The character of Friar Bacon was a great challenge for Jason Gray in the SQM production. Charged with performing a character who is described as both a frighteningly powerful magician and jolly friar, Gray often had to create his character’s mightiness alone, isolated amongst the company’s comic japes. In his first scene, he plays the straight man to Miles’s clowning even though the later action of the scene casts him as a comic trickster who dupes his rival Burden. The company’s use of a supernumerary devil to effect magical appearances and disappearances first appears in this scene. This playful staging of Bacon’s power offered a combination of the impressive and the comical that came to define the company’s performance of the play’s magic. The scene follows a pattern used in the Famous Victories in which the English hero turns the tables on a proud adversary (Henry in , and Derrick in ). Bacon comically exposes the Doctor Burden who has dared to question the extent of the friar’s power. The pattern was familiar to the SQM company by this time in the rehearsal process and they knew to exaggerate the challenger’s pride prior to the fall to enhance the comic effect. The pattern is used again in the Vandermast scene ().