Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

Robert Greene (1558–1592) was the author of romances, pamphlets, lyrics, and plays. He was educated at Cambridge and Oxford, and led a remarkably irresponsible and dissolute life. The comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay was probably written and produced around 1589, and was first printed in 1594. Its account of the marvelous exploits of Friar Bacon is drawn from The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon, a sixteenth-century account of the legends surrounding the Oxford Franciscan, Roger Bacon (b. 1214). The play was an important influence both on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.