The Knight of the Burning Pestle

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The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (likely almost entirely by Beaumont) written around 1611 and first published in a quarto of 1613. It is notable as the first whole parody (or pastiche) play in English. The play is a satire on chivalric romances in general, similar to Don Quixote, and a parody of Thomas Heywood's The Four Prentices of London and Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday. Furthermore, the play is notable for breaking the fourth wall at its outset.

1 Text
2 Staging
3 Plot
4 External link
5 References

[edit] Text

It is most likely that the play was written for the child actors at Blackfriars Theatre, where John Marston had previously had plays produced. Blackfriars specialized in satire, according to Andrew Gurr (quoted in Hattaway, ix), and Michael Hattaway suggests that the dissonance of the youth of the players and the gravity of their roles combined with the multiple internal references to holiday revels because the play had a Shrovetide or midsummer's day first production (Hattaway xxi and xiii). The play is certainly carnivalesque, but the date of the first performance is purely speculative. The second quarto publication came in 1635, with a third the same year. The play was omitted from the first folio of 1647 but included in the second folio of 1679.

[edit] Staging

The Knight of the Burning Pestle was initially produced in a small private theatre, if it was written for Blackfriars, with minimal stage properties. However, the private theaters were the first ones to introduce the practice of having audience members seated on the stage proper (according to Gurr, op cit. in Hattaway ix), which is a framing device for the play's action. Additionally, the higher cost of a private theater (six shillings, compared to a penny at some public theaters) changed the composition of the audience to some degree and would have suggested a more critically aware (and demanding) crowd. The play makes use of several "interludes," which would have been spare entertainments between the acts (but which are integrated into the performance in this case), again emphasizing the smallness and spareness of the initial staging (as interludes would have allowed for technicians to arrange the lights and scenery and to put actors in place).

Revivals of the play are largely undocumented, but some are attested. Hattaway suggests that it was performed in the Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane in 1635, at court the next year, and then after the Restoration at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1662 and again in 1665 and 1667 (Hattaway xxix). The play "has proved popular with amateur and university groups," according to Hattaway, but not with professional troupes. The Royal Shakespeare Company performed it in 1981.

[edit] Plot

A grocer and his wife "in the audience" of the play interrupt to complain loudly that plays are always about nobility and that it is they, the common people, who pay for most of the tickets. It is suggested that one of them—in fact, their apprentice, Rafe—should have a part in the play. Rafe then gets the part of the "Grocer Errant" in the interrupted drama. He has a burning pestle on his shield as a heraldic device and has to undertake the daring rescue of patients being held by a barber named Barbaroso. The meta-fictional plot is intercut with the main plot of the interrupted play, where Jasper, a merchant's apprentice, is in love with his master's daughter, Luce, and must elope with her to save her from the arranged marriage with Humphrey. Humphrey and the merchant capture the lovers, and the merchant locks Luce in her room. Jasper feigns death and gets his coffin carried to the merchant's house (as the merchant is responsible for his apprentice). He then gets up from the coffin and pretends to be his own ghost and frightens the merchant into giving consent to his match with Luce.

The play hits a number of satirical and parodic points. The audience is satirized, with the interrupting grocer, but the domineering and demanding merchant class is also satirized in the main plot. Beaumont makes fun of the new demand for stories of the middle classes for the middle classes, even as he makes fun of their taste for an exoticism and a chivalry that is entirely hyperbolic. Much of the humour derives from innuendo, the pestle itself being a rude metaphor. A burning pestle, i. e. penis, is one of the symptoms of syphilis. Needless to say, the rude jokes pass completely over the heads of the Grocer and his wife.

A 1974 production of the play featured music by Peter Schickele, best known as the creator of P.D.Q. Bach.