The Manuscript
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.
The MS. text, with its "two missing scenes," "confused nomenclature...and seemingly abbreviated romance plot," presents a range of problems to modern editors. Its difficulties lured one scholar into the contradiction of arguing that John of Bordeaux was a "bad quarto" — that never got printed.
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 February 19, 1592. Most scholars believe that this was Greene's original Friar Bacon; yet some researchers have pointed out that since Greene's original was the property of Queen Elizabeth's Men, it can make more sense to suppose that Strange's company was acting the "second part of Friar Bacon," John of Bordeaux.
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