Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama

ONE Sex and Magic in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

23 ONE Sex and Magic in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay It is impossible to determine whether Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay predates or postdates Christopher Marlowe ’s Doctor Faustus. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen find implausible the “possibility that Greene may have pioneered in bringing a famous magician on stage...in view of Greene’s other blatant attempts to capitalise on Marlowe’s success.”1 While Friar Bacon presumably was not as influential on the early modern stage as Doctor Faustus, whose presence can be detected almost everywhere in the subsequent drama, Greene’s play seems in many ways quite original, and is certainly a radically different artistic achievement than Marlowe’s. Like Faustus, Friar Bacon explores ways of resolving the narcissistic tension between the will to absolute power and the demand for complete self-abnegation . Like The Tempest it offers a protagonist magician within a comic plot structure that manages to contain more effectively than the tragedies the patriarchally perceived “dark” threat of feminine sexual (and by inference magical) power, or rather, in effect, the violent masculine response to this power. While Prospero, through his version of the island’s history, successfully displaces a sense of his tyrannical control onto the evil but deceased witch Sycorax, and in doing so manages to elide 24 Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama his own darker sexual longings, which become projected onto Caliban, in Friar Bacon the containment of female sexuality is achieved by splitting the play between the plot involving Friar Bacon’s magical career, and the romantic plot treating Lacy and Margaret. The portrait of Friar Bacon is, consequently, highly ambiguous, containing both the suggestion of a proto-Protestant hero who challenges class hierarchy and champions self-discipline and individual assertion, as well as of a thwarted magician whose celibacy and self-involvement fail to prefigure the potential accomplishments, as well as the disturbing control of others, intrinsic to Protestant manliness. It has been compulsory in discussions of this play to mention William Empson’s formulation regarding the significance of the play’s double plot: by creating a parallel between Friar Bacon and Margaret, the play suggests that “the power of beauty is like the power of magic; both are individualist, dangerous, and outside the social order....The process is simply that of dramatizing a literary metaphor.”2 Most critics give Empson credit for identifying the structural principle of the play, but often retain questionable elements of Empson’s original formulation, especially as it reflects on the character of Margaret. Charles Hieatt states, for example, that the “Edward, Bacon, and Margaret plots are arranged in parallel , all three characters being engaged in self-seeking enterprises in which they plan to benefit from their superiority.” He speculates that the element of repetition in the plot structure implies “a measure of responsibility on Margaret and Bacon’s part, in its suggestion that they should have recognized the uncontrollable nature of their powers as the means and provocation to danger.”3 Curiously, such readings hold Margaret responsible for the “power of [her] beauty” when its effect is to raise sexual desire in men, which desire they have to control. Contra Empson, the power of beauty and the power of magic are not directly comparable ; rather, the parallel in Greene’s play involves the power of magic and the power of sexual desire. Moreover, the responsibility for control falls almost wholly on the shoulders of the Sex and Magic in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 25 male characters, not because Margaret is weak, or uninteresting, or unimportant in the plot, but because the play’s social context radically limits her own effective control. An examination of the relation between the play’s magic and the issue of masculine control may begin with Barbara Traister’s observation that the “power of Greene’s three magicians [Bacon, Bungay, and Vandermast] arises from their knowledge of how to command and bind spirits rather than from demonic pacts, such as Faustus made.”4 Faustus’s mistake, supposedly, is not so much that he deals with devils but that he foolishly subordinates himself to them; he does not, in spite of his lecture to Mephistopheles, maintain “manly fortitude” (1.3.87) or control. While Greene in Friar Bacon is careful to keep his magic of the “manly,” controlling variety, he does choose for his protagonist a...