Love and Technological Iconoclasm in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

The climax of Robert Greene's 1589 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay presents a moment of secularized iconoclasm: the destruction of the brazen head created by the play's sorcerer protagonist. English iconophobia, as expressed for example in the Homily Against Idolatry, had long insisted on the social harmfulness of material images. This essay argues that Friar Bacon's longstanding interpretive difficulties, noted by William Empson and others, can be mitigated by observing that Greene's play echoes contemporaneous texts by regarding religious idolatry and the emergence of early modern science as similarly threatening to traditional forms of human connection.