ABSTRACT
In his chronicle of superstitions and “vulgar errors,” Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Sir Thomas Browne claimed, “Every ear is filled with the story of Frier [sic] Bacon that made a brazen head to speak.” 1 One of the culprits responsible for cramming the public's ears with such—in Browne's opinion—ostensible drivel was the notorious libertine and purveyor of pulp romance Robert Greene. Sometime around 1590, Greene adapted an anonymous sixteenth-century prose text, The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon, into one of the most commercially successful and oft-anthologized of the pre-Shakespearean comedies. Today the reputation of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay rests on its innovative use of a double-plot (instead of a comic sub-plot). The first story-line involves a love triangle between King Edward, Lacy the Earl of Lincoln, and Margaret “The Fair Maid of Fressingfield,” while the second hinges on Roger Bacon's attempt to forge a brazen head that will spout “strange and uncouth aphorisms” (iii.168) and enable him to ring Britain with a wall of brass. 2 The play's Bacon spends seven years perfecting his invention; but overcome with fatigue, he falls asleep at the decisive moment when it awakes and utters three short, cryptic phrases: “Time is,” “Time was,” “Time is Past” (xi.53, 63, 73). As his feckless assistant stands by cracking jokes, the head is destroyed in one of the more spectacular stage directions in Elizabethan drama: “a lightning flasheth forth, and a hand appears that breaketh down the Head with a hammer” (xi.72). While editors have speculated at length about the staging of this scene, critical studies of Friar Bacon have not sufficiently addressed how Greene exploits the enormous head as a visual symbol for the intellectual and technological aspirations of the early modern era. 3 Through the destruction of the automaton, the play delivers a stern judgment not only on contemporary fantasies of technological dominion, but also on drama itself as an aesthetically and morally dubious form of animation.
