A pseudo-historical character evidently inspired by Edmund de Lacy (d. 1258), youthful heir to the extensive estate of courtier John de Lacy, third earl of Lincoln (d. 1240).

John de Warenne, sixth earl of Surrey and Sussex (1231–1304), who during the course of a long political career sustained the trust of both Henry III and Edward I.

Another pseudo-historical figure, inspired by Sir William Ormesby (d. 1387), a justice of the king’s bench in the reign of Edward I and England’s chief minister of Scotland at the time of William Wallace’s rebellion in 1296–1297.

This fictitious jester’s surname evokes that of the notorious pretender Lambert Simnell, a simple Oxford youth conscripted by Yorkist loyalists into impersonating the royal claimant Edward, earl of Warwick and spear-heading an insurrection against the newly crowned Henry VII in 1487. Rafe’s license as a court fool permits him to imitate royal authority in a more benignly comic echo of his historical namesake.

Heir of the royal house of Plantagenet, born in 1239; Q1 introduces him as Edward the first, though he would not be crowned until 1274, following his father’s death in 1272. He reigned thereafter until his own death in 1307.

Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1292), a Franciscan friar and Oxford master of theology, known for his studies of Aristotle, mathematics, linguistics, alchemy, astrology, and natural philosophy (notably the science of optics). Greene’s stage character more closely resembles the fanciful magician forged by popular legends in the wake of the historical Bacon’s life, especially as portrayed in the anonymously authored prose work (see the notes at , , , and the Supplementary Materials included in this edition).

Adapted directly from the contemporary prose work , the character perhaps appealed to Greene personally, given the author’s sometimes cynical attitude towards the impoverishment of Elizabethan scholars. The word miles means servant in Irish, which offers a potential clue about the dialect in which the part was originally performed. Miles’s name also means soldier in Latin, and his comic bravado links him genetically to the theatrical archetype of the miles gloriosus, or braggart soldier.

First monarch of the Plantagenet dynasty, born in 1207; he reigned as King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Aquitaine for a period of fifty-six years, from 1216 until his death in 1272.

Like Emperor Frederick II, Ferdinand III of Castile and Leon (1201–1252) died before the historical events dramatized in the play actually took place. His son and successor, Alfonso X (1221–1284), in fact presided over the diplomatic marriage between Prince Edward and Eleanor of Castile.

Born in 1241, Eleanor of Castile was King Ferdinand III’s only daughter by his second wife Joan, countess of Ponthieu. She arrived in England in 1255 as Prince Edward’s consort and, after accompanying him on a short-lived crusade, she was crowned Queen of England in 1274. She bore Edward sixteen children, including the future Edward II.

A non-speaking character whose historical identity is ambiguous; Q1 records no explicit entrances or exits, however characters address him as both the Scocon duke and Saxonie, suggesting his distinctive place amid the emperor’s continental entourage. During the time in which the play is ostensibly set, the duchy of Saxony was governed by Albert I of the house of Ascania (c. 1175–1260).

Greene appears to have in mind Frederick II (1211–1250), emperor of Germany and Italy and brother-in-law of King Henry III by his marriage to Henry’s sister, Isabella, in 1235. Frederick died, however, and his Hohenstaufen dynasty’s imperial claim had ended before the play’s major historical events took place—such as Edward and Eleanor’s marriage negotiations in and . Greene, working primarily within the genre of romance and not chronicle history, was not much troubled by the inaccuracy.

A pseudo-historical figure also adapted from . Thomas de Bungeye (fl. 1270–1283) was an Oxford-educated Franciscan minister from Suffolk and a contemporary of Bacon’s whose mathematical skill similarly earned him a legendary reputation as a magician.

A fictional character adapted from . Q1 depicts him as German, however Greene gives him the additional name Jaques, associating him with a wider community alien to England.

An unnamed character who accompanies Margaret and the Keeper onstage in Scene 13: Q1 identifies the figure simply as their friend. This may refer to Joan, Thomas, or Richard, if not to a distinct rural companion from Fressingfield.

It has been noted that Burden, Mason, and Clement are names of actual scholars who attended Oxford at different times between the medieval period and the sixteenth century (Ardolino). However, the three doctors’ names are perhaps better understood as having allegorical significance of the sort common to early Tudor drama. The clearest case is Burden, whose name is insistently spoken on stage as his sinful extracurricular activities are exposed in Scene 2. According to Q1, the names Mason and Clement are never spoken on stage, but they nevertheless also carry hints of conceptual design, gesturing respectively towards a stone-cutter and a state of tolerant mildness. Taken together, they may stand for three related stages of spiritual being, each very familiar to Greene’s Protestant audience: the first can be characterized as the painful recognition of innate human sinfulness, a burden thought to be a consequence of humanity’s fall from divine grace; the second evokes (indirectly) the flinty heart of the sinner that may only be broken and made contrite by a divine stone-worker; the third then points to the redemptive clemency that the Protestant faithful believed to be mysteriously granted by a merciful God (c.f. Ezekiel 36:26; Psalm 51).