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.
History
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. 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.