John of Bordeaux
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John of Bordeaux, or The Second Part of Friar Bacon, is an Elizabethan era stage play, the anonymous sequel to Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.[1] The play was never printed in its own historical era and survived in a single, untitled, defective manuscript until it was named and published in 1936.[2] It is usually dated to the 1590–94 period, shortly after the success of Greene's original Friar Bacon.
The sole extant original text of John of Bordeaux is MS. 507 in the Duke of Northumberland's Library at Alnwick Castle. It gives the appearance of being a shortened version, cut down for acting; it is annotated by the hands of two prompters, one of whom also annotated the surviving MS. of Edmund Ironside.[3]
The MS. text, with its "two missing scenes," "confused nomenclature...and seemingly abbreviated romance plot," presents a range of problems to modern editors.[4] Its difficulties lured one scholar into the contradiction of arguing that John of Bordeaux was a "bad quarto" — that never got printed.[5]
Among the notes added to the MS. by the prompters is the name of John Holland, an actor who was with Lord Strange's Men in the early 1590s. That company performed a Friar Bacon play on 19 February 1592. Most scholars believe that this was Greene's original Friar Bacon; yet some researchers have pointed out that since Greene's play was the property of Queen Elizabeth's Men (in 1594), it might make sense to suppose that Strange's company was acting the "second part of Friar Bacon," John of Bordeaux.