeron 100–109). Friar Bacon’s King Henry ultimately resembles an idealized Tudor monarch more than a historical Plantagenet one: he radiates magnificence; he is a patron of learning and the arts; and he presides over a nation secure in its sovereignty and powerful in relation to international adversaries:
Albion is another little world,Henry boasts to foreign dignitaries (Sc4 Sp1), a paradise
like that wealthy isle / Circled with Gihon and Euphrates(Sc15 Sp10).
Para36The enduring popularity of Friar Bacon owes much to the seamlessness with which Greene weaves together its distinct threads
of pseudo-history, necromancy, erotic intrigue, and academic satire. The play exemplifies
what McMillin and MacLean characterize as the Queen’s Men’s
medley style,trading heavily in social and moral stereotypes (princes, scholars, gentry, farmers, fools) that bring into focus
the interplay between the lowly and the powerful(McMillin and MacLean 124–127, 135–136). Like other plays from the repertory for which it was written, Friar Bacon dramatizes an English panoply, mingling the courtly and the bucolic, the magical and the melodramatic, the frightening and the risible. Its host of iconographic stage types—the sorcerer who abjures occult power to save his soul, the country maid whose patience tames the predatory aristocrat, the unregenerate clown roaring into hell on the back of the devil—join to form a coherent, pluri-theatrical whole that is exuberantly aware of its own conventions. With its lattice of appeals to the cultural and intertextual competencies of sixteenth-century playgoers, Greene’s pastiche rises at times to the aesthetic and affective sublimity of the best early modern plays.
Two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us,as Umberto Eco has written of Casablanca, another deceptively simple icon of popular entertainment:
When only a few of these formulas are used, the result is kitsch. But when the repertoire of stock formulas is used wholesale, then the result is an architecture like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia: the same vertigo, the same stroke of genius(Eco 202).
Prosopography
Andrew Griffin
Andrew Griffin is an associate professor in the department of English and an affiliate
professor in the department of Theater and Dance at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He is general editor (text) of Queen’s Men Editions. He studies early
modern drama and early modern historiography while serving as the lead editor at the
EMC Imprint. He has co-edited with Helen Ostovich and Holger Schott Syme Locating the Queen’s Men (2009) and has co-edited The Making of a Broadside Ballad (2016) with Patricia Fumerton and Carl Stahmer. His monograph, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, History, Catastrophe, was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2019. He is editor of the
anonymous The Chronicle History of King Leir (Queen’s Men Editions, 2011). He can be contacted at griffin@english.ucsb.edu.
Christopher Matusiak
Christopher Matusiak (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay) is an Associate Professor of English at Ithaca College in New York where he teaches
courses on Shakespeare and early modern drama. His research on seventeenth-century
theatre management at the Drury Lane Cockpit has appeared in Early Theatre and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, and in Shakespeare Quarterly on the use of John Aubrey’s manuscripts in studies of Shakespeare’s life. He is currently
writing a book (with Eva Griffith) about Christopher Beeston and the Cockpit playhouse,
and researching another on the persistence of illegal stage-playing during the English
Civil Wars, Shakespearean Actors and their Playhouses in Civil War London. He also prepared REED London: The Cockpit-Phoenix: an edited collection of seventeenth-century manuscripts and printed documents illustrating
the history of the Cockpit-Phoenix playhouse in Drury Lane (for The Records of Early English Drama). He can be contacted at cmatusiak@ithaca.edu.
Helen Ostovich
Helen Ostovich, professor emerita of English at McMaster University, is the founder
and general editor of Queen’s Men Editions. She is a general editor of The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press); Series
Editor of Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Ashgate, now Routledge),
and series co-editor of Late Tudor and Stuart Drama (MIP); play-editor of several
works by Ben Jonson, in Four Comedies: Ben Jonson (1997); Every Man Out of his Humour (Revels 2001); and The Magnetic Lady (Cambridge 2012). She has also edited the Norton Shakespeare 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1602 and F1623 (2015); The Late Lancashire Witches and A Jovial Crew for Richard Brome Online, revised for a 4-volume set from OUP 2021; The Ball, for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley (2021); The Merry Wives of Windsor for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Dutch Courtesan (with Erin Julian) for the Complete Works of John Marston, OUP 2022. She has published
many articles and book chapters on Jonson, Shakespeare, and others, and several book
collections, most recently Magical Transformations of the Early Modern English Stage with Lisa Hopkins (2014), and the equivalent to book website, Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context containing scripts, glossary, almost fifty conference papers edited and updated to
essays; video; link to Queenʼs Mens Ediitons and YouTube: http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/contexts/index.htm, 2015. Recently, she was guest editor of Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605,
Special Issue on Marston, Early Theatre 23.1 (June 2020). She can be contacted at ostovich@mcmaster.ca.
Janelle Jenstad
Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of
Victoria, Director of The Map
of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama
Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she
co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old
Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s
A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML
and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice
(with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not
Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in
Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern
Literary Studies, Shakespeare
Bulletin, Renaissance and
Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval
and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives
(MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern
England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and
the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in
Early Modern England (Ashgate); New
Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter);
Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating
Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and
Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking
Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital
Technologies (Routledge); and Civic
Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern
London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Jodi Litvin
Joey Takeda
Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he
assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on
LEMDO.
Kate LeBere
Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator
and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English
at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History
Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management
in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth
and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet
during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University
of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.
Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the
UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media Centre for
over two decades, and has been involved with dozens
of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on
the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of
the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as
lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on
the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.
Navarra Houldin
Project manager 2022-present. Textual remediator 2021-present. Navarra Houldin (they/them)
completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During
their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs
Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and
sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.
Peter Cockett
Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the Theatre and Film Studies at McMaster
University. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor
of Queen’s Men Editions. He was the stage director for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM),
directing King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006) and he is the performance editor for our editions of those plays. The process
behind those productions is documented in depth on his website Performing the Queen’s Men. Also featured on this site are his PAR productions of Clyomon and Clamydes (2009) and Three Ladies of London (2014). For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players,
he has directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director
with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.
Robert Greene
Tracey El Hajj
Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD
from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched
Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on
Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life.Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.
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Orgography
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
QME Editorial Board (QMEB1)
The QME Editorial Board consists of Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text), with the support of an Advisory Board.
Queenʼs Men Editions (QME1)
The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
Authority title | Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: Textual Introduction |
Type of text | Critical |
Short title | FBFB: Text Intro |
Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
Series | Queenʼs Men Editions |
Source |
Born-digital, peer-reviewed document written by Christopher Matusiak. First published in the QME 1.0 anthology on the ISE platform. Converted to TEI-XML
and remediated by the LEMDO Team for republication in the QME 2.0 anthology on the LEMDO platform.
|
Editorial declaration | n/a |
Edition | Released with Queenʼs Men Editions 2.0 |
Sponsor(s) |
Queenʼs Men EditionsThe Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).
|
Encoding description | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines |
Document status | published, peer-reviewed |
Licence/availability | Intellectual copyright in this edition is held by the editor, Christopher Matusiak. The critical paratexts, including this Textual Introduction, are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that they are freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the editor, QME, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of QME, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the classroom. Production photographs and videos on this site may not be downloaded. They appear freely on this site with the permission of the actors and the ACTRA union. They may be used within the context of university courses, within the classroom, and for reference within research contexts, including conferences, when credit is given to the producing company and to the actors. Commercial use of videos and photographs is forbidden. |