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Francis Beaumont, the Knight of the Burning Pestle

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Francis Beaumont, the Knight of the Burning Pestle Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle First performed i607-8 First published i6i3 The Knight of the Burning Pestle was written for the The enactment of ‘The Knight of the Burning Pestle’ private Blackfriars Theatre, built by Richard Burbage in superficially suggests an innocent preoccupation by the i596, and was performed by a company o f boy actors. citizens with the old stories o f chivalric adventure and The play is significant for the information it offers in nobility. They celebrate, and Beaumont parodies, the tales the Induction and elsewhere about contemporary acting of Guy of W arwick and Bevis of Hampton, meshing companies and the public taste in theatre, as well as these with narratives derived from popular Spanish prose other popular cultural form s, such as the chivalric romances. However, such evocations o f the past also had romance. This, together with its representation o f social a clear place in the official and semi-official discourse of class, and its very specific sense o f the geography of the Tudor and early Stuart state. Edm und Spenser (i552- London and its environs, gives The Knight o f the 99) had written his chivalric romance, The Faerie Queene Burning Pestle a particular authority for students o f early (i590-6), with a seriousness that borders on the seventeenth-century theatre. Beaum ont’s play is a melancholic, framing a mythologised national history that network of overlapping dramatic narratives. The underpinned Elizabethan Protestant identity. The Faerie Induction and the Interludes supply a commentary on Queene is referred to in The Knight o f the Burning Pestle (and intervene in) the two ‘inner’ narratives, that of (II.i80), but the contrast between Spenser’s stately epic Venturewell and his family (the story of ‘The London and Beaumont’s parody is complete, undermining a M erchant’) and the enactment of ‘The Knight of the project that, in more widely accessible forms than Burning Pestle’ itself. That the one story parodies Spenser’s, was represented in ballads, pageants and other London’s aspiring merchant class, and the other popular forms o f entertainments. satirises that class’s taste for chivalric romance, gives the Some of these entertainments were presented at M ile play a special sense o f topicality. The Citizen’s ‘Down End and it is not surprising that, towards the end of with your title, boy, down with your title!’ (Induction, The Knight o f the Burning Pestle, the action shifts to this 29), in response to what he predicts will be yet another location. Here, beyond the city walls o f London, was Blackfriars play poking fun at his class, is humorous but where the serious business of training soldiers had also emphatic; it is a cry from the heart of a class that traditionally taken place, an activity that the play was sensitive about its own emerging, but as yet ill- parodies in a subversive way. Yet it was also the scene defined, position at the centre o f London’s economic of the kind o f ‘misrule’ and carnival espoused by Rafe and social transformation. and M errythought, but severely condemned by the The sensitivity to social rank and identity is Puritans who were emerging as the more powerful and confirmed as it is exposed in Venturewell’s attempts at politically motivated representatives o f the social class manipulation in the business o f his daughter Luce’s from which Beaumont drew his characters. marriage: he is entirely willing to enhance his social The Knight o f the Burning Pestle is a compelling and position at the expense o f his daughter’s genuine desire often hilarious account o f the workings o f early for the ‘unsuitable’ Jasper. In turn, Jasper, similarly seventeenth-century theatre, a parody o f contemporary dismissed by his own mother, can rely on neither concerns over an evolving system o f social class, and a professional bonds (his indentures as an apprentice) or critique o f an earlier genre o f plays that celebrated an family loyalty. As for his love for Luce, and her love for ideal of ‘M erry England’, such as Thomas Dekker’s The him, these become tellingly confused by the play’s Shoemakers Holiday (i599). Yet many critics agree that continual recourse to the enactment of chivalric codes, the framing device o f the Induction and Interludes such as in the scene in W altham Forest in Act III tempts us to share the considerable and, finally, where Jasper ‘tests’ Luce. Humorous and bizarre as they unattractive, prejudices o f the Citizen and his W ife. are, such episodes suggest that in this dramatic world, Indeed, the play may put us in the position o f endorsing Copyright © 2002. Routledge. All rights reserved. © 2002. Routledge. Copyright as much as in any tragedy, the ‘experience’ of the social easy solutions to the problematic social distinctions that is dictated by ‘codes’ of representation that are shaped shape the world o f the play, favouring a sense o f order by value judgements which confine rather than liberate. above the chaos that is achieved through the intersection 2 3 i The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama, edited by Simon Barker, and Hilary Hinds, Routledge, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/villanova-ebooks/detail.action?docID=180234. Created from villanova-ebooks on 2020-03-17 13:42:37. FRANCIS BEAUMONT o f social class with chivalric romance and festive release. Bliss, Lee (1987) ‘“Don Quixote in England”: The Case for M errythought, with his constant recourse to song in the The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Viator: Medieval and face o f adversity, makes us laugh until, perhaps, we Renaissance Studies, i8: 36i-80. Bliss, Lee (i987) Francis Beaumont, Boston, M A: Twayne consider the terms, and price, of his good humour. As Publishers. Arthur Kinney has remarked, ‘M errythought, after all, is Bristol, Michael D. (i985) Carnival and Theater, London: forever genial, yet that very geniality depends on the M ethuen. willingness o f others to support him - he survives on the Cook, Ann J. (1981) The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's legacy o f others. H e can also carry his one-dimensional London 15/6-1642, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University philosophy to an excess we would consider inhuman: “If Press. both my sons were on the gallows, I would sing”’ Finkelpearl, Philip J. (i990) Court and Country Politics in the (Kinney 1999: 389). As with much of the comedy of the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Princeton, NJ: Princeton p erio d , The Knight o f the Burning Pestle suggests that, University Press. beyond the laughter, there was a very real uncertainty in Hattaway, Michael (1982) Elizabethan Popular Theatre, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. the shift from a late-medieval world into a recognisably Iselin, Pierre (ed.) (1996) Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher: modern one. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Paris, France: Didier Erudition. Textual note Kirsch, Arthur C. (i972) Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. The Knight of the Burning Pestle was once thought to Leech, Clifford (i962) The John Fletcher Plays, London: have been written jointly by Francis Beaumont and his Chatto & Windus. long-term collaborator, John Fletcher (1579-1625), but Lesser, Z. (1999) ‘Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning we follow recent editors, and the evidence of careful Pestle, English Literary Renaissance, 29, i: 22-43. analysis o f the play’s stylistic cohesion, in attributing it Lindsay, E. S. (i924) ‘The Music of the Songs in Fletcher’s to Beaumont alone. This edition is based on the quarto P lays,’ Studies in Philology, X X I. Miller, Ronald F. (i978) ‘Dramatic Form and Dramatic of 1613 (referred to in the footnotes as Qi) and the two Im agination in Beaum ont’s The Knight of the Burning further quartos dated 1635 (Q2 and Q3). The play was Pestle, English Literary Renaissance, 8, i: 67-84. reprinted from Q3 (which may, in fact, have been later Osbourne, Laurie E. (i99i) ‘Female Audiences and Female than i635) for the second Beaum ont and Fletcher folio Authority in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Exemplaria, of 1679. Copies o f these early editions are held in the 3, 2: 4 9 i - 5i7. British Library in London. This edition reproduces the Samuelson, David A. (i979) ‘The Order in Beaumont’s Knight seventeenth-century division o f the play into Acts and of the Burning Pestle, English Literary Renaissance, 9, 2: Interludes; further subdivision (into scenes), although 302-18. favoured by some modern editors, suggests an Steinberg, Glenn A. (1991) ‘“You Know the Plot/We Both Agreed On#”: Plot, Self-consciousness, and undermining of the unusual sense of pace and cohesion The London Merchant in Beaum ont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, achieved by the continued presence on the stage o f the Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 5: 2 ii-24 . Citizen and the Citizen’s W ife. Weimann, Robert (i978) Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, London, Baltimore, M D: Johns Hopkins Further reading University Press. Editions Works of related interest Dyce, Alexander (ed.) (1843-6) The Works of Beaumont and Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (i585) Fletcher, London: Edward Moxon. A n o n ., Mucedorus (i588) Hattaway, Michael (ed.) (1970) The Knight of the Burning George Peele, The Old Wives’ Tale (1591) Pestle, The New Mermaids, London: A. & C. Black. George Peele, Edward I (i59i) Kinney, Arthur F. (ed.) (1999) Renaissance Drama: An Thomas Heywood, The Four Prentices of London (1594) Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, Oxford: Blackwell.
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