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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
NEAR the conclusion of Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Miles, the play's clownish student, is dismissed from Friar Bacon's service and tutelage for failing to rouse his master at the brief awakening of Bacon's necromantic masterpiece, the "Brasen head." On his own to "see if [he] can want promotion," (1) Miles is ultimately found by a devil conjured up by Bacon "to torment his lasie bones, / For careles watchidg of his Brasen head" (H4). In Vice fashion, however, Miles not only merrily greets Bacon's demonic emissary but also ends up mirthfully riding off to hell on his back. In the interview with the devil leading up to his traditional "southerly" exit, Miles steers the conversation toward a long-standing component of Tudor law: "Good Lord M. Plutus I haue seene you a thousand times at my maisters and yet I had neuer the manners to make you drinke, but sir, I am glad to see how conformable you are to the statute, I warrant you hees as yeomanly a man, as you shall see, marke you maisters, heers a plaine honest man, without welt or garde, but I pray you sir do you come lately from hel?" (H4v). Perhaps not unexpectedly (given his theatrical inheritance), Miles's remarks here border on the seditious. The "statute" to which he refers belongs to England's infamous sumptuary legislation, a series of sumptuary laws dating from medieval times and culminating in Henry VIII's "An Act for the Reformacyon of Excesse in Apparayle" in 1533 and Mary's "Act for Reformation of Excess in Apparel" in 1553. Specifically, Miles touches upon a clause in the former statute that states, "that no seruyng man, nor other yeman, takyng wages, or suche other, as he maie not dispende of freeholde forty shyllynges by yere, after the saide feaste shall weare any clothe in his hoses, aboue the pryce of two shyllynges, the yarde; And that none of their hoses be graded or myxed with any other thyng, that maie be sene on or throughe the vtter part of their hosen but with the selfe same clothe onely: nor in his gowne, cote, or iakette, or other garmente any clothe aboue the pryce of thre shyllynges foure pence the brode yarde...." (2) That Miles's comment functioned as a public statement on the current restrictive sumptuary conditions in England is indicated not just by his direct address to his Elizabethan audience--"marke you maisters"--but also by the fact that sumptuary restrictions did not yet exist in the England of Henry III (the time period in which the play is set). The joke is therefore seemingly twofold: it is based first upon Miles's foolishness in identifying a devil as being a "yeomanly man" and second upon the absurdity of judging a devil "honest" because his clothes are appropriately "plaine ..., without welt or garde." (3)
I am interested in this extradramatic interlude within Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay for two reasons. To begin with, it seems to fly in the face of what undeniably was Elizabeth's seriousness about sumptuary law. Mocking any of England's laws was ground for fines and imprisonment, (4) but Miles's comment is particularly risky because it occurs within two years of Elizabeth's lengthy proclamation on the subject in 1588. (5) In it, Elizabeth is very clear about the penalties for openly "contemn"ing England's sumptuary restrictions: "And for such as shall contemn any of the orders before...
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