1. Textual Essay

On May 14, 1594, the London Stationersʼ company registered a playbook “entituledthe Historye of ffryer BACON and ffryer BOUNGAYE” on behalf of the printer Adam Islip. Islipʼs 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 (ESTC 12267). 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 Whiteʼs shop under “the signe of the Gun” in St Paulʼs churchyard, advertised as having been “plaid by her Maiesties seruants” and “[m]ade by Robert Greene Maister of Arts.” Greeneʼs name appears again on the bookʼs final leaf along with his Horatian motto, “Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci” (‘he who mingles profit with pleasure wins every pointʼ), 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 Queenʼs Men edition.

Islipʼs quarto shows few obvious signs of error. It collates signatures A to I continuously and running titles are printed without interruption from A3vto 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. TLN 850, 1203, 1739, 1821, 1866, 2059), and Islip appears to have been working with a damaged ffligature (TLN 953, 1602, 1853). Omitted space resulted in several crowded lines (e.g. TLN 154, 977, 1581) and one line has inadvertently been set twice (TLN 1781-82). Skeltonic verse spoken by the clown Miles is rendered as prose (e.g TLN 887-892), 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 (TLN 610). Only rarely is substantive misreading apparent, as in Hellens cape for “Helenʼs scape” (TLN 666), Scocon for “Saxon” (TLN 830), and Essex for “Sussex” (TLN 931). The relative absence of corruption suggests Islip had access to an orderly and legible manuscript.

On 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 (TLN 1611). W.W. Gregʼs early edition for the Malone Society (1926) regards this notation as “an addition actually made in the playhouse” and concludes on this basis that Q1 was typeset from a prompting manuscript that a theatrical bookkeeper used to regulate performance (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” (xi). Bookkeepersʼ 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. Seltzerʼs “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 head” may be “an example of direction in rehearsal.” (xi) If this is correct, and Q1 enshrines action improvised while Friar Bacon was being prepared by the actors, then Milesʼs accompanying cry—“passion a God I haue almost broke my pate!” (TLN 1612)—would seem to preserve an interlinear addition as well.

The claim that Q1 was set from an “actual promptbook” failed to persuade the playʼs next editor, J.A. Lavin, whose New Mermaids edition (1968) argues that textual irregularities in the quarto point to a source closer to Greeneʼs 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 clownes” to converse with Lacy and Margaret in scene 3 (TLN 355, 414); 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 scenes 4, 8, 11, and 15 (TLNs 444-45, 1113-14, 1695-96, and 2074-79). Lavin supposed that a bookkeeper worth his salt would have resolved such ambiguities in the practical interest of producing a coherent promptbook (xxxiii).

As further evidence of authorial copy, Lavin adduces writerly references to the status, mood, and motivations of characters in Q1ʼs stage directions: as the play opens, for instance, Edward enters “malcontented” (TLN 1); Miles is described as Baconʼs “poore scholer with bookes vnder his arme” (TLN 171-72); Margaret is several times introduced by the epithet “the faire mayd of Fressingfield” (TLN 354, 673, 1740, 1767, and 2078); and in the penultimate scene the devil enters explicitly “to seeke Miles” (TLN 2010). 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” (TLN 1197-98); “Heere [Hercules] begins to breake the branches” (TLN 1214); “Heere the Head speakes and a lightning flasheth forth, and a hand appeares that breaketh down the Head with a hammer” (TLN 1635-37). 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 whispersMargret in the eare” (TLN 391). Elsewhere, directions hint at an author disposed to prose narrative: “Enter Frier Bacon drawing the courtaines with a white sticke, a book in his hand, and a lampe lighted by him, and the brasen head and miles, whith weapons by him” (TLN 1561-63). Cumulatively, Lavin interpreted these textual features as evidence that “the printerʼs copy was a transcript (probably of Greeneʼs fair or foul papers) in which the play had been only partly prepared for acting” (xxxiii, 72 n.49).

A second look lends some credence to Lavinʼs theory, while suggesting further that the transcript he envisions may have been in Greeneʼs own hand. We can expect a holograph to have born Greeneʼs signature and motto on its final leaf, as witnessed by Q1. Moreover, the imperative mood of the textʼs 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, letVenusbe let downe from the top of the Stage” (A3r); “sinke downe where you came vp (E1v); “Make as though you were a going out” (E2v); “Lay hold ofFabius, and make as though you carrie him out” (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 [playwrightsʼ] mouths,” and “antics garnished in our colors” (Melnikoff 41-3; Groats-worth of Witte F1v).

A contemporary remark about Greeneʼs handwriting yields another clue that support Lavinʼs 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 Greeneʼs hand was none of the best” it was necessary to transcribe his papers into more legible copy before they could be licensed and printed (A Kind-Harts Dream A4r). As noted above, there is no indication that Q1ʼs compositor was ever seriously confused by his copy, from which we may infer the use of a manuscript tidier than Greeneʼs foul papers. This fairer transcript, if not the work of a theatrical scribe, may well then have been the product of Greeneʼs own study, copied out with a degree of care to ensure the manuscript submitted to the Queenʼs 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 absolute” in that “[f]ew 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” (19-20). A case in point—and a possible contemporary analogue for Q1ʼs 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).

Seltzer and Lavinʼs theories of copy owe much to Gregʼs influential distinction between theatrical and authorial manuscripts (Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio 105, 112-13, 142). Seltzer reads “Sit down and knocke your head” as a notation made during rehearsal and so is inclined to infer Q1ʼs derivation from a species of promptbook. Lavin, on the other hand, proceeds from the premise that a bookkeeper would have purged Q1ʼs textual irregularities when preparing a promptbook and so envisions a direct transcript of Greeneʼs 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 authorʼs papers have been shown to be a feature of manuscripts also bearing promptersʼ annotations (Werstine 107-99). 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, 111-13).

Bearing in mind that Friar Bacon was acted by the Queenʼs 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 Queenʼs 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: Peeleʼs David and Bathsheba and two lost plays, a “famous historye of John of Gaunte” and “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 Queenʼs Men plays that spring as well, includingA Looking Glass for London, The Famous Victories of Henry V,and The True Tragedy of Richard III(Arber 2: 645, 648-49, 654, 656; Princiss 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 Queenʼs Men gave performances of both “friar bacone” and “kinge leare” at Hensloweʼs 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 Admiralʼs 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 Baconafter the Queenʼs Menʼs departure (322-24). Later quartos do advertise the play as having been acted by Prince Palatineʼs Servants, a Jacobean company largely made up of former Admiralʼs players. However, Hensloweʼs 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 Greeneʼs 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, Greeneʼs play arguably remained the property of the Queenʼs 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, 184-88).

The question remains: why would the Queenʼs 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 “allowed” books, 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 “friend” of Margaretʼs father who utters only a single line in a single scene (TLN 1896, 1924-25). 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 playʼs 32 speaking roles can be performed by 14 actors doubling or tripling their parts (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 eleventh scene, presumably because those actors were needed to double as Bungay and one of the dueling country gentleman in scene 12. Rafe and Bungayʼs unusual absence from the playʼs 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 Queenʼs Men plays sold to publishers in 1594 reveal a similar pattern of ‘disappearancesʼ. The Queenʼs Men were, as they point out, “an unusually large company” which “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” (107-8, 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.

If the provenance of Q1ʼs 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 314-18). He was also well acquainted with Greene by 1594. According to Thomas Nashe, when Greeneʼs 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” (E4v). White purchased more of Greeneʼs 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 Fitzwaterʼs Nightingale(1592), and Greeneʼs Orpharion (1599). In addition to his knowledge of Greeneʼs 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 Whiteʼs bookshop, including Kydʼs The Spanish Tragedy (1592, followed by seven impressions over the next two decades), Arden of Faversham (1592), Shakespeareʼs Titus Andronicus (1594), and Marloweʼs 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 Islipʼs in the register of the Stationersʼ company was not merely a mundane error, it probably reflects the more experienced publisherʼs deliberate pursuit of the copyright.

Two 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 Alldeʼs widow Elizabeth issued a second quarto based on Q1 (McKerrow 5-6). The title page of Q2 replaces Islipʼs 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 Greeneʼs 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 Alldeʼs recent edition of the prose Famous History stirred fresh interest in the legendary character. By 1640, the copyright had passed to Alldeʼs 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, Bellʼs wife Jean (or Jane) printed a third quarto based on Q2. Q3 replicates Alldeʼs 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 Palsgraveʼs Men, an advertisement long out of date in the wake of the breakdown of Stuart theatrical patronage during the English civil wars.

2. Date

Friar 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 Edwardʼs remark that “next Friday is S[aint] James[ʼs]” (TLN 137) 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 (264-65). 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: Greeneʼs 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 playʼs idealized countryside scenes. Cum hoc ergo prompter hoc—one suspects Greene was not as meticulous as Fleay imagines.

Other commentators have read the playʼs 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 Baconʼs expels Vandermast from Oxford and during the glorification of Queen Elizabeth as “Dianaʼs rose” in 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. Baconʼs desire to “compass England with a wall of brass” (TLN 204) may have spoken more profoundly to audiences prior to the launch of the Armada. How one reads the magicianʼs “deep prescience” of a national peace on the horizon is also relevant: from his medieval vantage point, Baconʼs 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” (TLN 2129-31). It is a rather devious prognostication in that it may refer with proleptic irony to a post-Armada moment in which Greeneʼs 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 Queenʼs Menʼs 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 war” whose situation remained dangerously uncertain. Such encouragement would have been within the Queenʼs Menʼs purview as they broadcast their message of nationalistic Protestantism along provincial touring circuits in the later 1580s. Does Baconʼs 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.

We 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 certainty” that Greene wrote Friar Bacon in response to Marloweʼs necromantic spectacle Doctor Faustus (Churton Collins 2-3). Yet the occasion of Faustusʼs 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 Marloweʼs success (Ward xxi-xxvi; Greg, Marloweʼs 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 Millerʼs 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 brokery” in a pamphlet printed the same year as Fair Em (Farewell to Folly A4v), some assume that the plagiarist must have been the ‘inferiorʼ anonymous 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 Greeneʼs 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 Greeneʼs 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 Lylyʼs Campaspe, Shakespeareʼs 1 Henry VI, and the anonymously-authored A Knack to Know a Knave (Dean 41-2; Heiatt 183-87).

The Famous History of Friar Bacon, widely held to be Friar Baconʼs 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 Stationersʼ 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 24-8). Although the Caroline chapbook offers an idea of what Greeneʼs 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 Greeneʼs 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 Greeneʼs play (e.g. Baconʼs explicit association with Brasenose, Herculesʼs wearing of a lionʼs skin). Jones interprets this to mean that Greeneʼs 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 (54-72). From this premise, he then argues that a topical allusion exclusive to the Norris text allows us to date Greeneʼs 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. Norrisʼs edition is unique in describing this woman as having recently been “busy about dressing the dinner at Sir William Beltonʼs, 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. Fleetwoodʼs reputation for eloquence, Jones claims, is the basis of a pun on ‘bel toneʼ (‘Beltonʼ) and the allusion to “Sir William Beltonʼs” should 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 meatʼs origin from “Sir William Beltonʼs” to the “Bell at Henley,” we are told, the playwright was “playing safe,” deviating from the ‘bel toneʼ 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 Belton” and Fleetwoodʼs bel tone is “very “secure” and 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 Fleetwoodʼs ‘bel toneʼ was ever so widely acknowledged that audiences could make the linguistic leap necessary to identify him as “Belton” or, 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 Belton” was a person known to the public when Norrisʼs eighteenth-century text was printed—is simply dismissed by Jones without explanation as indefensible (62). Yet as Richard Levin has shown, the content of The Famous Historyunderwent demonstrable changes over time. An edition issued in 1683, for example, incorporates the names Margaret, Lacy, and Prince Edward from Greeneʼs play while adding to the text incidents drawn from John of Bordeaux (“Friar Bacon … and the 1683 Edition” passim). Any variations in post-Caroline editions of the chapbook—regardless of whether they seem to inform Greeneʼ 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 Greeneʼs era.

An 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 Queenʼs Menʼs 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 Tarltonʼs 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 Scottoweʼs Alphabet Book (British Library Harleian MS 3885, f. 19: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=21899). The Famous Historyʼs 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); Greeneʼs character, by contrast, stuffs his arms with a “brown bill,” pistols, and other weapons (TLN 1563, 1567-69). 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 Tarltonʼs participation in the play (“Tarlton” 85-9).

There are further hints that Greene may have tailored the part to Tarlton. One of the performerʼs 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 (TLN 172-73, 1325, 1563). 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 (TLN 2043-54). For those familiar with the clownʼs public ethos, the moment may have resonated self-reflexively again as Tarlton belonged to the Vintnerʼs Company and was owner of both the Saba Tavern on Gracechurch Street and an ordinary on Paternoster Row (“The Ghost of Dick Tarlton”).

Co-sanguinity between dramatist and player might furthermore be suggested by scoffs on the part of Gabriel Harvey, one of Greeneʼs antagonists in print. Harvey sneered at what he took to be the dramatistʼs “fond disguising of a Master of Art with a ruffianly hair, unseemly apparel, and more unseemly company,” and he leveled particular scorn at Greeneʼs “vainglorious and thrasonical braving, his piperly extemporizing and Tarletonizing” (B2r). The playwright certainly had ample opportunity to observe and later socialize with the iconic actor. Tarlton visited Greeneʼs native Norwich as a member of Sussexʼs 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 Queenʼs Men in the vicinity of both universities during Greeneʼs 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 Queenʼs Men) at a time when Tarltonʼs 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 Tarltonʼs 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 Leonardʼs Shoreditch.

3. Sources

It is generally agreed that the playʼs 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 Historyʼs seventeen prose episodes, five closely resemble scenes in Greeneʼs play:

• 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)
• Baconʼs 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)
• Baconʼs renunciation of magic (G2v-G3v)

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 Greeneʼs 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 Baconʼs wide-ranging allusions, be they classical (e.g. to Aesopʼs Fables, Ovidʼs Metamorphoses), scriptural (the Vulgate Bible, Psalm 133), historical (Holinshedʼs Chronicles), esoteric (the Corpus Hermeticum), or vernacular (Barclayʼs translation of The Ship of Fools, Skeltonʼs 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 Queenʼs Men.

3.1 The Brazen Head

The fifth episode of The Famous History (“How Friar Bacon made a brazen head to speak …”) concerns Englandʼs vulnerability to foreign incursion and Baconʼs 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 Baconʼs servant Miles—said to be jovial but “none of the wisest” (B1v)—to wake them if the head should speak. Under Milesʼs watch the brazen head speaks seven words—“Time is. Time was. Time is past.” There is “a terrible noise” and “strange flashes of fire” and 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” (B4v-C3v).

Stories of oracular statues date back to antiquity (Lagrandeur, “The Talking Brass Head” 408-10) and an inquisitive, eclectic reader like Greene stood to encounter brazen heads in occult texts such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippaʼs 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 Bourneʼs Inventions or Devices Very Necessary for all Generals and Captains or Leaders of Men (c. 1578, printed 1590). Greeneʼs 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, “Brasenose Collegeʼs Brass Head” 48-50).

The 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 Greeneʼs 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, “Roger Bacon and Experimental Method” 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 (Epistola fratris Rogerii Baconus 521-51). Such practices were fertile ground for suspicions of sorcery and demonism to grow (Thorndike, “The True Roger Bacon II” 476-79; Power 658-64).

By the mid-sixteenth century, an increasing number of scholars began to recognize Baconʼs 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(tiii^v).

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 Imagesʼ), Practica magiae (‘Practical Magicʼ), and De occultis operibus naturae (‘The Secret Works of Natureʼ) 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, Baconʼs very name had become a word by which spirits might be conjured (see the Supplemental 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” (323).

It is intriguing that the failure of the brazen head project and the disappointment Bacon experiences as a result seems most to have captured Greeneʼs imagination. Noticeably, the playwright shifts the headʼs 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 Baconʼs own culpability. The stage friar knows precisely which night the head will utter its “strange doubts and aphorisms” (TLN 200, 1593-95) 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 Baconʼs 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,ʼ 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. (Of the Vanity and Uncertainty of Arts and Sciences 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 Greeneʼs 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 Godʼs counsel” and “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 astrologerʼs 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 Greeneʼs 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 natureʼs 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” (B1r). Among the most respected scholars during Greeneʼs 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 84-5; Watson 291). Allenʼs 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 Bungayʼs showdown with the contending magician Vandermast.

3.2 The Contest with Vandermast

The 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 tree” only 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 Germany” and “the devil obeyed him and took Vandermast on his back, and went away with him in all their sights” (D1v-D2v). Commentators have traced the genealogy of the magical contest to ancient narratives in scripture and romance (Ward xxvii; Levin “My Magic”201-07). It has also been observed that by ignoring the initial conjuration of Pompey and Caesar, Greeneʼs play places greater emphasis on Baconʼs 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 31-2).

To 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 state” of Oxford, the play reimagines the first phase of the contest between Bungay and Vandermast as a logical “dispute” on the “the doubtful question” of “whether the spirits of pyromancy / or geomancy be most predominant in magic” (TLN 1133, 1135-37). Educated playgoers would recognize this as a formal disputation on a set topic (or quaestione), 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 313-20; 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 incantationsʼ), “an divinatio astrologica sit probanda” (‘whether divination by astrology may be approvedʼ), and “an chymicus sit philosophus” (‘whether an alchemist may be considered a philosopherʼ), the latter seemingly concerned with the transmutation of metals by the putative power of the philosopherʼs stone(Clarke 171-73). 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” (78-9). 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 juggler” as 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 212-17). 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 practiceʼs important shaping influence on the playʼs composition.

3.3 The Glass Prospective

Friar Baconʼs representation of a second magical device, the “glass prospective,” also shows signs of having been shaped by Greeneʼs 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 loversʼ escape and Bacon conjures a spectacular masque to celebrate their union (F1r-F3v). In the second episode (“How two young gentlemen came to Friar Bacon to know how their fathers did …”), it is revealed that Baconʼs 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” (G1v-G2v).

Greene cleverly fuses the two episodes to hiscentral 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 Margaretʼs hand in marriage. Significantly, Greene follows the second episode closely by emphasizing Baconʼs 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 glass” in the play are themselves imprecise. It is said to be (or to contain) a “crystal” (TLN 1868) 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 glass” or to “Sit still and keep the crystal in your eye” (TLN 643, 649).

Greene will have understood something of Roger Baconʼs 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 453-54). As Greene may also have known, the narrative of the university students who request Baconʼs help to spy on events at home germinated in Baconʼs 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 Baconʼs 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 Heldon 28)

The Perspectiva was widely read and lectured upon in the centuries after Baconʼs 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 (Friar Bacon His Discovery19-22). Some considered Dee a magus in his own right; his collection of esoteric artifacts at Mortlake included an obsidian ‘scrying stoneʼ—a carved disc of volcanic glass polished to mirror smoothness, now at the British Museum (http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_mla/d/dr_dees_mirror.aspx). 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 Deeʼs 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” (Autobiographical Tracts 17). Modern scholars most often envision Friar Baconʼs “glass prospective” as a “magic mirror” resembling a hand-held vanity, and sometimes as a more generic “crystal ball” (Seltzer 30; Lavin xvi-xvii, 32, 80), yet the notoriety of Deeʼs “glass so famous” suggests that a scrying stone may have been Greeneʼs original model for the stage property.

Bearing in mind Greeneʼs exposure to intellectual communities familiar with Baconʼs Perspectiva, another possible model for the “prospective glass” is worth considering. The adjective “prospective” in early modern usage usually meant ‘forward-lookingʼ (as at TLN 1792-1793) and in this sense would be accurately applied to a property such as Deeʼs obsidian “glass so famous,” with its supposed power to glimpse the future. However, by the later sixteenth century “prospective” was also used interchangeably with “perspective,” a word that refers both to the distortion of sight, and to its magnification (OED adj.2). “Perspective glass” was 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 n.2a). 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 angles” were 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, Baconʼs Experiments, that by strange adventure, or rather destiny, came to his hands, though chiefly by conjoining continual laborious practice with his mathematical studies (Stratioticos 189-90)

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 (PantometriaAiijv, Giv-Giir)

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 Deeʼs 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.

It is worth observing again the parallel between actual Elizabethan scholars and Greeneʼs 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:

… 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. (TLN 232-235)

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, “perspective glasses” held 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-80s) drew up a Treatise on the Properties and Qualities of Glasses for Optical Purposes at the behest of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the queenʼs principal secretary. The document illustrates the governmentʼs 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” (TLN 649) were early audiences introduced to a stage property meant to evoke this nascent technology? If so, it may have seemed to many (in Bourneʼs words) “incredible to be believed,” the reflecting telescope being a technology so new and awe-inspiring as to be indistinct from magic itself.

3.4 Chronicle History

Into 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 proseFamous 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 dynastyʼs 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 playʼs romantic flavor. Consider, for instance, Edward Plantagenet (1239-1307), heir to the throne of Henry III and one of the playʼs central roles. Sixteenth-century chronicles provide a comprehensive portrait of this controversial figure: they tell of the princeʼs tall and slender physique, which earned him the moniker ‘Longshanksʼ; that in youth he was wayward and brutal, once ordering a manʼs 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 Scotsʼ).

Greene jettisons virtually all of this information and subordinates what remains to the generic requirements of comic romance. He certainly understood, for example, the young Edwardʼs reputation for being volatile and mercurial, and these characteristics are retained insofar as they serve a dramatic purpose. In the playʼs first scene, Edward enters in the midst of a transformation—the “frolic” venison hunter has grown suddenly melancholy, “like to a troubled sky” ready to storm (TLN 1-15). Greeneʼs 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 Lylyʼs 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 characterʼs metamorphosis is primarily a function of the comic romance that structures the action: history demands that Edward marry Eleanor, but Greeneʼs greater concern is the dramatic tension that the arranged marriage creates between the princeʼs 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?

There 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 Peeleʼs The Chronicle History of Edward I (printed in 1593), and the Admiralʼs Men evidently performed a lost play known as “longe shancke” at the Rose in 1595 starring the imposing actor Edward Alleyn (Foakes 30-6, 47-8). 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 Queenʼs Menʼs repertory, stemming from the companyʼs agenda to propagandize in the name of its patron while touring the nationʼs provinces (McMillin and MacLean 166-67). Greeneʼs 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 companyʼs mandate, Greene faced the stubborn fact that the Plantagenet story unfolds in ways antithetical to the Queenʼs Menʼs 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 Queenʼs 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 26-7, 166-67). 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 Baconʼs 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 (TLN 452), a paradise “like that wealthy isle / Circled with Gihon and Euphrates” (TLN 2144-2145)—“Thus glories England over all the west” (TLN 2155).

The 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 Queenʼs Menʼs “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” (124-27, 135-36). 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, Greeneʼs 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 Gaudiʼs Sagrada Familia: the same vertigo, the same stroke of genius” (202).