1: First Impressions: Strangeness and Wonder

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungayʼs buoyant mixture of spectacular magic, erotic intrigue, royal pageantry, and anarchic clowning generated considerable enthusiasm when the play debuted circa 1588. The studiousness with which Greene assembles well-rubbed character types and tropes from popular genres such as medieval romance, chronicle history, and the homiletic interlude explains in part this positive reception (McNier 171-79; Hieatt, “A New Source” 182-86; Cartwright 222-23). But for all its familiar aspects, there is an undeniable strangeness to Friar Bacon that appears to have resonated strongly as well. Indeed, the word “strange” is uttered with conspicuous frequency in the play (thirteen times). In early modern usage, the term commonly referred, as it does today, to the enigmatic quality of things experienced as alien or inexplicable. But it carried more nuanced connotations, too, notably evoking the moral disorientation brought about by unorthodox or ungodly behavior, and characterizing events deemed providential and therefore tantalizingly beyond the grasp of human reason (OEDadj; Walsham 32-51, 167-224). Much of the strangeness of Greeneʼs most famous play may be traced to the playwrightʼs abiding fascination with the human desire for knowledge, its circumscribed nature, and the potentially dire consequences of its acquisition. The eponymous Bacon is an Oxford scholar turned legendary sorcerer, already renowned as the play opens for having performed “strange and uncouth miracles” (TLN 1790) and determined to complete his magnum opus, a prodigious head of brass whose speech promises to illuminate “strange doubts and aphorisms” (TLN 220, 229, 349, 1582, 1647). For his part, Friar Bungay squares off in a “strange dispute” with the continental magician Vandermast, exhilarating onlookers with his own “strange necromantic spells” (TLN 1160, 1235). Gradually, the friarsʼ uncanny marvels give way to the more profound mystery at the heart of the play—what Providence holds in store for England—a question brought into focus by the Plantagenet King Henry III, who muses, “what strange event shall happen to this land?” (TLN 2119)

In response to such moments, characters exhibit “wonder,” another key word in the playʼs verbal texture. Bacon has risen from humble origins to be reputed “the wonder of the world,” dazzling both friends and enemies alike with “wonders” that “pass the common sense of man” (TLN 212, 249). But when his occult power inevitably slips its harness and threatens to harm those in the friarʼs orbit, shock and estrangement are revealed to be dimensions of wonder as well (TLN 1116): “O strange stratagem,” cries Bungay in horror, as the events of scene 11 take their grievous turn (TLN 1858). Deep-set Elizabethan anxieties surrounding religious transgression and its punishment were never wholly separable from the excited conception of magic as an instrument capable of penetrating natureʼs secrets. The frisson that Friar Baconʼs earliest audiences seem to have experienced therefore encompasses at least two powerfully “strange” sensations: awed amazement at the apparent wondrousness of occult power; and the profound uneasiness of bearing witness to heresy.

By the late 1580s, the prose romance The Famous History of Friar Bacon had familiarized the reading public with the magicianʼs legendary exploits, while stories of the real-life Franciscan circulated vividly in academic circles (see the Textual Essay for more on this background). Greeneʼs dramatization, however, seems to have most firmly seized the early modern imagination. The theater entrepreneur Philip Henslowe recorded respectable crowds visiting his Rose playhouse in Southwark to see Lord Strangeʼs Men perform “fryer bacone” in 1592 and 1593 (Foakes 16-20). This was for many years assumed to be Greeneʼs play, though it may also have been a sequel that survives today in the manuscript known as John of Bordeaux (Alnwick Castle MS. 507; Manley and MacLean 93-6). In any event, the existence of multiple productions featuring the character reflects strong cultural interest—indeed, perhaps, a cultural phenomenon. There is evidence the play remained a touchstone for decades to come: casual allusions to Baconʼs brazen head crop up regularly in the work of popular playwrights such as Jonson, Middleton, and Shirley (Ward clxiv-clxvi); countless friar pairings paraded across Jacobean and Caroline stages in conspicuous imitation (Matusiak 209-10, 224 n9); and well into the eighteenth century, audiences flocked to booth stages to see child-sized puppets (or ‘motionsʼ) act out scenes adapted from Greeneʼs well-known play (Rosenfeld 12-3).

Greeneʼs literary notoriety is likely to have stoked curiosity about Friar Bacon. Having stablished himself as an “Author of Plays and a penner of Love Pamphlets” by the later 1580s, Greene reportedly grew so “famous in that quality” that he mused: “who for that trade [had] grown so ordinary about London as Robin Greene” (The Repentance of Robert Greene C1v)? The best evidence for Friar Baconʼs contemporary appeal however remains its first appearance in quarto in 1594, the title-page of which identifies it as having been “played by her Majestyʼs servants.” The Queenʼs Men were the most beloved touring company of the late Elizabethan era and the ways in which Greeneʼs commercial and ideological designs were bound up with its actors and their royal sponsor will be explored in detail below; let it suffice for the moment to observe that while commentators have traditionally discussed the play as having been written for a purpose-built amphitheater in London (Seltzer 98-100; Lavin xvi-xxi; Leggatt 30-31), it is equally important to situate it in the context of late-Tudor theatrical touring. Londoners certainly knew the play: Hensloweʼs accounts confirm that the Queenʼs Men acted it on the Bankside during the Easter season of 1594 (Foakes 21); it was probably performed as well at city innyards such as the Bull in Bishopsgate Street and the Bell Savage near Ludgate (Kathman 68-75). But as recent scholarship has persuasively shown, the greater part of the royal companyʼs career was spent on the road, and dramatic scripts were necessarily adapted to the physical and social conditions of guildhalls, fairgrounds, and noble households in locales as distant from one other as Bristol, Norwich, York, and Dover (McMillin and MacLean 55-82). Friar Bacon may well have been exhibited more frequently beyond London than within, and was certainly a more dramaturgically flexible and multivalent play—a stranger one, we might say—than has previously been assumed.

2: Coherency or Incoherency

Modern critical opinion of the play, until recently, has stood rather awkwardly at odds with Friar Baconʼs prominent place in Elizabethan popular culture. Early twentieth-century commentators admired the “recognizably real” quality of Greeneʼs characters, especially his sympathetic portraits of women, the inspiration for which has been traced to the playwrightʼs troubled relationship with his own “wronged and forgiving wife” (Robertson 104-5). Bradleyan appreciation could not wipe away the stigma of being a “secondary” Elizabethan dramatist, however. Many came to regard Greene as an envious imitator of more chic and supple-minded university writers, particularly Marlowe, thus framing Friar Bacon as a tactful, if uninspired, response to the artistically superior Doctor Faustus (Churton Collins 2:2-3). At his best, Greene could be said to have planted seeds from which more refined artistry would grow, with Friar Bacon notably the bud of a species of romantic comedy that would flower fully into Twelfth Night and The Winterʼs Tale. In seeking to keep pace with his fellow university wits, Greene, in effect, eked out modest innovations that critics found useful when constructing a teleology focused on the emergence of Shakespeare. In G.E. Woodberryʼs memorable phrase, Greene was a “flitting bat in the slow dawn of our golden poet” (388-89, 394).

With the rise of New Criticism, Friar Bacon attracted fresh attention as a formal puzzle to be solved. Establishing the textʼs unity proved a vexing enterprise however as the play plainly exhibits contradictions and delivers paradoxical effects. Ambiguous, ambivalent, uncertain, and conflicting would predictably become standard terms of critical description, especially in discussions of the playʼs characters. Friar Bacon and Margaret of Fressingfield, the two most prominent roles, are exemplary in this respect. Is Bacon properly a benevolent wizard of romance, or a damnable Faustian sorcerer (McNeir 176-79; Towne 9-13; West 499-500; Traister 72)? The answer, evidently, is both. Without question, the English court and academic community at Oxford appreciate the prestige the brilliant friar bestows upon his nation and university. King Henry and the doctors Clement and Mason commend Bacon warmly as “frolic” and “jolly” (TLN 319, 328), a “brave scholar” (TLN 98) and “Englandʼs only flower” (TLN 505) worthy of “a coronet of choicest gold” (TLN 510). Merlin-like, the magus directs his art towards the welfare of England: his “prospective glass,” which brings distant events immediately before oneʼs eyes, is “free for every honest man” to use (TLN 1812); and Baconʼs professed purpose in pursuing the brazen headʼs “strange principles of philosophy” is to surround his country with fortifications more impervious than those of ancient empires:

I will strengthen England by my skill,
That if ten Caesars lived and reigned in Rome
With all the legions Europe doth contain
They should not touch a grass of English ground.
The work that Ninus reared at Babylon,
The brazen walls framed by Semiramis,
Carved out like to the portal of the sun,
Shall not be such as rings the English strand
From Dover to the marketplace of Rye. (TLN 232-240)

Patriotic sentiment of this kind seems calculated to stir the hearts of Elizabethan Protestants, who by the later 1580s were alert to the subversive presence in England of seminary priests from Rheims, and awaited military invasion by Catholic Spain. But playgoers could hardly have overlooked the heretical means by which the friar pursues his patriotic ends. From the gloom of his study, Bacon claims to have “dived into hell / And sought the darkest palaces of fiends” (TLN 1570-1571), and poring over “dark Hecateʼs principles” in forbidden books (TLN 1579), he has summoned the sulfurous agents Belcephon and Astaroth to do his bidding (TLN 230, 1259-1260, 1572). There can be no confusing such practices with ‘whiteʼ or ‘naturalʼ magic: this is “necromancy” (TLN 228), the Greek and Latin roots of which (neckroi, ‘deathʼ / niger, ‘darkʼ) send disturbing shivers through the playʼs otherwise festive proceedings. Bacon, moreover, is pathologically self-aggrandizing, claiming the right to “boast more than a man might boast” (TLN 1674). His Faustian habit of addressing himself in the third person betrays the fact that intellectual hubris motivates him as forcefully as altruism (Assarsson-Rizzi 38; Ettin 276-77). As in the case Faustus, too, Baconʼs nobly-expressed intentions tend to devolve into scenes of farce tinged with discontentment and malevolence; more than once, for instance, and with obvious self-satisfaction, he conjures horned and feathered devils to dispatch those who challenge or frustrate him (TLN 335-337, 807, 2072-2073). Moreover, an unmistakable hollowness characterizes even his greatest magical accomplishment, the alchemical enlivening of the brazen head. After weeks of patient labor and suspenseful anticipation, the head speaks nothing but a sparse epigram on worldly transience—“Time is … Time was … Time is past” (TLN 1616, 1626, 1638)—words (on their surface at least) anticlimactic for their obviousness (TLN 1582). Casting the darkest shadow over the friar is his failure to recognize, until it is too late, that magic “worketh many woes” (TLN 1861). Baconʼs enchanted glass proves especially dangerous, first in enabling Edwardʼs imperious schadenfreude at Bungayʼs mute humiliation and the terrorization of Margaret and Lacy, and then in its facilitation of the violence that consumes the Lamberts and Serlsbys (TLN 1818). Scholars have read Baconʼs breaking of his glass as a redemptive and “educative” gesture—a sign that his descent into sin is only temporary and that his condition remains regenerative (Wertheim 274, 285). But the magnitude of his transgressions—which he confesses to be so foul and extensive that Christʼs wounds “oft did bleed afresh” (TLN 1888)—complicates attempts to impose a morality play pattern on the action and tends to dampen the comedyʼs final articulation of optimism. “Sins have their salves” and “repentance can do much,” Bacon reassures himself (TLN 1885). But “the dew of mercy” remains very much in the balance as Bacon makes his final vow to “spend the remnant of my life / In pure devotion, praying to my God / That he would save what Bacon hath vainly lost” (TLN 1889, 1892-1894). Two opposing conceptions of magic are thus articulated. Neither may be factored out, nor are they reconcilable—the play simply holds them in tension (Assarsson-Rizzi 79-80; Crupi 119).

After Bacon, Margaret speaks the most lines in the play, and she shares the friarʼs Janus-faced quality. From one vantage point, she is a Sussex dairymaid who makes butter and cheese in her fatherʼs lodge on a royal hunting ground; from another, she models a grand and ancient myth, embodying a second Helen of Troy whose suitors are driven to violent distraction by her rare beauty (Muir 49; Assarsson-Rizzi 72-3). The shifting register of Margaretʼs speech neatly reflects this paradoxical nature. Among her rustic neighbors at Harleston Fair, she speaks unpretentiously, often with a passivity befitting her social status and gender in a conservative rural environment:

When we have turned our butter to the salt
And set our cheese safely upon the racks,
Then let our fathers price it as they please.
We country sluts of merry Fressingfield
Come to buy needless naughts to make us fine,
And look that young men should be frank this day
And court us with such fairings as they can. (TLN 363-369)

But upon encountering Lacy, the earl of Lincoln, Margaretʼs rhetoric heightens, becoming more allusive and richer in its tropes:

His words are witty, quickened with a smile,
His courtesy gentle, smelling of the court;
Facile and debonair in all his deeds,
Proportioned as was Paris when in gray
He courted Oenone in the vale by Troy.
Great lords have come and pleaded for my love,
Who but the Keeperʼs lass of Fressingfield?
And yet methinks this farmerʼs jolly son
Passeth the proudest that hath pleased mine eye. (TLN 420-428)

Coercively pressured by Prince Edward to abandon her affection for Lacy, her classicism grows even more pronounced:

Pardon, my lord. If Joveʼs great royalty
Sent me such presents as to Danae,
If Phoebus, tired in Latonaʼs webs,
Came courting from the beauty of his lodge,
The dulcet tunes of frolic Mercury
Nor all the wealth heavenʼs treasury affords
Should make me leave Lord Lacy or his love. (TLN 1013-1019)

And amid the crisis of Lacyʼs disavowal, Margaret speaks as though transplanted into a Senecan tragedy:

Fond Atë, doomer of bad-boding fates,
That wraps proud Fortune in thy snaky locks,
Didʼst thou enchant my birthday with such stars
As lightened mischief from their infancy?
If heavens had vowed, if stars had made decree,
To show on me their froward influence,
If Lacy had but loved, heavens, hell, and all
Could not have wronged the patience of my mind. (TLN 1531-1538)

The mosaic of Margaretʼs speech habits might generously be interpreted as expressive of her changing emotional condition and a near-heroic struggle to shore up an integrity of self under various kinds of pressure. But her stylistic disjointedness has been criticized for muddying the playʼs otherwise clear depiction of social distinctions and for confusing the audienceʼs sense of who she is and where she belongs (Muir 49). Compounding the issue is a degree of unpredictability in Margaretʼs behavior, which can range from quiet and withdrawn humility to bold self-assertiveness. Her patience when Lacy abandons her, for instance, has been likened to that of Griselda, the implication being that it is through suffering that Margaret becomes entitled to the social eminence granted her by the comic finale (Seltzer xvi; Lavin xxiii-xxv; Mortenson 201). Others find the Griselda analogy strained, noting that Margaret has an active hand in orchestrating events and is “uncommonly articulate” when speaking out against the impositions placed upon her; from this perspective, she resembles more a dignified “lady in disguise” than an overtly deferential subject of patriarchy (Assarsson-Rizzi 71-3; Cartwright 235-41). It has even been suggested, with less generosity, that beneath the surface of her pastoral heroism lies a hard core of proud self-regard not unlike Baconʼs own. “Great lords have come and pleaded for my love, / Who but the Keeperʼs lass of Fressingfield?” she muses in the aside quoted above, cognizant that she is considered Suffolkʼs paramount beauty, and possibly gratified by the fact:

Shall I be Helen in my froward fates,
As I am Helen in my matchless hue,
And set rich Suffolk with my face afire? (TLN 1483-1485)

The challenge of reconciling Margaretʼs inclination both towards diffident self-abnegation and proud self-determination has prompted conclusions that border on cynicism: does she knowingly exploit her “matchless hue” in the interest of upward social and political mobility? How calculated is her final breach of decorum when she advantageously marries a lord above her station (Hieatt 22)?

In the face of such “strange” contradictions, there have emerged two broadly distinguishable strategies of critical explanation. The first understands the playʼs contrarieties to be a consequence of incompatible personal or aesthetic investments on the part of the dramatist. Calling attention to details in Greeneʼs putative biography, David Bevington proposes, for instance, that the playwrightʼs disappointed social aspirations and dissolute lifestyle prevented him from depicting romantic comedyʼs upward social mobility in an uncomplicated way. Sensing hints of mockery and caricature in Margaretʼs remarkable rise from the low estate of a dairymaid to aristocratic luxury, Bevington asks: “Did Greene really warm to his task in creating Margaret, or did he cater to a pipe dream that he then passed off as faintly ludicrous and ineffably bourgeois? … One senses not that Greene was consciously cynical of his popular themes and morality, but that he concocted an unstable vision of goodness he yearned for and then mistrusted because it eluded him” (Tudor Drama 224). Kenneth Muir accounts for the same inconsistencies by arguing that Greene assembled his source materials recklessly. To compose Friar Bacon, Greene pressed together a remarkable array of stock characters and narrative elements from the genres of romance, chronicle history, and the moral interlude. Given the diverse nature of these sources, constituent components cannot be expected to align neatly in every instance, nor should we be surprised if they sometimes resist the artificial logic of professional stage comedy to resolve matters harmoniously. It is the uneven architecture of Friar Baconʼs underlying structure, Muir argues, and not any modern principle of psychological coherence that ultimately determines the nature and fate of its characters. Contradictions, on this view, are the result of “character sacrificed to plot” and merely require our “willing suspension of disbelief” (48-9).

J.A. Lavinʼs influential New Mermaids edition of Friar Bacon conceives the play at cross purposes in yet another sense. Greeneʼs predilection for eye-pleasing spectacle, Lavin argues, contradicted his effort to impose on the action a pattern of orthodox morality condemning necromancy (xxvii-xxix). Few would dispute the first premise: Greene was unquestionably adventurous when devising visual displays for the stage. In Alphonsus, he indulged spectatorsʼ eyes with a canopy topped with the severed heads of vanquished kings (G2v); in Orlando Furioso, his hero crosses the stage “with a leg” over his shoulder, grotesquely mistaken for Herculesʼs club (D4v); Remilia is incinerated by lightning in A Looking Glass for London (C2v); and Jonah in the same play is “cast out of the Whaleʼs belly upon the stage” (F3v). Of a piece with arresting moments such as these is scene 8 of Friar Bacon, in which Bungay conjures the mythical tree of Hesperides and a “dragon shooting fire” (TLN 1198). As Greene was no doubt aware, the dragon had long been a hallmark of Tudor pageantry, a serpentine property fitted with tubes through which ignited powder was conducted to produce a shower of sparks from the mouth (Butterworth, Theatre of Fire 39, 86). Before the smoke from this spectacle clears, Vandermast summons a “fiend appearing like great Hercules,” complete with “his lionʼs skin,” to tear the branches from the tree (TLN 1208, 1216). Bacon overmasters Vandermast in turn, ordering Hercules to spirit away both the tree and the necromantic challenger (TLN 1279-1280). Perhaps more impressive still is the spectacle then called for in scene 10. Indeed, Baconʼs talking brass head has become one of the most iconic moments in English Renaissance drama. Players appear to have adopted an existing technique of conveying sound through statuary of this kind; the head was probably brought to life by piping an actorʼs voice into the property from offstage (Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage 98-112; and see the Supplementary Materials). Greeneʼs Alphonsus features a similar pyrotechnic head, as do others plays in the Queenʼs Menʼs repertory (e.g. The Old Wives Tale, the lost Orson and Valentine), and it seems likely the same property was employed across productions (Dahlquist 67). Yet by juxtaposing its version of the head with the comic improvisation of the actor playing Miles, Friar Bacon presented Elizabethan audiences with something original, a theatrical tour de force whose effects include ‘jump scaresʼ (each time the head makes its “great noise”), tense laughter at Milesʼs comic fright, and wondrous awe as “a lightning flasheth forth” (likely an emission of flame from the headʼs mouth, as in Alphonsus) and a mysterious hand suddenly appears to “breaketh down the head” (TLN 1614, 1633, 1635). Friar Baconʼs technical wizardry may well have been among its chiefest pleasures, but to Lavin it constitutes a case of “incomplete artistic integration”; to be absorbed and delighted by magical spectacle, he argues, is to remain oblivious to Greeneʼs point that necromancy is grounds for damnation; thus the “gleeful parade of magical tricks does not square with his didactic conclusion” (xxix).

A second, distinct group of critics diverges from the arguments above by taking as its starting point Thomas Nasheʼs well-known assertion that Greene was his “craftʼs master” when it came to “plotting plays” (Have with You V3r). Rather than offering explanations for Friar Baconʼs apparent contrarieties, this second critical movement has sought to resolve ambiguities by identifying ways to unify the text at the levels of character, theme, and structure. In his seminal reading of the evidence, William Empson posits connections “insinuated powerfully and unobtrusively” between distinct plots involving Margaret and Bacon, each of whom shapes the action by exercising analogous powers—in Empsonʼs famous formulation, “the power of beauty is like the power of magic” (27-34). The dairymaid and the necromancer each stand to benefit socially from their respective influence, but to the extent their powers are “individualist, dangerous, and outside the social order” they also trouble the universe of comedy, an idea seemingly reinforced by scene 12 when Margaretʼs physical attractiveness and Baconʼs magical glass conspire to erase two generations of Lamberts and Serlsbys. Empsonʼs insight would shape the discourse of critics for a generation, paving the way for further debate as to whether Bacon and Margaret—“Englandʼs only flower” and “the flower of all towns” (TLN 505, 1424)—ought to be regarded as analogous, or as embodying a polarity of competing influences on those they encounter (Seltzer xvi; Mortenson 196-97). The power of Margaretʼs ‘magicʼ remains particularly controversial. In response to her exquisite beauty, distinctly male communities of courtly noblemen and provincial neighbors lose faith in each other and fall into conditions of violent sexual obsession. But should Margaret be held responsible for the behavior of men who react to her in these ways (Senn 547; Hieatt, “Multiple Plotting” 22-6)? Is restraint not precisely the responsibility of those thus affected (McAdam 37)?

If Empsonʼs equation of magic and beauty usefully enables such questions, other critics have found it too reductive and so sought to bring additional aspects of the playʼs internal logic into focus. Similarities have been detected, for instance, between Bacon and Edward: both men are proud and ambitious; both maintain irreverent servants (Miles and Rafe) who undercut their pretentions; and both must struggle to exert self-control after abusing extraordinary powers in self-serving ways (Senn 551-53; Dessen 32-5). At the same time, a contrast between Bacon and Bungay is implicitly drawn, grounded in each friarʼs magical and moral efficacy: Bungay seeks to solemnize the union between Margaret and Lacy, but Bacon hinders it; Bungay is bettered in his showdown with Vandermast, but Bacon prevails; thir respective reactions to the outwardly rippling effects of the magical head and prospective glass are furthermore marked by differences (Cartwright 241). Empsonʼs double plot was thus gradually replaced by a conception of multiple threads of action, raveled carefully into sequential movements. A tone of festive misrule dominates the playʼs first movement. Social and political norms are upended, for instance, when Edward and Rafe exchange clothes in scene 5. This sartorial switch provides Edward with a disguise in which to act upon his erotic desire for Margaret, while Rafe—one of the professional stageʼs first court-licensed, or ‘artificialʼ, fools—enjoys the freedom to “prince it out” in silk with reveling courtiers above his station. The carnivalesque inversion is funny, but Greene uses the material trappings of costume to reinforce thematic meaning as well: putting on the foolʼs motley signals Edwardʼs symbolic entrance into a condition of folly (i.e. his disruptive pursuit of Margaret), which must be relinquished by the playʼs final movement. His return to the stage in princely attire in scene 8 figures a willingness to set the world aright, to re-establish social and political order by redirecting his erotic energy into an uxorious (and diplomatic) union with Eleanor of Castile (Mortenson 195-97; Hieatt, “Multiple Plotting” 19-21).

While advocates of “rough unity” have done much to improve Friar Baconʼs critical reputation, it must be conceded that certain elements in the play stubbornly refuse to coalesce (Muir 48). Consider, for instance, its dualistic conception of academic life. Greene was awarded degrees by both Cambridge and Oxford, and he proudly broadcast his credentials on the title pages of his publications. In Friar Bacon, he praises his alma mater as a fount of intelligence and wealth, sustained by a fertile provincial landscape:

… these Oxford schools
Are richly seated near the river side,
The mountains full of fat and fallow deer,
The battling pastures laid with kine and flocks,
The town gorgeous with high-built colleges,
And scholars seemly in their grave attire,
Learnéd in searching principles of art. (TLN 1114-1120)

Bacon boasts to Vandermast that the institution surpasses any in Europe: “None read so deep as Oxenford contains. / There are within our academic state / Men that may lecture it in Germany / To all the doctors of your Belgic schools” (TLN 1127-1130). The university is also a magnet for monarchs. In the manner of Tudor visitations such as those Greene likely experienced as a student, King Henry directs his entourage and foreign guests to “progress straight to Oxford” to “hear dispute among the learnèd men” (TLN 483, 501), endowing the university with the prestige of the royal court (Shuger 313-14; Knight 355, 358).

Yet juxtaposed with this laudatory perspective is one more decidedly caustic, suggesting Greene was as intent to satirize the “academic state” as to celebrate it. While Baconʼs formal, book-bound scholarship leads him into the narrow and melancholy back alleys of necromancy, characters such as Lacy and Margaret are depicted reaping healthier rewards from the trial and error of experiential learning and intuition (Cartwright 224). The insular atmosphere of the university often appears to breed only tenuous happiness and success shot through with pride and envy. Peeling back the outward bravado of the all-male world of the doctors, Greene exposes a thin tissue of masculinity. Glory is routinely gained at othersʼ expense in the zero-sum game of academic reputation (McAdam 37-40). When Burden sniffs incredulously, for instance, at a proposal to commemorate Bacon “in characters of brass / And statues such as were built up in Rome” (TLN 215-216), Bacon puffs up his chest and subjects his colleague to brutal social humiliation. Magically summoning a tavern Hostess with a suggestively skewered piece of mutton in hand, he reveals her to be the extracurricular “book” with whom Burden secretly spends his nights “in alchemy” (TLN 266-294). By crude insinuation, we are to understand that his antagonistʼs nocturnal experiments (drinking and mingling fluids with a prostitute) have left him ‘burdenedʼ with venereal infection.

King Henryʼs visit ironically brings about a further deflation of scholarly dignity. Burden, Mason, and Clement plan in advance of the courtʼs arrival “to welcome all the western potentates” with “stately tragedies / Strange comic shows such as proud Roscius / Vaunted before the Roman emperors” (TLN 833-836). Late sixteenth-century university scholars commonly staged Latin plays before courtly visitors, regarding it as an opportunity to praise and impart political wisdom especially to royal patrons. Yet when Henry arrives, he is not at all interested in the doctorsʼ “stately” exhibitions. The king demands instead feats of magical showmanship—spectacular sensation rather than intellectual stimulation. The luxurious banquet that Bacon promises after the magical competition is of a piece with this eagerness for spectacle:

The basest waiter that attends thy cups
Shall be in honors greater than thyself.
And for thy cates rich Alexandria drugs,
Fetched by carvels from Egyptʼs richest straits,
Found in the wealthy strand of Africa,
Shall royalize the table of my king.
Wines richer than the Gyptian courtesan
Quaffed to Augustusʼs kingly countermatch
Shall be caroused in English Henryʼs feasts.
Candy shall yield the richest of her canes;
Persia, down her Volga by canoes
Send down the secrets of her spicery;
The Afric dates, myrobalans of Spain,
Conserves and suckets from Tiberias,
Cates from Judea, choicer than the lamp
That fired Rome with sparks of gluttony,
Shall beautify the board for Frederick;
And therefore grudge not at a friarʼs feast. (TLN 1370-1387)

The scholarsʼ idealized relationship to the court is effectively nullified, their political relevance downgraded. They occupy a position curiously like that of professional stage-players, whom Greene seemingly viewed with ambivalence, and with whom he may have worked only reluctantly (Shenk 21; Knight 359).

If it was felt to be demeaning to subsume the gravitas of learning into sensational courtly entertainment, consignment to the commercial milieu of the public theater would seem to border on abjection. Rafe expresses this idea when he arrives at Oxford to revel and brawl in his mock-role as the prince. Likening the scholarsʼ “doting nightcaps” to his foolʼs coxcomb, the jester threatens to exile the entire intellectual community in “a ship that shall hold all your colleges, and so carry away the Niniversity with a fair wind to the Bankside in Southwark” (TLN 893-897). The nonce concept of a “Niniversity”—which reduces the whole rarefied academy to a condition of humiliating folly—is then echoed in the scene of Milesʼs damnation. Castigated as the “greatest blockhead in all of Oxford” (TLN 540), Miles is at once a figure deserving of ridicule and a scapegoat who elicits a degree of pathos. When Bacon expels him from his position as a student-servant, Miles initially is content to “roam and range about the world” with his book, gown, and cap in hand, confident that his learning will secure him “promotion” (TLN 1683-1690). But dim economic prospects beyond the university soon disabuse him of optimism. “I would I had been made a bottle-maker when I was made a scholar,” he says, “for I can get neither to be a deacon, reader, nor schoolmaster; no, not the clerk of a parish” (TLN 2024-2026). Lacking even the modest “pottage and broth” served for sustenance at Oxford (TLN 1339), he leaps at the opportunity to work as a “tapster” in the “dry heat” of hell (TLN 2049-2054). In spurred boots, atop the devilʼs back, he exits roaring like the Vice, or the damned everyman of a moral interlude. The message delivered by Greeneʼs pastiche is secular, however, and bitterly ironic: Milesʼ willing descent into hell for “a lusty fire … a pot of good ale, a pair of cards, a swingeing piece of chalk, and a brown toast” (TLN 2044-2046) emblematizes the self-deluding and self-corrupting condition of a scholarly underclass compelled to pursue professional work to avoid impoverishment. In effect, Miles is a dramatic re-iteration of the hapless public persona Greene developed in his prose pamphlets—that of the delinquent intellect given over to cravings of the flesh, selling his talent to publishers and actors, and taking small consolation in the fact that he is not the sole reprobate from the Niniversity to have tumbled into a modern urban inferno: “Hell, quoth I, what talk you of hell to me? I know if I once come there I shall have the company of better men than myself; I shall also meet with some mad knaves in that place, and so long as I shall not sit there alone my care is the less” (The Repentance of Robert GreeneB2r).

3: “If thou hadst seen, as I did”: The Eyes and their Discontents

If Friar Baconʼs disjunctions ultimately defy the anachronistic criterion of formal unity, might they serve another purpose? Holding opposing points of view in tension creates, for instance, a mood that is interrogative rather than prescriptive. Questions are raised but no definitive answers are provided, an open-endedness that encourages active intellectual involvement on the part of playgoer. Do we easily condemn the arrogant necromancer when his professed intention is to protect the nation? May a dairymaid, if inherently noble, defy social propriety and marry a lord? Will academic prestige survive immersion in the solvent of professional labor? Greeneʼs habit of calling upon spectators to entertain multiple points of view hearkens back to the rhetorical training he received at Cambridge and Oxford (see the Textual Introduction). Regular participation in academic debate (disputatio) encouraged students to master the Ciceronian technique of argumentum in utremque partem—the taking up of alternative positions in relation to moral, ethical, and metaphysical controversies. Students engaged in this practice both formally and in impromptu ways many times a week, and in many it instilled a notion of truth that was more dialectical and paradoxical than absolute, one contingent upon the exigencies of time, circumstance, and prejudice (Altman 31-53; Shuger 313-20). “Ethical polyphony” is a feature of even the most propagandist drama written by humanist-educated playwrights, for whom the stage became “a kind of rhetorical gymnasium in which muscles could be flexed and imagined as if at full power” (Hunter, “Rhetoric” 113-16).

By compelling an audience to grapple with contradictory points of view, Friar Bacon in effect replicates the intellectual challenge of academic debate and signals its preoccupation with the perspectival nature of human experience. To reinforce this idea, Greene notably foregrounds the operation of human sight. Playgoers hear the word eye spoken nineteen times over the course of the action, and watch, look and see recur twenty, thirty, and over sixty times respectively. Each of Greeneʼs three main settings—the pastoral countryside in Sussex, the university at Oxford, and the peripatetic Plantagenet court—is a place “to see and to be seen” performing amorous, academic, and political roles (TLN 141). Moreover, acts of seeing conspicuously motivate what characters do and say. The thread of erotic intrigue is spun when Prince Edward first catches sight of Margaret. “Tell me, Ned Lacy,” he asks his friend, the Earl of Lincoln, “didst thou mark the maid, / How lively in her country weeds she looked?” (TLN 41-42). It is her eyes especially that enrapture him:

I tell thee Lacy, that her sparkling eyes
Do lighten forth sweet loveʼs alluring fire,
And in her tresses she doth fold the looks
Of such as gaze upon her golden hair. (TLN 55-58)

Lacy is no less profoundly affected by the sight of Margaret, later confessing to her that “when mine eyes surveyed your beauteous looks, / Love, like a wag, straight dived into my heart, / And there did shrine the idea of yourself” (TLN 713-15).

For Elizabethans, eyesight was generally thought to offer the most direct access to knowledge, an idea inherited from ancient Graeco-Arabic scholars and passed down in the works of medieval philosophers like Roger Bacon (c. 1214-c.1296) (Lindberg, “Science of Optics” 349-54). The eyes were said to cast out a pair of luminous rays which coupled with the likeness (or species, from the Greek specmeaning ‘the appearance of a thingʼ) radiated from from every visible thing, from the ants to the stars. Impressing itself upon the beholderʼs eye, the object of perception dematerialized, becoming a cognitive picture in the mind, a phantasm or fancy (Lindberg, Roger Baconxxv-lii; Tachau 336-59). The “alluring fire” that Margaretʼs eyes emit in the quotation above invokes precisely this model, reaching out and holding Edwardʼs gaze long enough for the beauty of her hair to “fold” (or enfold) the princeʼs own eye-beams. And what Lacy later describes as the “idea” of Margaret enshrined in his thoughts correlates with the second phase of perception outlined above, the creation of a mental phantasm or fancy. This faculty of the oculus mentis, or eye of the mind, was considered especially important: not only did it organize oneʼs conception of the external world, but it made comprehensible things divine and beyond the pale of everyday perception (Clark 10-18).

Relying heavily on sight to convey the nature of reality and metaphysics, Elizabethans were understandably anxious about its potential for distortion. Even minor misapprehensions, they observed, might radically warp the phantasms of interior experience, creating biased and even wholly inaccurate conceptions of reality. The question of whether “the commodities of sight” outweighed the “great hurts it brings to men” was a matter for serious debate considering how susceptible eyes could be to “voluptuous delights … which daily end in bitterness, alienation of sense, provocation to envy, irritation, and commotion against the heart” (Estienne F1r-F4v). As Stuart Clark has argued, one of the defining aspects of the early modern period writ large was the way “vision came to be characterized by uncertainty and unreliability, such that access to visual reality could no longer be normally guaranteed” (2). Indeed, Friar Bacon expresses considerable skepticism about the integrity of sight as an epistemological basis and foundation of moral practice. Sight may be a powerful means of acquiring knowledge of the world, but as Lacy cautions, “Eyes are dissemblers and fancy is but queasy” (TLN 1522). We all too easily mistake “fond conceit” for objectivity, as Margaret observes, giving ourselves over to skewed perspectives on reality whose insubstantial “hap and essence hangeth in the eye” (TLN 1957-1958).

Experiences of erotic melancholy and idolatry affect perception most prominently in Friar Bacon, and the distortions they create are represented as analogous. In Elizabethan medicine, the perturbations of melancholy were held to be as disruptive as those of devils or magicians (Clark 39, 53-4). Dullness was said to be induced “both in outward senses and conceit” when a “splenetic fog” prevented the eyes from providing a “true report” of reality; thus clouded, “uglie illusions” and “monstrous fictions” easily populated the mind, all “vayne, false, and voide of grounde” (Bright 101-3, 124). It is an apt diagnosis of the “malcontented” Prince Edward (TLN 1). Brooding for the better part of the play in a “melancholy dump” (TLN 15), the princeʼs troubled emotions lead him down a dark path of sexual aggressiveness and threatened violence, and most disturbingly, so long as his vantage point remains inflected by his passion, he remains imperceptive of his own cruelty—a cognitive prisoner of himself. His attraction to Margaret, the “bonny damsel” in “stammel red,” is depicted as unwholesome and dehumanizing: he fills her fatherʼs lodge with venison with the expectation of venery in return, a “dear” for the “deer” on his royal game reserve (TLN 1-23). When Margaret rejects the princeʼs advances, his sexual frustration leaves the royal son/sun “like to a troubled sky / When heavenʼs bright shine is shadowed with a fog” (TLN 1-2). The depth of his obsession is sounded by his Petrarchan blazoning of her “curious imagery” (TLN 66)—her hair, cheeks, teeth and lips—an impassioned exercise that transforms the Fressingfield laborer into a deity on earth:

When as she swept like Venus through the house,
And in her shape fast folded up my thoughts,
Into the milk-house went I with the maid,
And there amongst the cream bowls she did shine
As Pallas ʼmongst her princely huswifery.
She turned her smock over her lily arms
And dived them into milk to run her cheese;
But whiter than the milk her crystal skin,
Checked with lines of azure, made her blush,
That art or nature durst bring for compare.
Ermsby, if thou hadst seen, as I did note it well,
How beauty played the huswife, how this girl
Like Lucrece laid her fingers to the work,
Thou wouldst with Tarquin hazard Rome and all
To win the lovely maid of Fressingfield. (TLN 77-91)

Edward may insist he has witnessed Margaretʼs beauty for what it is (“if thou hadst seen, as I did note it well”) but the ironic distance between the figure his imagination has constructed and the woman herself is plain. Most ominously, in the concluding lines of his reverie he self-identifies with Tarquin, the legendary Roman king whose furtive and destructive rape of the matron Lucrece instigated both her tragic suicide and his political overthrow. The point of Greeneʼs allusion is clear: Edward must escape the prison of possessive lust, or similar horrors will follow.

At the height of his infatuation with Margaret, Edward sends the disguised Lacy to “espy her loves” and woo by proxy, while enlisting Baconʼs magical aid to peer invasively into her private activity (TLN 144-145). His use of the words “plot” and “policy” to describe these designs imply rationality, but the emotionally reckless and despotic nature of his behavior is soon apparent: “it must be necromantic spells, / And charms of art that must enchain her love” (TLN 109, 121, 125-126). The involvement of Baconʼs mysterious glass helps to underscore the problematic nature of his “troubled” gaze. Staring into the instrument grants Edward a precise visual image of Lacy and Margaretʼs intention to marry, but it does not permit him to hear their conversation. Sight alone prevents Edward from registering Lacyʼs agonized deliberation over how to protect Margaret from the princeʼs vexing lust and the prince himself from the stigma of dishonor. In Lacyʼs own words:

Recant thee, Lacy, thou art put in trust.
Edward, thy sovereignʼs son, hath chosen thee
A secret friend to court her for himself,
And darest thou wrong thy prince with treachery?
Lacy, love makes no exception of a friend,
Nor deems it of a prince but as a man.
Honor bids thee control him in his lust.
His wooing is not for to wed the girl,
But to entrap her and beguile the lass.
Lacy, thou lovest; then brook not such abuse,
But wed her, and abide thy princeʼs frown:
For better die than see her live disgraced. (TLN 689-700)

The princeʼs reaction to Margaret and Lacyʼs affection punctuates Greeneʼs point about the dangerous potential of solitary perspectival confinement. “Gogʼs wounds, Bacon, they kiss!” the prince cries, raising his dagger, “Iʼll stab them!” (TLN 762). Baconʼs response (“Oh hold your hands, my lord, it is the glass!”) tells us Edward directs his anger toward the simulacrum produced by the magical object, a vivid externalized metaphor for the capacity of interior phantasms to divert the subject from reason and objectivity (Senn 552-53). A timely moment of clarity and the exertion of will are all that prevent the precarious situation from tipping over into tragedy. Reining in his destructive caprice, Edward opens his eyes to the fact that his darkened state of amorousness has made him confuse “shadows” for “substances” (TLN 764-65).

Edwards allusion to shadows and substances echoes language used in theological discourse of the era. The religious conviction that eyes were gateways to temptation and wickedness did much to further undermine Elizabethan confidence in visual perception. “The light of the body is the eye” pronounced the gospel, “when thine eye is evil, thy body is also full of darkness” (Luke 11: 34). For English Protestants, the glories of God were everywhere visible, but the universe was packed as well with vanities that threatened to beguile sensory and rational faculties corrupted by Original Sin. Calvinist clergyman such as George Hakewill (1578-1649) decried the world as a theater of misapprehension in which every spectator was prone to:

the delusion of the sight by the subtlety of the devil, by the charms of sorcerers, by the spells and exorcisms of conjurers, by the legerdemain of jugglers, by the knavery of priests and friars, by the nimbleness of tumblers and ropewalkers, by the sleights of false and cunning merchants, by the smooth deportment and behavior of hypocrites, by the stratagems of generals, by the giddiness of the brain, by the distemper of frenzies, and lastly, by the violent passions of fear and melancholy; besides a thousand pretty conclusions drawn out of the bowels of natural philosophy and the mathematics; by the burning of certain mixed powders, oils, & liquors; by the casting of false lights, by the reflection of glasses, and the like (53-54)

A generation earlier, the danger inherent in such delusions had been spelled out by the second Elizabethan Tome of Homilies (1563). Preached in parish churches as a matter of government policy, the official sermon “against peril of idolatry” denounced the worship of Catholicismʼs material adornments, claiming that “if religion stand in godly things (and there is no godliness but in heavenly things) then be images without religion” (fol. 24r). To invest a fresco, a sculpture, or other hand-wrought image of “dead stock or stone, gold or silver” with spiritual power was to devote oneself to an ephemeral creation instead of the incorruptible Creator; it was a diverting exercise of eye-service in place of the ear-service and genuine comprehension of the Word considered necessary for salvation. According to the homilist, the “inclination to idolatry” was innate in human beings, leaving “infinite multitudes” entrapped in their adoration of images like “dared [fascinated] larks in that gaze”; indeed, “how should the unlearned, simple, & foolish scape the nets and snares of idols and images, in the which the wisest and the best learned have been so entangled, trapped, and wrapped?” (fol. 67r-v, 70r; Clark 163-66) The endemic nature of this idolatrous instinct thus motivated Protestant reformers to limit the use of images, and in some cases to remove them altogether, in the practice of worship.

In Edwardʼs case, the iconoclastic act a psychological one that becomes apparent to him in a critical moment in scene 7. As he menaces the kneeling Margaret and Lacy with his dagger, a timely moment of self-reflection permits him to recognize the nature of his false adoration; “subduing fancyʼs passion,” he acknowledges the earnestness with which is friends love each other, and the deified idol—the false construction of a woman— enshrined in his imagination relinquishes its hold on him. In the wake of the Reformation, as Huston Diehl has observed, equating religious idolatry with an obsession for feminine beauty became a standard rhetoric trope: “whatever entices the eyes, beguiles or enchants the mind, fires the imagination, or captivates the heart is idolatrous, and according the Renaissance theories of eros, women do all of these things” (164). Adjusting his perception of Margaret is thus more than a matter of honor for Edward; it is a spiritual victory:

Edward art thou that famous prince of Wales
Who at Damascus beat the Saracens
And broughtʼst home triumph on thy lanceʼs point,
And shall thy plumes be pulled by Venus down?
Is it princely to dissever loversʼ leagues,
To part such friends as glory in their loves?
Leave, Ned, and make a virtue of this fault,
And further Peg and Lacy in their loves.
So in subduing fancyʼs passion,
Conquering thyself, thou getʼst the richest spoil.-- (TLN 1058-1067)

An even more direct engagement with the theme of idolatrous perception becomes apparent in scenes involving the brazen head. Greeneʼs interest in the theme had already been signaled by his earlier staging of an Islamic head of brass in Alphonsus (see the Supplementary Materials). In Friar Bacon, the property is again figured as a graven image, “contrived and framed” with infernal assistance (TLN 229-230). Bacon, overwhelmed by fascination for the artifact, places the entirety of his faith in its promise of knowledge, power, and protection. Diverging from his prose source, Greene lengthens the duration of the friarʼs devotion to the object: after seven years spent fashioning it, he watches it for “threescore days” as if “Argus lived and had his hundred eyes” (TLN 1584, 1586). Protestant polemic regularly indicted the illusory or “magical” thinking that enabled idols to be treated as though vibrant with miraculous power, deeming the encouragement of such thinking on the part of Catholic authorities an act of “conjuring” or “juggling” (Clark 166, 174-89). To the Elizabethan homilist idols were “dead” things destined to perish in time. The same message is articulated in Greeneʼs allegory by the brazen headʼs famous utterance—“Time is. Time Was. Time is past.” Even brass, that common symbol of endurance (as in Shakespeareʼs 65^th sonnet), will be reduced to dust eventually by the deprivations of time. Greene makes the point emblematically when the brazen head is finally broken into pieces like an eggshell, exposing its ultimate hollowness and insubstantiality. Notably, it is a moment Bacon fails to see. Drowsy after weeks of staring at his idol, he has closed his eyes to sleep, a standard means of signifying spiritual vulnerability in early English drama.

The playʼs festive resolution depends upon the acknowledgment of idolatryʼs perils (Dalhquist 70). Edward must set aside his voyeuristic imaginings of Margaret and attend to the political duties that await him at the court of his father, King Henry; Bacon must abjure delusions of magical grandeur and humble himself before another father, God. But before these iconoclastic acts disrupt the excitement stirred in these characters by their idols, Greeneʼs dialectical mindset, his habit of engaging with controversies in utramque partem, leads him to impress upon the audience the powerful claims of the perspectives rejected. Turning from Margaret proves a genuine challenge for Edward because it means stifling desire that, while morally anarchic, is nevertheless authentic. He surrenders autonomy over his erotic future as he pivots toward Eleanor of Castile and a diplomatic union arranged by his father (TLN 1094-1095). Bacon, too, upon awakening from his literal and figurative sleep, must ensure the shards of his smashed prospective glass are added to the pile that was once the brazen head: “So fade the glass, and end with it the shows / That necromancy did infuse the crystal with” (TLN 1867-1868). In breaking the glass, he signals his willingness to forego ambitiousness that, while misguided, is understandably seductive because rooted in the familiar desire to transcend human limitations, and to fend off the dread of mortality with the shield of worldly fame.

We will never know the extent to which Greene was personally invested in advocating for iconoclasm. Some argue that his rehearsal of moral conventions onstage amounts to no more than lip-service, a superficial and opportunistic appropriation of earlier moral drama essentially emptied of its original import (Peterson 78-80). Others sense in Greeneʼs work an authentic and even vigorous moralism, possibly instilled in youth in the orbit of the charismatic Calvinist preacher John More (Greene, Repentance C1r-C4v; Ide 432-36). Even these critics, it should be noted, remain divided as to whether Friar Baconʼs iconoclasm exhorts specifically against Catholic religious practice (Sager 86) or against an emergent atheistic devotion to scientific technology (Dahlquist 67-73). The view expressed in the present edition of the play is that calculation indeed lurks in Greeneʼs ambiguity. The disembodied hand that destroys the brazen head with its accompanying thunder and lightning evokes a distinctly supernatural agent, hinting at the generally Calvinist conception of a divine presence beyond the meagre capacity of human comprehension. When Bacon breaks his prospective glass with his own hands, it is arguably the figurative rather than the literal dimension of the moment that is most striking. The glass has been described as an instrument that shows its users “what so their thoughts or heartsʼ desires could wish” (TLN 1809-10). The view it affords is telescopic, but not a more objective: true objectivity, the play asserts, inheres in knowing that perception is partial, situated, and easily warped. The smashed glass is thus emblematic of the radical interior transformation of the oculus mentis that Protestant reformers considered necessary for salvation: the repudiation of a technologically-enhanced view of the world, and with it the false assumption of godʼs-eye omniscience, connotes a decisive break with intellectual pride. To perceive less with the bodily eye is to be better oriented in relation to spiritual reality.

This generalized pattern of broken idols aligns neatly with the ideological aims of the acting company that first performed Greeneʼs play, the Queenʼs Men. Although the government of Elizabeth I sought to inculcate an iconoclastic attitude with its prescribed homiletic discourse, it did not generally favor the indiscriminate destruction of church fabric by more fervent Puritans intent on root-and-branch religious reformation. In this context, Friar Baconʼs specific emphasis on idols of the mind and its downplaying of zealous idol-breaking by human agents, appears to reflect the more moderate stance of the playersʼ nominal patron. And as the final section of this essay will show, it one of several aspects of the play calibrated to suit the actors who represented Queen Elizabeth and her interests.

4: “Three-formed Luna” and “Dianaʼs rose”: a Play for the Queenʼs Men

Friar Bacon was written to serve the commercial and ideological ends of a specific acting company, the Queenʼs Men. Until recently, this all-star troupe was thought to have fallen casualty to professional resettlements in the early 1590s that enabled selected companies such as the Chamberlainʼs and Admiralʼs Men to thrive in London. But over the past two decades, in response to the seminal work of Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, theater historians have considerably revised this narrative. The profile of a stagnated company relegated to the outermost reaches of the county after failing to compete in the capitalʼs burgeoning theatrical marketplace has been replaced by an understanding of the Queenʼs Men as a troupe purpose-built for commercial touring, one that from the time of its inception in 1583 to its last recorded performance in 1602/3 remained “quite simply, the best known and most widely travelled professional company in the kingdom” (McMillin and MacLean 67). And as the royal actors rode from venue to venue along established touring circuits, their engagement in commercial playing served to facilitate another, more complex objective. Two powerful sponsors of the company from the queenʼs privy council, Sir Francis Walsingham and Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester (from whose earlier company several of queenʼs players had been drawn) were united in their opposition to both Catholics and radical Puritans in the heated religious and political climate of the 1580s. The involvement of these two elites in the founding of the Queenʼs Men suggests the company may have been mandated “to increase the prestige of their patron throughout the land, to harness the theatre in the service of moderate Protestant ideology, and to add a vivid group of travelers who might serve the councilʼs needs for secret information about recusants or foreign visitors” (McMillin and MacLean 24). Viewed in this light, any playbook commissioned by the company would need to appeal to diverse audiences across the kingdom, while at the same time enabling the players to fulfill their role as emissaries on behalf of Elizabeth I.

Friar Bacon satisfies both criteria. The text as we have it appears deliberately tailored to the dramaturgical needs of touring actors. The playʼs insistence on narrative variety rather than organic unity becomes less puzzling when we consider the practical need for touring performers to double their parts. By alternating character groups and settings onstage, players were given time to change their costumes and prepare any properties, effects, or music required in scenes to come. Greeneʼs interspersing of pastoral, academic, and courtly scenes, punctuated by space in which clowns could extemporize adheres closely to this pattern (McMillin and MacLean 97-120, 124-54). That Greene wrote with the theatrical economy of touring in mind is also evident in his habit of calling for costumes and properties used elsewhere in the Queenʼs Menʼs repertory. Some stage attire was obviously customary and easily repurposed: the crowns and regalia worn by King Henry and the European dignitaries, for example, are likely the same employed in The Famous Victories of Henry V, The Troublesome Reign of King John, The True Tragedy of Richard III and King Leir. Similarly, Bacon and Bungayʼs mendicant habits probably to dress the raucous friars in The Troublesome Reign. Rustic attire, too, worn in scenes set in the Sussex countryside could have doubled as the disguises donned by Cordella and Gallia in Leir (after being acquired initially perhaps for the companyʼs lost pastoral Phyllida and Corin). Many weapons and other hand-held items—daggers, rapiers, halberds, books, bags of money, and so on—will have been reused in the same way. Even rarer properties appear to have been recycled: the lionʼs skin used to dress the spirit of Hercules in Friar Bacon is presumably the same seized by the Bastard from Austria in The Troublesome Reign; and the brazen head itself was perhaps a modified version of the speaking head in the well from The Old Wivesʼ Tale and almost certainly the brass head featured in the Queenʼs Menʼs lost adaptation of the romance Orson and Valentine.

Writing for the royal actors, Greene sought to entertain as broad a base of playgoers as possible. His emphasis on eye-catching emblematic spectacle has already been discussed, though it is worth noting how visual displays such as Bungayʼs conjuration of the Hesperidian tree and dragon need not have been sacrificed when the play was staged on the road. Numerous proposals have been made for how the play may have worked within the structural conditions of Londonʼs sixteenth-century amphitheaters: the tree and dragon are typically imagined, for instance, rising and disappearing through a trapdoor in the stage platform, while the delineation of Baconʼs study is said to have been achieved using a fixed traverse and curtain upstage. But the players were obviously capable of creative alternatives to these techniques. Stage directions such as “the tree appears with the dragon shooting fire” and “Exit the spirit with Vandermast and the tree” are sufficiently elastic to allow for major properties to be whisked about by hand or on wheels (TLN 1279-1280). A similar flexibility marks the staging of “curtains” (TLN 1561, 1600): several plays assigned to the repertory of the Queenʼs Men explicitly call for their use (The Old Wivesʼ Tale, Selimus, A Looking Glass for London), which means the company may have traveled with a portable canopy, possibly large enough to house the bed in which Bacon falls asleep. But the versatility of the players suggests they may also have simply made do with the conditions encountered in their various venues, exploiting, for instance, the tapestries suspended in the entranceways to great halls to curtail drafts, or simply moving about the playing area to represent distinct locations (McMillin and MacLean 139-40).

Conviviality is an important feature of Friar Bacon, another notable sign of Greeneʼs intention to appeal to a broad audience. Although the play at times dances on the precipice of tragedy, it sustains its holiday tone through the repetition of words expressing happiness (“frolic”, “jolly”, “merry”) and cumulative images of commensality: “Butter and cheese, cream and fat venison” (TLN 440), “a lusty bottle of wine” (TLN 1105), “viands such as Englandʼs wealth affords … ready set to furnish the boards” (TLN 2149). The world of the play is one of pastimes—the sportive pursuit of game, fairing, and reveling. No less than nine of the playʼs scenes conclude with invitations to carouse or attend a feast (Lavin xxx-xxxi; Mortenson 197).

Essential to the overall mood of merriment are the playʼs clowns. Greene understood the need to fashion roles suitable for the Queenʼs Menʼs comic talents, especially perhaps its most beloved comedian Richard Tarlton, if indeed the production was underway before the actorʼs death in September 1588 (see the Textual Introduction). The courtly fool Rafe Simnell and the academic delinquent Miles are creatures of enormous energy and appetite, not unlike other comic pairings in the companyʼs repertory, such as Derrick and John Cobbler in The Famous Victories. Rafeʼs surname gestures toward Lambert Simnell, the notorious youth who posed as a Yorkist claimant to the Tudor crown a century earlier before being judged harmless enough to serve as a spit-turner in the kingʼs kitchen (Holinshed 765-67). Rafe, the licensed wit, is likewise a pretender, roistering in Plantagenet clothes and temporarily upending the decorum of the princeʼs entourage. Miles, too, overturns formalities with ritualized irreverence, calling out the hypocrisies of his Oxford masters with an intellectual and verbal dexterity lacking in the prose-source namesake from which he is adapted. Much like Tarlton, the performer Greene may have envisioned in the part, Miles sings in different voices, shifting effortlessly from earthy, innuendo-laden prose to Skeltonics, the East Anglian verse form popularized by the courtly satirist John Skelton (1463-1529): “Salvete omnes reges, that govern your greges in Saxony and Spain, in England and in Almain; for all this frolic rabble must I cover table, with trenchers, salt, and cloth, and then look for your broth” (TLN 1326-1329). Essential to the appeal of these roles is their physicality, and Greene wisely assigns opportunities to each for comic improvisation. Rafeʼs mock-haughtiness as he impersonates Edward (TLN 513-525) and public drunkenness in his “company of rufflers” (TLN 863); Milesʼs tumbling when boxed about the ears (TLN 551,575) and his juggling of books, dishes, and weapons (TLN 172, 1325, 1563)—the eye may pass easily over such moments on the page, but an energetic performance renders them instantly and profoundly funny. The laughter generated by such moments does much to explain the Queenʼs Menʼs commercial success. Moreover, the pleasure seems to have been integral to the companyʼs larger ideological goal of strengthening communal bonds in a nation sorely divided by politics and religion.

McMillin and MacLean have argued that each surviving Queenʼs Men play centers on an “image of the queen or themes of the queenʼs political interests” (166). One example of such thematic foregrounding—the staging of iconoclasm in a manner consistent with the crownʼs moderate brand of Protestantism—has already been discussed. But the playʼs multivalence becomes apparent if we consider the telescopic powers of Baconʼs prospective glass in the context of a holiday performance at the queenʼs court, where concerns about political and religious subversion by foreign and domestic adversaries were especially acute. In the two decades after Elizabethʼs excommunication by Rome, members of the queenʼs inner circle tasked with protecting her brought to light numerous plots intending her harm, some real, others imagined. Courtiers such as Walsingham and William Cecil aimed to neutralize the danger by cultivating networks of “spialls,” or intelligence gatherers, throughout the realm and abroad, a practice that fueled the growth of modern espionage. The belongings of strangers were searched at ports, private correspondence was intercepted, houses were ransacked, and anyone suspected of disaffection was at risk of being violently interrogated (Alford passim). The impact of the stateʼs growing surveillance apparatus is frequently reflected in the arts of the period, vividly for instance in the so-called Rainbow portrait of Elizabeth (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Elizabeth_I_Rainbow_Portrait.jpg) which depicts the queen cloaked protectively in a bright orange mantle embroidered with human eyes and ears—emblems of the vigilant watchfulness she depended upon to maintain sovereignty (Strong 195 n65; Dedijer 12-15, 20-8, 42-3). It has been suggested the Queenʼs Men themselves participated in the Elizabethan trade in secrets, reporting observations to the crown about the people and events they encountered while on tour (McMillin and MacLean 22-9).

Baconʼs glass, with its panoptic capacity to detect the perceived disloyalty of unsuspecting subjects, may have raised the eyebrows of those engaged in this shadowy activity, and perhaps those of the queen herself. Whether staged as a fantastical mirror, a crystal, or a no less wondrous prototype of the telescope (see the Textual Introduction), the glass raises challenging questions about the desirability of a technology that exercises so much power. Greeneʼs recourse to the dialectic between “comedy” and “tragedy” when describing the glassʼs use for spying is telling (TLN 683, 1818). A courtly intelligencer accustomed to intruding upon the private lives of others might presumably see the glass as a fabulous tool with which to root out dissidents, and his or her response to its condemnation and destruction might reasonably then involve a measure of regret. But quite a different response can be imagined on the part of playgoers watching Friar Bacon at a local guildhall or pleasure fair: for the great majority of the public, the pervasive culture of Elizabethan surveillance was shadowy and frightening for its capacity to ensnare the innocent. Particularly when the Queenʼs Men brought the play to communities more heavily populated by recusants, where the atmosphere might be headier with distrust and fear, a spy glass directed suspiciously toward the private lives of subjects was liable to interpreted as an instrument of tyrannical governance. Indeed, would it not seem the more menacing because the information it provides is incomplete and easily misinterpreted? Topcliffean pain was administered to the innocent as freely as to those guilty of conspiracy, as subject mistakenly suspected of treason knew only too well. The interpretation of the glass, then—whether as pragmatically useful spy-tool begrudgingly relinquished, or an implement of authoritarianism reassuringly broken—was significantly dependent on where, and for whom, the play was performed. Rather like an anamorphic painting, composed of distinct and incompatible images visible only when the viewer shifts her vantage point, the representation of the glass indulges a fantasy of political surveillance in a moment of perceived existential threat while, at the same time, insinuating that no such power can be tolerated because of the social division it brings about.

When Margaret suddenly reverses her decision to enter a convent in the playʼs final scene, we sense another moment seemingly calculated to appeal to different constituencies of the Queenʼs Menʼs audience. After exchanging her red woolen dress for the pale habit of a nun, she causes her father and friends distress by asking: “Is not heavenʼs joy before earthʼs fading bliss, / And life above sweeter than life in love?” (TLN 1972-1973) Presumably, a minority of those originally attending the play would have approved of her intention to retire from the world to the cloisters of an institution officially suppressed a generation earlier. But the moment is not without complexity: Greene is meticulous in providing some justification for Margaretʼs contemptus mundi posture, having already shown us her intense emotional suffering in response to Lacyʼs broken affiance and then underscoring the callousness of his premarital ‘testʼ of her loyalty by depicting him as surprisingly blunt and impatient when he returns “booted and spurred” with his chauvinistic clique of aristocratic friends:

Lacy

Why then Margaret will be shorn a nun?

Margaret

Margaret hath made a vow which may not be revoked.

Warren

We cannot stay, my lord, an if she be so strict;
Our leisure grants us not to woo afresh.

Ermsby

Choose you, fair damsel. Yet the choice is yours:
Either a solemn nunnery or the court,
God or Lord Lacy. Which contents you best?
To be a nun, or else Lord Lacyʼs wife?

Lacy

A good motion.-- Peggy, your answer must be short. (TLN 1974-1982)

“God or Lord Lacy. Which contents you best?” Charles Crupi calls this “perhaps the most remarkable question in all of Elizabethan drama” (128). In a play brimming with questiones customized to generate debate, it is certainly the most provocative. How to interpret the tone of Margaretʼs response?

The flesh is frail. My Lord doth know it well
That when he comes with his enchanting face,
Whateʼer betide I cannot say him nay. (TLN 1983-1985)

Does she deliver her proverbial answer immediately and with exuberance while casting her nunʼs attire to the ground? Or is she more deliberative, pausing and weighing the stakes before selecting the option she considers less imperfect? Different dramatic effects seem possible, and we cannot help but anticipate that natural shocks will be endured in the future.

Placing the moment in the Protestant context of marriage resolves some, though not all, of its tension. According to Mary Beth Rose, the sixteenth century saw the cultural ideals of virginity and celibacy gradually displaced by a new respect for sexual love and companionship in marriage. There was growing conviction that conjugal affection and loyalty strengthened marital bonds, thereby solidifying societyʼs foundation. The ideals proved so transformative, in fact, that they helped to erode traditional delineations of social rank (4, 32-40). Rose reads Margaretʼs decision to shed her nunʼs apparel and marry a man to whom she is physically attracted as “a final farewell to the medieval ideas of love and sexuality” (33-4). This is certainly consistent with the Queenʼs Menʼs mandate to endorse their Protestant patrons in government, and those harboring strong anti-Catholic prejudices presumably took comfort in Margaretʼs casting aside her nunʼs attire. And yet, as mentioned above, a feeling of tension lingers. In having Margaret declare her intention to lead a life of perpetual virginity, Greene depicts her reasons for doing as perfectly comprehensible. He also makes plain what would be sacrificed in pursuing that ideal to the end. We might wonder how such a scene played out before the monarch herself at court. Queen Elizabeth was interested in securing for herself an emotionally satisfying marriage, as her pained verse concerning the Duc of Anjouʼs leave-taking in 1582, “On Monsieurʼs Departure,” makes clear. But when no suitable negotiation could be arranged, the effort was made instead to enshrine her in the public eye as a deified and virginal queen (Strong 16; Hackett, Virgin Mother 73, 95, 201). By suggesting that Margaretʼs decision is a difficult one emotionally, Greene may have been offering a subtle gesture of respect to a patron whose experience was ostensibly similar, though it resulted in a radically different outcome.

Friar Baconʼs concluding scene exhibits an even more unconcealed effort to shape a positive image of Elizabeth. By this point in the action, Greene has established a consistent pattern of allusions to powerful classical goddesses that poets of the 1580s had assembled into a coded vocabulary for praising the queen. Identifying Elizabeth with deities of the ancient world, Helen Hackett explains, “helped to negotiate the challenge of asserting that she was Godʼs anointed and his earthly agent to advance the true faith, while avoiding forms of praise of her sacredness that might smack of idolatry and the Catholic cult of saints” (“A New Image” 240). A prominent figure in this discourse of political mythography was Hecate, the diva triformis, or triple-bodied goddess who incorporated aspects of Selene (or her Roman equivalent Luna), Artemis (or Diana), the Erinys (or Furies), and Pallas (or Minerva). The powerful “three-formed Luna,” as Greene calls her (TLN 1575), wove together traditions of veneration for feminine wisdom, chastity, and self-sufficiency against male violence and unfaithfulness. Importantly, she was endowed with powers of enchantment. There can be little doubt that Greene meant learned audiences to recognize Elizabeth when alluding to this figure (and especially to the constituent deities Luna and Diana). In so doing, he quietly articulates an argument about the efficacy of the queenʼs own political magic. For much of the play, Baconʼs “strange” necromantic powers are said to be limitless. But late in the action, he boasts of once having so torn the skies of the earth that:

… three-formed Luna hid her silver looks,
Trembling upon her concave continent,
When Bacon read upon his magic book. (TLN 1575-1577)

Literally, Bacon is saying he obscured the moon with darkness, but the provocatively ironic nature of the statement was not likely lost on its original audience: metaphorically, Bacon claims that his masculine powers were so terrible as to fright the queen herself. The friar notably utters the lines in a moment of shame, humility, and repentance, for, as Greene carefully implies, there is in fact no basis for comparison. Baconʼs magic has been exposed as dangerous and dis-unifying, not the patriotic and protective force initially promised. And it is precisely at this moment that Greene refocuses attention on the queenʼs more substantial power to defend the English nation.

The final scene opens with members of the growing English court marching in pomp across the stage, showing off a variety of emblematic properties—“a pointless sword” (mercy), a “globe” (earthly political power), and “a rod of gold with a dove” (equity, peace, the holy spirit) (TLN 2074-2079). Processions of this kind were a signature aspect of the Queenʼs Menʼs aesthetic (McMillin and Maclean 140), a direct response to their royal patronʼs delight in pageantry and the intellectual game of decoding allegory. King Henry invites Bacon to demonstrate his “deep prescience” by sharing a glimpse of what the future holds in store for England: “what strange event shall happen to this land?” (TLN 2219) The friarʼs vision of things to come remains partial, his goal of God-like omniscience having by now been proven illusory. But in a cryptic revelation he succeeds in gleaning a “royal garden” destined to be disturbed by “stormy threats of war” before “peace from heaven shall harbor in these leaves.” He proceeds to catalogue an array of magnificent flowers, each embodying a deity of the past—“Venusʼs hyacinth”, the “gillyflowers” of Juno, “Pallasʼs bay”—harbingers all to the growth of a singular “matchless flower”—“Dianaʼs rose”—beneath which all must “stoop and wonder” (TLN 2124-2141). From the vantage point of the playʼs thirteenth-century characters, Baconʼs prophecy is incomprehensibly “mystical,” but for Greeneʼs audience “Dianaʼs rose” was instantly intelligible.

The rose of the Tudor dynasty had become a poetical commonplace, familiar to courtly consumers of culture in literary works such as Edmund Spenserʼs The Shepheardʼs Calender, which figures its “mayden Queene” as “the flowre of Virgins” whom “No morall blemish may … blotte” (C4v). In Baconʼs prophecy, then, Elizabeth was encouraged to recognize herself. Greeneʼs relation of a floral pageant featuring Venus, Juno, and Pallas participates also notably participates in the contemporary fashion among panegyrists of incorporating Elizabeth into narratives of the mythological Judgment of Paris (Hackett, “A New Image” 225-30, 254). When Paris was tasked with awarding a golden apple to whoever among Venus, Juno, and Pallas Athena he judged to be the fairest, he selected Venus because she promised him the affection of the worldʼs most beautiful woman, Helen of Sparta. The consequences of the decision proved disastrous, setting in motion the death and destruction of the Trojan War. Greeneʼs version of the contest is distinct in that it judges Diana/Elizabeth to be superior to all three contestant goddesses in beauty, authority, and wisdom. In this respect, it constitutes blatant flattery. But it also cleverly alters the outcome of what was conventionally understood to be tragic narrative, thereby reinforcing the association that Baconʼs prophecy makes between the English queen and a state of peace.

In its rich final conceit, the play figures Elizabeth as a self-sacrificing protector of the realm. In addition to praising her enchanting beauty, Greeneʼs calculated allusion to Diana ascribes to the queen an otherworldly constancy; like Diana, she remains unmarried, an icon of chastity and virginity, concepts that her shrewd propagandists had crafted into a political narrative insisting she had restrained all personal passion to become the mystical spouse of her nation (Wilson 134-35, 213-19). Imbricated, too, among these potential meanings, and perhaps most impressively, is the assertion that Elizabeth occupies a privileged place in an unfolding providential history, an topic of central concern in other history plays acted by the Queenʼs Men, such as The True Tragedy of Richard III and The Troublesome Reign of King John. Wars may blight the garden of Englandʼs past and present, Baconʼs speech insists, but the “fair bud” of the house of Tudor—Eliza Triumphans—holds the promise of peace to come. Greene thus endows the queen with protective magic that is at once stranger than Baconʼs and more powerful for its connection to the mysterious authority of Providence. Although more carefully coded than the encomia articulated in The True Tragedyand The Troublesome Reign, Friar Baconʼs implicit message about Queen Elizabethʼs sanctity must have been perfectly comprehensible to both players and playgoers as they joined in collective prayer for her health after each performance. The beauty of Margaret (“the flower of all towns”) may be splendid and the power of Friar Bacon (“Englandʼs only flower”) awesome; no one however was to be understood as richer in beauty or power than Dianaʼs strange and wondrous “rose.”