Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
Encyclopedia
The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy
written by Robert Greene
. Widely regarded as Greene's best and most significant play, it has received more critical attention than any other of Greene's dramas.
in Greene's play was inspired by the magic in Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus
, which if valid would mean that FBFB must post-date Faustus; Greene's play also has relationships with several other plays of its era, most notably Fair Em
. Yet since none of the plays in question can be dated with absolute certainty, the nature of the relationships among them are open to question and cannot resolve the pertinent dating issues.
, as were several of Greene's other plays. When that company entered a period of difficulties in the early 1590s, the play appears to have passed into the control of theatre manager and impressario Philip Henslowe
, and thereafter to have been performed by Henslowe-connected acting troupes. Lord Strange's Men
performed the play on 19 February 1592 at the Rose Theatre
; it was acted again by a combination of the Queen's Men and Sussex's Men on 1 April 1594. The play then passed into the repertory of the Admiral's Men
; that company paid Thomas Middleton
to write a Prologue and Epilogue for a Court performance in 1602.
FBFB was entered into the Stationers' Register
on 14 May 1594, and was published later that year in quarto
by the bookseller Edward White. The title page assigns the play to Greene. A second quarto was issued in 1630 by Elizabeth Allde
; the Q2 title page states that the play was "lately played by the Prince Palatine his Servants" — the Admiral's Men in a later incarnation. A third quarto followed in 1655 from Jean Bell. Contemporary allusions indicate that the play was even more popular than its limited publication history indicates; references to the play are common in the literature of the era.
.
"Friar Bacon" is based on the historical Roger Bacon
, the thirteenth-century polymath who suffered a popular reputation as a magician. The second friar of the title is another historical figure, Bacon's contemporary Thomas Bungay. Thomas Bungay (Thomas de Bungeye) was a member of the Order of Friars Minor, educated at Oxford (1270-1272) and at Cambridge (1282-1283) and wrote a commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo.
In addition to Roger Bacon, the tale of the brazen head
was connected with several other prominent figures of the later Middle Ages, including Robert Grosseteste
and Gerbert of Aurillac. In one account, Albertus Magnus
formed the brazen head, only to have it broken by Thomas Aquinas
.
Prince Edward
, the son and heir of King Henry III
, plans to seduce Margaret, the Fair Maid of Fressingfield
, with the help of the necromancer Friar Bacon. Edward also employs a more conventional approach, relying on the eloquence of his friend Earl Lacy to help with the seduction. Lacy goes to persuade Margaret, but quickly falls in love with her himself. When Edward learns of the love of Lacy and Margaret, he threatens to kill his friend — before he masters his passion and reconciles himself to the fact. Edward returns to Court, where he falls in love with and marries Elinor of Castile, the bride his father has chosen for him.
The beautiful Margaret is the unwilling cause of a quarrel between two of her neighbors, the Suffolk
squires Serlesby and Lambert: they both fancy themselves in love with her, and kill each other in a duel. Margaret receives a letter from the absent Lacy, renouncing his love for her. She decides to enter a nunnery — but Lacy intercepts her before she takes her vows, and tells her that he was only testing her constancy. After an understandable hesitation, Margaret accepts Lacy's conduct and his explanation; they are married together with Edward and Elinor at the end of the play.
Another level of plot involves Friar Bacon and his magic. Bacon displays a range of magical skills: he shows Edward the romance of Lacy and Margaret in his magic glass, and interrupts their wedding at a distance; he magically transports a tavern hostess from one place to another; he wins a contest of magic with a German named Vandermast, witnessed by the Kings of England and Castile and the Emperor of Germany. In collaboration with another magician, Friar Bungay, Bacon labors toward his greatest achievement: the creation of an artificial head made of brass, animated by demonic influence, that can surround England with a protective wall of the same metal. Yet Bacon's inability to remain awake and the incompetence of his servant Miles spoil the opportunity. (The brazen head speaks three times, saying "Time is," "Time was," and "Time is past" — then falls to the floor and shatters. Miles doesn't have the wit to wake his master in time.) Finally, Bacon inadvertently allows two young Oxonians to witness their fathers' duel in the magic glass; in response the students themselves duel, and kill each other. Appalled by this outcome, Bacon renounces magic and turns to a life of repentance. His bad servant Miles, haunted by Bacon's conjured devils, gets a promise of a tapster's job in Hell from one of them, and rides to perdition on the devil's back.
is a sequel to FBFB, written to build upon the success of the original play. The John of Bordeaux MS., annotated by prompters, mentions the name of John Holland, an actor who was with Lord Strange's Men in the early 1590s. This has suggested to some researchers that the Friar Bacon play acted by Strange's Men on 19 February 1592 was this second part of the story rather than the original FBFB.
Comedy
Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...
written by Robert Greene
Robert Greene (16th century)
Robert Greene was an English author best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, widely believed to contain a polemic attack on William Shakespeare. He was born in Norwich and attended Cambridge University, receiving a B.A. in 1580, and an M.A...
. Widely regarded as Greene's best and most significant play, it has received more critical attention than any other of Greene's dramas.
Date
The date of authorship of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay cannot be fixed with certainty on the basis of the available evidence; the play is normally dated to the 1588–92 period. 1589 may be the single most likely year: a line in the play's opening scene, "Next Friday is S. James," fixes St. James's Day (25 July, the feast day of St. James the Great) as a Friday, which was true in 1589. Some critics argue that the magicMagic (paranormal)
Magic is the claimed art of manipulating aspects of reality either by supernatural means or through knowledge of occult laws unknown to science. It is in contrast to science, in that science does not accept anything not subject to either direct or indirect observation, and subject to logical...
in Greene's play was inspired by the magic in Marlowe's
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...
Doctor Faustus
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, commonly referred to simply as Doctor Faustus, is a play by Christopher Marlowe, based on the Faust story, in which a man sells his soul to the devil for power and knowledge...
, which if valid would mean that FBFB must post-date Faustus; Greene's play also has relationships with several other plays of its era, most notably Fair Em
Fair Em
Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester, is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy written c. 1590. It was bound together with Mucedorus and The Merry Devil of Edmonton in a volume labelled "Shakespeare. Vol...
. Yet since none of the plays in question can be dated with absolute certainty, the nature of the relationships among them are open to question and cannot resolve the pertinent dating issues.
Performance and Publication
The title page of the play's first edition (see below) asserts that FBFB was originally acted by Queen Elizabeth's MenQueen Elizabeth's Men
Queen Elizabeth's Men was a playing company or troupe of actors in English Renaissance theatre. Formed in 1583 at the express command of Queen Elizabeth, it was the dominant acting company for the rest of the 1580s, as the Admiral's Men and the Lord Chamberlain's Men would be in the decade that...
, as were several of Greene's other plays. When that company entered a period of difficulties in the early 1590s, the play appears to have passed into the control of theatre manager and impressario Philip Henslowe
Philip Henslowe
Philip Henslowe was an Elizabethan theatrical entrepreneur and impresario. Henslowe's modern reputation rests on the survival of his diary, a primary source for information about the theatrical world of Renaissance London...
, and thereafter to have been performed by Henslowe-connected acting troupes. Lord Strange's Men
Lord Strange's Men
Lord Strange's Men was an Elizabethan playing company, comprising retainers of the household of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange . They are best known in their final phase of activity in the late 1580s and early 1590s...
performed the play on 19 February 1592 at the Rose Theatre
The Rose (theatre)
The Rose was an Elizabethan theatre. It was the fourth of the public theatres to be built, after The Theatre , the Curtain , and the theatre at Newington Butts The Rose was an Elizabethan theatre. It was the fourth of the public theatres to be built, after The Theatre (1576), the Curtain (1577),...
; it was acted again by a combination of the Queen's Men and Sussex's Men on 1 April 1594. The play then passed into the repertory of the Admiral's Men
Admiral's Men
The Admiral's Men was a playing company or troupe of actors in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras...
; that company paid Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in...
to write a Prologue and Epilogue for a Court performance in 1602.
FBFB was entered into the Stationers' Register
Stationers' Register
The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England...
on 14 May 1594, and was published later that year in quarto
Book size
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from "folio" , to "quarto" and "octavo"...
by the bookseller Edward White. The title page assigns the play to Greene. A second quarto was issued in 1630 by Elizabeth Allde
Edward Allde
Edward Allde was an English printer in London during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. He was responsible for a number of significant texts in English Renaissance drama, including some of the early editions of plays by William Shakespeare.-Life:Edward Allde was part of a family of professional...
; the Q2 title page states that the play was "lately played by the Prince Palatine his Servants" — the Admiral's Men in a later incarnation. A third quarto followed in 1655 from Jean Bell. Contemporary allusions indicate that the play was even more popular than its limited publication history indicates; references to the play are common in the literature of the era.
Sources
Greene's primary source for his play was an anonymous sixteenth-century prose romance titled The Famous History of Friar Bacon (c. 1555?). The earliest extant printed edition of this work dates from 1627, long after both FBFB and Greene's 1592 death; manuscript versions, and perhaps one or more earlier printed editions, underlie the 1627 text. The relationship between FBFB and other plays of its era, some of which may have served as sources, has been noted above. FBFB also has a complex set of commonalities with the earlier Medieval drama of the morality playMorality play
The morality play is a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment. In their own time, these plays were known as "interludes", a broader term given to dramas with or without a moral theme. Morality plays are a type of allegory in which the protagonist is met by personifications of...
.
"Friar Bacon" is based on the historical Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...
, the thirteenth-century polymath who suffered a popular reputation as a magician. The second friar of the title is another historical figure, Bacon's contemporary Thomas Bungay. Thomas Bungay (Thomas de Bungeye) was a member of the Order of Friars Minor, educated at Oxford (1270-1272) and at Cambridge (1282-1283) and wrote a commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo.
In addition to Roger Bacon, the tale of the brazen head
Brazen Head
A Brazen Head was a prophetic device attributed to many medieval scholars who were believed to be wizards, or who were reputed to be able to answer any question. It was always in the form of a man's head, and it could correctly answer any question asked of it...
was connected with several other prominent figures of the later Middle Ages, including Robert Grosseteste
Robert Grosseteste
Robert Grosseteste or Grossetete was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, theologian and Bishop of Lincoln. He was born of humble parents at Stradbroke in Suffolk. A.C...
and Gerbert of Aurillac. In one account, Albertus Magnus
Albertus Magnus
Albertus Magnus, O.P. , also known as Albert the Great and Albert of Cologne, is a Catholic saint. He was a German Dominican friar and a bishop, who achieved fame for his comprehensive knowledge of and advocacy for the peaceful coexistence of science and religion. Those such as James A. Weisheipl...
formed the brazen head, only to have it broken by Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
.
Synopsis
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is recognized as a groundbreaking play in terms of multiple-plot structure; it has three plots, or two, or four, depending on different scholars' analyses.Prince Edward
Edward I of England
Edward I , also known as Edward Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots, was King of England from 1272 to 1307. The first son of Henry III, Edward was involved early in the political intrigues of his father's reign, which included an outright rebellion by the English barons...
, the son and heir of King Henry III
Henry III of England
Henry III was the son and successor of John as King of England, reigning for 56 years from 1216 until his death. His contemporaries knew him as Henry of Winchester. He was the first child king in England since the reign of Æthelred the Unready...
, plans to seduce Margaret, the Fair Maid of Fressingfield
Fressingfield
Fressingfield is a small village in Suffolk, England, east of Diss, Norfolk. It has a population of over 900, with two shops a medical centre and three churches, with Anglican, Baptist and Methodist congregations. Fressingfield once had five public houses...
, with the help of the necromancer Friar Bacon. Edward also employs a more conventional approach, relying on the eloquence of his friend Earl Lacy to help with the seduction. Lacy goes to persuade Margaret, but quickly falls in love with her himself. When Edward learns of the love of Lacy and Margaret, he threatens to kill his friend — before he masters his passion and reconciles himself to the fact. Edward returns to Court, where he falls in love with and marries Elinor of Castile, the bride his father has chosen for him.
The beautiful Margaret is the unwilling cause of a quarrel between two of her neighbors, the Suffolk
Suffolk
Suffolk is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in East Anglia, England. It has borders with Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south. The North Sea lies to the east...
squires Serlesby and Lambert: they both fancy themselves in love with her, and kill each other in a duel. Margaret receives a letter from the absent Lacy, renouncing his love for her. She decides to enter a nunnery — but Lacy intercepts her before she takes her vows, and tells her that he was only testing her constancy. After an understandable hesitation, Margaret accepts Lacy's conduct and his explanation; they are married together with Edward and Elinor at the end of the play.
Another level of plot involves Friar Bacon and his magic. Bacon displays a range of magical skills: he shows Edward the romance of Lacy and Margaret in his magic glass, and interrupts their wedding at a distance; he magically transports a tavern hostess from one place to another; he wins a contest of magic with a German named Vandermast, witnessed by the Kings of England and Castile and the Emperor of Germany. In collaboration with another magician, Friar Bungay, Bacon labors toward his greatest achievement: the creation of an artificial head made of brass, animated by demonic influence, that can surround England with a protective wall of the same metal. Yet Bacon's inability to remain awake and the incompetence of his servant Miles spoil the opportunity. (The brazen head speaks three times, saying "Time is," "Time was," and "Time is past" — then falls to the floor and shatters. Miles doesn't have the wit to wake his master in time.) Finally, Bacon inadvertently allows two young Oxonians to witness their fathers' duel in the magic glass; in response the students themselves duel, and kill each other. Appalled by this outcome, Bacon renounces magic and turns to a life of repentance. His bad servant Miles, haunted by Bacon's conjured devils, gets a promise of a tapster's job in Hell from one of them, and rides to perdition on the devil's back.
Sequel
The anonymous manuscript play John of Bordeaux, or The Second Part of Friar BaconJohn of Bordeaux
John of Bordeaux, or The Second Part of Friar Bacon is an Elizabethan era stage play, the anonymous sequel to Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay....
is a sequel to FBFB, written to build upon the success of the original play. The John of Bordeaux MS., annotated by prompters, mentions the name of John Holland, an actor who was with Lord Strange's Men in the early 1590s. This has suggested to some researchers that the Friar Bacon play acted by Strange's Men on 19 February 1592 was this second part of the story rather than the original FBFB.