Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, originally entitled The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay, 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. [1]
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 magic in Greene's play was inspired by the magic in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, (c. 1589–92) which if valid would mean that Bacon and Bungay must post-date Faustus; Greene's play also has relationships with several other plays of its era, most notably Fair Em (c. 1590). 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.
The title page of the play's first edition states that Bacon and Bungay was acted by Queen Elizabeth's Men, as were several of Greene's other plays. 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.
Bacon and Bungay 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. [2] 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.
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 play. [3]
The "Friar Bacon" of the title is Roger Bacon (1219/20 – c. 1292), the thirteenth-century polymath who later enjoyed a popular reputation as a magician. The second friar was Bacon's late contemporary Thomas Bungay (c. 1214 – c. 1294). Bungay was a fellow Franciscan who wrote a commentary on Aristotle's De Caelo [4] and served as the Franciscans' Minister Provincial over England during the mid-1270s.
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. [5]
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is recognised as a groundbreaking play in terms of multiple-plot structure; different scholars have identified three plots, or two, or four. [6]
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 neighbours, 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 by the Emperor of Germany. In collaboration with another magician, Friar Bungay, Bacon labours toward his greatest achievement: the creation of a talking 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 does not 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.
The anonymous manuscript play John of Bordeaux, or The Second Part of Friar Bacon 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.
The story was redone for children in 1905 as "Roger Bacon and the Brazen Head" for James Baldwin's Thirty More Famous Stories Retold. In 2013, television actor David Oakes directed the play at Shakespeare's Globe as part of their Read Not Dead season. [7]
The supposed 1599 edition, sometimes encountered, is simply a mistaken copy of Mrs. Allde's 1630 edition. [8]
Roger Bacon, also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism. In the early modern era, he was regarded as a wizard and particularly famed for the story of his mechanical or necromantic brazen head. He is sometimes credited as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method, along with his teacher Robert Grosseteste. Bacon applied the empirical method of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) to observations in texts attributed to Aristotle. Bacon discovered the importance of empirical testing when the results he obtained were different from those that would have been predicted by Aristotle.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1594.
The Ur-Hamlet is a play by an unknown author, thought to be either Thomas Kyd or William Shakespeare. No copy of the play, dated by scholars to the second half of 1587, survives today. The play was staged in London, more specifically at The Theatre in Shoreditch as recalled by Elizabethan author Thomas Lodge. It includes a character named Hamlet; the only other known character from the play is a ghost who, according to Thomas Lodge in his 1596 publication Wits Misery and the Worlds Madnesse, cries, "Hamlet, revenge!"
The Merry Devil of Edmonton is an Elizabethan-era stage play; a comedy about a magician, Peter Fabell, nicknamed the Merry Devil. It was at one point attributed to William Shakespeare, but is now considered part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha.
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. I" in the library of Charles II. Though scholarly opinion generally does not accept the attribution to William Shakespeare, there are a few who believe they see Shakespeare's hand in this play.
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 followed.
A brazen head, brass, or bronze head was a legendary automaton in the early modern period whose ownership was ascribed to late medieval scholars, such as Roger Bacon, who had developed a reputation as wizards. Made of brass or bronze, the male head was variously mechanical or magical. Like Odin's head of Mimir in Norse paganism, it was reputed to be able to correctly answer any question put to it, although it was sometimes restricted to "yes" or "no" answers. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Browne considered them to be misunderstanding of the scholars' alchemical work, while in modern times, Borlik argues that they came to serve as "a metonymy for the hubris of Renaissance intellectuals and artists". Idries Shah devotes a chapter of his book The Sufis to providing an interpretation of this "head of wisdom" as well as the phrase "making a head", stating that at its source the head "is none other than the symbol of the [Sufic] completed man."
Richard Field (1561–1624) was a printer and publisher in Elizabethan London, best known for his close association with the poems of William Shakespeare, with whom he grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Thomas Creede was a printer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, rated as "one of the best of his time." Based in London, he conducted his business under the sign of the Catherine Wheel in Thames Street from 1593 to 1600, and under the sign of the Eagle and Child in the Old Exchange from 1600 to 1617. Creede is best known for printing editions of works in English Renaissance drama, especially for ten editions of six Shakespearean plays and three works in the Shakespeare Apocrypha.
Robert Greene (1558–1592) was an English author popular in his day, and now best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, Greene's Groats-Worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance, widely believed to contain an attack on William Shakespeare. Greene was a popular Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer known for his negative critiques of his colleagues. He is said to have been born in Norwich. He attended Cambridge where he received a BA in 1580, and an M.A. in 1583 before moving to London, where he arguably became the first professional author in England. He was prolific and published in many genres including romances, plays and autobiography.
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. The play was never printed in its own historical era and survived in a single, untitled, defective manuscript until it was named and published in 1936. It is usually dated to the 1590–94 period, shortly after the success of Greene's original Friar Bacon.
A Looking Glass for London and England is an Elizabethan era stage play, a collaboration between Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene. Recounting the Biblical story of Jonah and the fall of Nineveh, the play is a noteworthy example of the survival of the Medieval morality play style of drama in the period of English Renaissance theatre.
Cuthbert Burby was a London bookseller and publisher of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. He is known for publishing a series of significant volumes of English Renaissance drama, including works by William Shakespeare, Robert Greene, John Lyly, and Thomas Nashe.
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.
The Earl of Sussex's Men was a playing company or troupe of actors in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, most notable for their connection with the early career of William Shakespeare.
The Travels of the Three English Brothers is an early Jacobean era stage play, an adventure drama written in 1607 by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins. The drama was based on the true-life experiences of the three Shirley brothers, Sir Anthony Shirley, Sir Thomas Shirley, and Robert Shirley. The play illustrates the trend toward extreme topicality in some works of English Renaissance drama.
The True Tragedy of Richard III is an anonymous Elizabethan history play on the subject of Richard III of England. It has attracted the attention of scholars of English Renaissance drama principally for the question of its relationship with William Shakespeare's Richard III.
Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Divell is a tall tale, or a prose satire, written by Thomas Nashe and published in London in 1592. It was among the most popular of the Elizabethan pamphlets. It was reprinted in 1593 and 1595, and in 1594 was translated into French. It is written from the point of view of Pierce, a man who has not met with good fortune, who now bitterly complains of the world's wickedness, and addresses his complaints to the devil. At times the identity of Pierce seems to conflate with Nashe's own. But Nashe also portrays Pierce as something of an arrogant and prodigal fool. The story is told in a style that is complex, witty, fulminating, extemporaneous, digressive, anecdotal, filled with wicked descriptions, and peppered with newly minted words and Latin phrases. The satire can be mocking and bitingly sharp, and at times Nashe’s style seems to relish its own obscurity.
Thomas Bungay, also known as Thomas of Bungay and formerly also known as Friar Bongay, was an English Franciscan friar, scholar, and alchemist.