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The Knight of the Burning Pestle
'Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband; let him kill a lion with a pestle.'
So exclaims the Grocer's wife who, with her husband and servants, is attending one of the London's elite playhouses where a theatre comany has just begun to perform. Peeved at the fact that all the plays they see are satires on the lives and values of London's citizenry, the Grocer and his wife interrupt and demand a play that instead contains chivalric quests and courtly love. What's more, they nominate their apprentice Rafe to take on the hero's role of the knight in this entirely new play.
So exclaims the Grocer's wife who, with her husband and servants, is attending one of the London's elite playhouses where a theatre comany has just begun to perform. Peeved at the fact that all the plays they see are satires on the lives and values of London's citizenry, the Grocer and his wife interrupt and demand a play that instead contains chivalric quests and courtly love. What's more, they nominate their apprentice Rafe to take on the hero's role of the knight in this entirely new play.
The author, Francis Beaumont, ends up not just satirising the grocers' naive taste for romance but parodying his own example of citizen comedy. This play-within-a-play becomes a pastiche of contemporary plays that scorned those who were not courtiers or at least gentlemen or ladies. Like Cervantes in Don Quixote, Beaumont exposes the folly of those that take representations for realities, but also celebrates their idealism and love of adventure.
The editor, Michael Hattaway, is editor of plays by Shakespeare and Jonson as well as of several volumes of critical essays, and author of Elizabethan Popular Theatre, Hamlet: The Critics Debate, and Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature. He is Professor Emeritus of English Literature in the University of Sheffield.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1613
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About the author
Francis Beaumont
796 books19 followersborn 1584
English poet Francis Beaumont wrote his major works, plays, including The Maid's Tragedy and The Coxcomb , with John Fletcher in the 1610s.
Francis Beaumont, a dramatist in the Renaissance theater, most famously collaborated.
A justice of the common pleas of Grace Dieu near Thringstone in Leicestershire fathered Beaumont, the son, born born at the family seat. Broadgates hall (now Pembroke College, Oxford) educated him at 13 years of age in 1597. Following the death of his father in 1598, he left university without a degree and entered the Inner Temple in London in 1600 to follow in his footsteps.
Beaumont worked not long as a lawyer, accounts suggest. He studied Ben Jonson; Michael Drayton and other dramatists also acquainted him, who decided on this passion. He apparently first composed Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in 1602. The edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica describes as "not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits."
In 1605, Beaumont commendatory verses to Volpone of Jonson. Collaboration of Beaumont perhaps began early as 1605.
They hit an obstacle early in their dramatic careers with notable failures; The children of the Blackfriars in 1607 first performed The Knight of the Burning Pestle of Beaumont; an audience rejected it, and the epistle of the publisher to the quarto of 1613 claims, failed to note "the privie mark of irony about it;" they took satire of Beaumont as old-fashioned drama. It received a lukewarm reception. In the following year of 1608, Faithful Shepherdess failed on the same stage.
In 1609, however, the two collaborated on Philaster , which the men of the king performed at the globe theater and at Blackfriars. The popular success launched two careers and sparked a new taste for comedy. John Aubrey related a mid-century anecdote; , they lived in the same house on the Bankside in Southwark, "sharing everything in the closest intimacy."
About 1613, Beaumont married Ursula Isley, daughter and co-heiress of Henry Isley of Sundridge in Kent; she bore two daughters, one posthumous. After a stroke between February and October 1613, he ably composed no more than an elegy for Lady Penelope Clifton, who died 26 October 1613.
People buried his body in Westminster abbey. People celebrated Beaumont during his lifetime and remember him today as a dramatist.
English poet Francis Beaumont wrote his major works, plays, including The Maid's Tragedy and The Coxcomb , with John Fletcher in the 1610s.
Francis Beaumont, a dramatist in the Renaissance theater, most famously collaborated.
A justice of the common pleas of Grace Dieu near Thringstone in Leicestershire fathered Beaumont, the son, born born at the family seat. Broadgates hall (now Pembroke College, Oxford) educated him at 13 years of age in 1597. Following the death of his father in 1598, he left university without a degree and entered the Inner Temple in London in 1600 to follow in his footsteps.
Beaumont worked not long as a lawyer, accounts suggest. He studied Ben Jonson; Michael Drayton and other dramatists also acquainted him, who decided on this passion. He apparently first composed Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in 1602. The edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica describes as "not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits."
In 1605, Beaumont commendatory verses to Volpone of Jonson. Collaboration of Beaumont perhaps began early as 1605.
They hit an obstacle early in their dramatic careers with notable failures; The children of the Blackfriars in 1607 first performed The Knight of the Burning Pestle of Beaumont; an audience rejected it, and the epistle of the publisher to the quarto of 1613 claims, failed to note "the privie mark of irony about it;" they took satire of Beaumont as old-fashioned drama. It received a lukewarm reception. In the following year of 1608, Faithful Shepherdess failed on the same stage.
In 1609, however, the two collaborated on Philaster , which the men of the king performed at the globe theater and at Blackfriars. The popular success launched two careers and sparked a new taste for comedy. John Aubrey related a mid-century anecdote; , they lived in the same house on the Bankside in Southwark, "sharing everything in the closest intimacy."
About 1613, Beaumont married Ursula Isley, daughter and co-heiress of Henry Isley of Sundridge in Kent; she bore two daughters, one posthumous. After a stroke between February and October 1613, he ably composed no more than an elegy for Lady Penelope Clifton, who died 26 October 1613.
People buried his body in Westminster abbey. People celebrated Beaumont during his lifetime and remember him today as a dramatist.
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August 8, 2025
This is probably my favorite English Renaissance comedy outside of Shakespeare. A parody of chivalric romance (likely inspired by the authors’ having heard of, but perhaps not actually read, the just-released-in-Spain sensation Don Quixote), the play also lampoons English theater writ large. City comedies à la Ben Jonson or Thomas Dekker and romantic tragedy à la Shakespeare both come in for loving ridicule. Readers of Shakespeare will recognize the fantastic, deadpan parody of Romeo and Juliet’s death scene in Act IV, for instance. And anyone who’s ever made art for an audience will appreciate the increasingly absurd demands two pushy audience members make upon the acting troupe putting on “The London Merchant,” the play-within-a-play unceremoniously interrupted every ten minutes or so by our real heroes: George the grocer, his wife Nell, and their apprentice Rafe (an aspiring actor, though whether the aspirations are primarily his or his theater-parent employers is not entirely clear). “Why sir,” one of the actors entreats, “you do not think of our plot; what will become of that then?” What indeed!
As with Shakespeare, it’s obvious the play was written for a popular audience and intended to be laugh-out-loud hilarious—packed with jokes and bits and references and, in short, more akin to Bridesmaids or Anchorman than to modern literature. As with Shakespeare, most of the jokes no longer register fast enough to inspire actual laughter. And yet, though so many (not quite all!) of the laughs are lost to time, the play—like Shakespeare’s comedies—remains delightful. A genuine, deeply rooted delight that grows and grows as the pages turn.
So much for my review. Now, I’d like to get on my I-know-better-than-the-experts soapbox and turn to the question of authorship.
Since the 1950s, The Knight of the Burning Pestle has been widely credited to Frances Beaumont writing alone. I believe that’s a mistake—one that rests on a narrow and overly academic view of what it means to be a writer.
Readers and scholars have long suspected that Beaumont had the larger share. But the claim that the play should be credited to Beaumont alone wasn’t broadly accepted until an American literary scholar named Cyrus Hoy “proved” it in the 1950s. Hoy used stylometry—the study of literary style—to analyze the authorship of the entire Beaumont and Fletcher canon. That canon consists of about 50 plays published together under their names in the mid-17th century, the vast majority of which were actually written by Fletcher alone or with other collaborators, after a stroke forced Beaumont’s retirement when he was still in his twenties. According to Hoy, Fletcher almost always used a set of characteristic contractions, like ‘em for them or o’th’ for of the. Because the plays are metrical, contractions are not incidental—they shape the flow of the meter, and so were taken seriously by scribes and printers, making them a strong indication of personal style.
Foy’s method absolutely establishes that Frances Beaumont sat down at a desk or table and wrote every line of this play. But is that actually enough to establish sole authorship? Theoretically, couldn’t Fletcher have come up with the concept, the plot, all the characters, and most of the jokes—and Beaumont still have written every line? Furthermore, Hoy assumed that Fletcher used his personal style—including his ‘ems and o’th’s—unconsciously. But Beaumont and Fletcher were both brilliant stylists; there is no reason to think they weren’t fully capable of mimicking each other’s styles.
Beaumont and Fletcher were the closest collaborators of a theatrical culture that prized collaboration. They almost certainly lived together. In the words of the first folio of their collective work:
Whether one did contrive, the other write,
Or one framed the plot, the other did indite;
Whether one found the matter, th’ other dress,
Or th’ one disposed what th’ other did express;
Where’er your parts between yourselves lay, we,
In all things which you did, but one thread see;
So far as I’m concerned, all the plays Beaumont and Fletcher wrote during their collaboration should be credited to both, no matter what stylistic analysis might show. I don’t know if John Fletcher co-wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle. In my view, no one ever will. But the play was attributed to the two of them for almost 400 years. And I would rather take a broader than a narrower view of what it means to be an author; a broader than a narrower view of the myriad forms artistic collaboration can take.
As with Shakespeare, it’s obvious the play was written for a popular audience and intended to be laugh-out-loud hilarious—packed with jokes and bits and references and, in short, more akin to Bridesmaids or Anchorman than to modern literature. As with Shakespeare, most of the jokes no longer register fast enough to inspire actual laughter. And yet, though so many (not quite all!) of the laughs are lost to time, the play—like Shakespeare’s comedies—remains delightful. A genuine, deeply rooted delight that grows and grows as the pages turn.
So much for my review. Now, I’d like to get on my I-know-better-than-the-experts soapbox and turn to the question of authorship.
Since the 1950s, The Knight of the Burning Pestle has been widely credited to Frances Beaumont writing alone. I believe that’s a mistake—one that rests on a narrow and overly academic view of what it means to be a writer.
Readers and scholars have long suspected that Beaumont had the larger share. But the claim that the play should be credited to Beaumont alone wasn’t broadly accepted until an American literary scholar named Cyrus Hoy “proved” it in the 1950s. Hoy used stylometry—the study of literary style—to analyze the authorship of the entire Beaumont and Fletcher canon. That canon consists of about 50 plays published together under their names in the mid-17th century, the vast majority of which were actually written by Fletcher alone or with other collaborators, after a stroke forced Beaumont’s retirement when he was still in his twenties. According to Hoy, Fletcher almost always used a set of characteristic contractions, like ‘em for them or o’th’ for of the. Because the plays are metrical, contractions are not incidental—they shape the flow of the meter, and so were taken seriously by scribes and printers, making them a strong indication of personal style.
Foy’s method absolutely establishes that Frances Beaumont sat down at a desk or table and wrote every line of this play. But is that actually enough to establish sole authorship? Theoretically, couldn’t Fletcher have come up with the concept, the plot, all the characters, and most of the jokes—and Beaumont still have written every line? Furthermore, Hoy assumed that Fletcher used his personal style—including his ‘ems and o’th’s—unconsciously. But Beaumont and Fletcher were both brilliant stylists; there is no reason to think they weren’t fully capable of mimicking each other’s styles.
Beaumont and Fletcher were the closest collaborators of a theatrical culture that prized collaboration. They almost certainly lived together. In the words of the first folio of their collective work:
Whether one did contrive, the other write,
Or one framed the plot, the other did indite;
Whether one found the matter, th’ other dress,
Or th’ one disposed what th’ other did express;
Where’er your parts between yourselves lay, we,
In all things which you did, but one thread see;
So far as I’m concerned, all the plays Beaumont and Fletcher wrote during their collaboration should be credited to both, no matter what stylistic analysis might show. I don’t know if John Fletcher co-wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle. In my view, no one ever will. But the play was attributed to the two of them for almost 400 years. And I would rather take a broader than a narrower view of what it means to be an author; a broader than a narrower view of the myriad forms artistic collaboration can take.
April 25, 2021
I can safely say I've never read an early modern play like this.
It starts out rather conventional, with the Prologue introducing the play The London Merchant, a stereotypical love story between a poor merchant's apprentice and his master's daughter. But the actor playing the Prologue is rudely interrupted by a grocer and his wife ellbowing their way onto the stage and demanding to see a story that presents the London tradesmen in a more heroic light. Consequently, assistant grocer Rafe is pressed into the role of the play's unlikely romantic hero as the Knight of the Burning Pestle and given a subplot that the couple seemingly makes up on the spot. As the grocer and his wife continue to hijack the play's original plot, ordering Rafe to intervene in the merchant's story to suit their wishes, things become more and more chaotic. The frustrated actors of the original play try to stick up for the conventional genre rules ("Sir, this is a comedy! You can't murder the hero!"), but the citizens prove to be adamant and demand more and more ludicrous plot twists.
It is hilarious to see the two plots - the predictable love story and Rafe's quixotic adventures - intertwine and complicate each other. Highly metadramatic and self-referential, The Knight of the Burning Pestle is an ingenous parody that manages to subvert everything you think you know about Renaissance drama. While some of the jokes and contemporary allusions are probably lost to time, the humour translates surprisingly well. There is just something timeless about metafictional pastiche and it's hilarious and actually rather insightful to see two authors like Beaumont and Fletcher make fun of the conventions of early modern theatre in an early modern play. The whole play is wacky and absurd and I really liked it.
It starts out rather conventional, with the Prologue introducing the play The London Merchant, a stereotypical love story between a poor merchant's apprentice and his master's daughter. But the actor playing the Prologue is rudely interrupted by a grocer and his wife ellbowing their way onto the stage and demanding to see a story that presents the London tradesmen in a more heroic light. Consequently, assistant grocer Rafe is pressed into the role of the play's unlikely romantic hero as the Knight of the Burning Pestle and given a subplot that the couple seemingly makes up on the spot. As the grocer and his wife continue to hijack the play's original plot, ordering Rafe to intervene in the merchant's story to suit their wishes, things become more and more chaotic. The frustrated actors of the original play try to stick up for the conventional genre rules ("Sir, this is a comedy! You can't murder the hero!"), but the citizens prove to be adamant and demand more and more ludicrous plot twists.
It is hilarious to see the two plots - the predictable love story and Rafe's quixotic adventures - intertwine and complicate each other. Highly metadramatic and self-referential, The Knight of the Burning Pestle is an ingenous parody that manages to subvert everything you think you know about Renaissance drama. While some of the jokes and contemporary allusions are probably lost to time, the humour translates surprisingly well. There is just something timeless about metafictional pastiche and it's hilarious and actually rather insightful to see two authors like Beaumont and Fletcher make fun of the conventions of early modern theatre in an early modern play. The whole play is wacky and absurd and I really liked it.
December 19, 2015
In the beginning, I thought I would see a play within a play, then it switched to a knight's tale and towards the end a kidnapping story. This play was bonkers!
June 12, 2022
what the HECK was that
June 8, 2022
I read this for a class on Early Modern theatre and really liked it, maybe one of my favourites so far. It's fun, weird, confusing, and at times of course extremely outdated BUT! because of the satiric/quixotian format it reads as quite 'counter-culture' in an interesting way. The two 'heroes' Rafe and Jasper contrast in a fun way and the pure non-sense plans that Jasper keeps making are hilarious to me.
February 21, 2023
saying it now, I want a relationship like Nell and George.
October 11, 2017
Unlike many of William Shakespeare's comedies, the humor seemed clear to me from the page, and i often laughed aloud. The momentum winds down a bit after Rafe's encounter with the barber, which is enough of a comic highlight that it was edited for a collection of "Rump Drolls" called
The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport
, that were supposedly performed during the Civil War (meaning the Oliver Cromwell period, for Amerocentrics). This version is included as Appendix B, but one wonders as to the point, since it seems the only difference is that the old-style spelling was retained whereas the body of the play has standardized the spelling to contemporary usage. Zitner claims (165) that a number of lines were omitted, but they certainly weren't as he presented them. I didn't check line by line, but I didn't notice any major discrepancies, and when those the editor points out as omitted on page 165 appear on page 168, one wonders the point of the inclusion.
While there are many reasons I can think of to show a military drill a the end of a drama, Rafe's training of the military is neither as exciting or funny as the barber episode, ans one wonders if its anticlimactic nature isn't so much a mistake as a joke on the backwardness of the citizens who call for it, such as Shakespeare's "Coast of Bohemia" in The Winter's Tale (which some editors in previous centuries actually altered, pretending that the compositor made a mistake).
While Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker seemed to invite Mary Frith onto the stage, she died in 1659, and there is no evidence that she ever played herself in The Roaring Girl , but here we have a grocer and his wife come on stage and insist upon changes to the narrative and offering their own apprentice, Rafe, as the actor. At only one point do the stories actually intertwine, when there is a brief battle between the protagonists of the two separate arcs, Jasper and Rafe. Shakespeare's contemporaries are not known for effectively tying two plots together the way he could, one of a number of assertions against Charles Hamilton's attribution of The Second Maiden's Tragedy as Shakespeare's Cardenio . Nevertheless, the effect is something resembling postmodernism, and despite being one of the best known and most published plays of the period not by Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, it was initially a flop. Zitner's explanation of the play's historical background and tie to the "children's company" (despite the name the boys tended to range in age between 8 and in their 20s) tradition at Blackfriars Theatre is most informative for contextualizing the play, in which references to the play being performed entirely by boys is most common.
I was amused by Zitner's use of rhyme on page 70, note 184: "The sense intended is clear, but the phrase is awkward here." On page 73, line 244-8, there is an amusing quote from L. Stone's The Crisis of English Aristocracy , "The language used by men of . . high social standing is often so intemperate as to be almost deranged," which is parodied by Rafe making fun of aristocrats saying things like "the son of a whore" and "damned bitch," which made me think of Donald Trump. On pp 129-130, a theatre called the Red Bull is disdained as low brow, which I also see as unintentionally contemporary humor.
I do have some specific issues with Zitner's notes in the play. On page 69, note 172, he refers readers to Act IV, line 418. In this edition, Act IV has only 320 lines. I believe he intended to put Act III, where the reference to a special diet for syphilitics occurs (there are a lot of jokes in the play about people claiming war wounds that are really effects of syphilis), but writing IV when you mean III is a serious editorial issue. A similar mistake appears on page 150, note 182, when Zitner refers readers to Act I, line 219, when he really means line 222. On page 71, note 212.2, Zitner refers to pp. 000 of the introduction. I don't get this. On p. 94, note 311, he references "Jasper's wordplay and action in lines 303-4." Did anyone proofread this? Lines 303-4 are spoken by Tim, have no stage direction close by, and don't make mortar and pestle jokes, although they are to be found on the page. On page 143, note 10-11, Zitner makes a reference to a "Stubbes" who describes and deplores the Morris Dance, but there is no indication of his first name or the source either in the note or in the list of sources on pp. ix-x. Finally, on page 173, there is a footnote that appears not to lead anywhere. Again this makes me wonder if any of the general editors read this before it got published (1984) and reprinted (2004).
I read several English Renaissance plays last year, some mentioned above, and references to The Knight of the Burning Pestle were in at least one of them. I thought it was an interesting title. I didn't necessarily recognize it as a joke due to its age, thinking a pestle at a larger size could potentially have been an actual weapon. It refers to a garish parody of a the grocer's guild seal as it was similarly featured in Thomas Heywood's The Four Prentices of London , which is mentioned throughout the introduction and notes. I suspect The Winter's Tale is the one with the most references to The Knight, due to them both (as detailed by Zitner and Arden Winter's Tale editor John Pitcher) mocking the recent translation of Aristotle's Poetics , or at least the prescriptive use of it. Ben Jonson immediately accepted what it had to say as the truth of how plays should be written--specifically with the unities of time space and action. The one Jonson play I have read, The Alchemist , definitely respected the unities of space and action--it takes place entirely in the master's house as his servants try to scam various people. It was hard for me to imagine people making so many return visits to the "alchemist" without any lapse of time, however, but This is what became known as "the "well-made play." Pitcher discusses the translation of Poetics and Zitner details its influence in making certain types of theatre, particularly the Romances (which we would think of today more as adventures than as romances of the Harlequin sort), to be looked down upon by a certain class of people. Pitcher describes how Shakespeare wrote The Winter's Tale to go into all-out defiance of the Aristotelian unities. Zitner notes that Beaumont quite precisely keeps the unities of time space and action by setting it entirely in the theatre, no matter where what George and Nell are watching is supposedly taking place, having "audience" members on stage constantly reminds us that we are in the theatre, while a member of the company interacts with them, telling them they don't have the resources, for example, to show Princess Pompiona in a room of gold and velvet, as well as have George go off stage to get beer and so forth. the constant reminder that one is in the theatre breaks any illusion that one might be seeing an adventure play for any length of time. I tweeted out that Beaumont and Shakespeare "lampoon" the Aristotelian unities. After I posted that, I learned that the temporally correct word is "burlesque," both words having been coined around the mid-seventeenth century, and the difference between the two noted in the anonymous prologue that was added to a performance in the late 1660s (163), the difference being in the level of harshness. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, while quite witty towards the play's class issues, lacks the harshness "lampoon" would imply back then, which Zitner also theorizes as being cause for the play to initially flop, as the children's companies were expected to be more strongly satirical and have the effect of youths mocking their elders (13).
Beaumont's play should appeal to the casual fan of Shakespeare with its gentle satires of moments in Hamlet , Romeo and Juliet , and Macbeth (all identified in the footnotes, but often readily apparent), but perhaps the most commonly referenced scenic comparison is to King Henry IV, Part Two , from which Zitner tells us Samuel Taylor Coleridge considered a passage in this play plagiarism. The play is also valuable for a glimpse at how the plays were actually executed by its use of music in dances in way that normally would not have been included in the script because of the way that George and Nell comment on these moments. I am reminded of my college screenwriting professor, Ying Zhu, telling us "Don't direct," as we read each others' screenplays aloud in class with heavier and camera stage directions than are industry standard, but when you're being creative, it's difficult to resist even if you know you would need to cut it later to submit it on spec. Here we get more than usual put on paper than we do in other dramatic writing of the period.
While there are many reasons I can think of to show a military drill a the end of a drama, Rafe's training of the military is neither as exciting or funny as the barber episode, ans one wonders if its anticlimactic nature isn't so much a mistake as a joke on the backwardness of the citizens who call for it, such as Shakespeare's "Coast of Bohemia" in The Winter's Tale (which some editors in previous centuries actually altered, pretending that the compositor made a mistake).
While Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker seemed to invite Mary Frith onto the stage, she died in 1659, and there is no evidence that she ever played herself in The Roaring Girl , but here we have a grocer and his wife come on stage and insist upon changes to the narrative and offering their own apprentice, Rafe, as the actor. At only one point do the stories actually intertwine, when there is a brief battle between the protagonists of the two separate arcs, Jasper and Rafe. Shakespeare's contemporaries are not known for effectively tying two plots together the way he could, one of a number of assertions against Charles Hamilton's attribution of The Second Maiden's Tragedy as Shakespeare's Cardenio . Nevertheless, the effect is something resembling postmodernism, and despite being one of the best known and most published plays of the period not by Shakespeare or Ben Jonson, it was initially a flop. Zitner's explanation of the play's historical background and tie to the "children's company" (despite the name the boys tended to range in age between 8 and in their 20s) tradition at Blackfriars Theatre is most informative for contextualizing the play, in which references to the play being performed entirely by boys is most common.
I was amused by Zitner's use of rhyme on page 70, note 184: "The sense intended is clear, but the phrase is awkward here." On page 73, line 244-8, there is an amusing quote from L. Stone's The Crisis of English Aristocracy , "The language used by men of . . high social standing is often so intemperate as to be almost deranged," which is parodied by Rafe making fun of aristocrats saying things like "the son of a whore" and "damned bitch," which made me think of Donald Trump. On pp 129-130, a theatre called the Red Bull is disdained as low brow, which I also see as unintentionally contemporary humor.
I do have some specific issues with Zitner's notes in the play. On page 69, note 172, he refers readers to Act IV, line 418. In this edition, Act IV has only 320 lines. I believe he intended to put Act III, where the reference to a special diet for syphilitics occurs (there are a lot of jokes in the play about people claiming war wounds that are really effects of syphilis), but writing IV when you mean III is a serious editorial issue. A similar mistake appears on page 150, note 182, when Zitner refers readers to Act I, line 219, when he really means line 222. On page 71, note 212.2, Zitner refers to pp. 000 of the introduction. I don't get this. On p. 94, note 311, he references "Jasper's wordplay and action in lines 303-4." Did anyone proofread this? Lines 303-4 are spoken by Tim, have no stage direction close by, and don't make mortar and pestle jokes, although they are to be found on the page. On page 143, note 10-11, Zitner makes a reference to a "Stubbes" who describes and deplores the Morris Dance, but there is no indication of his first name or the source either in the note or in the list of sources on pp. ix-x. Finally, on page 173, there is a footnote that appears not to lead anywhere. Again this makes me wonder if any of the general editors read this before it got published (1984) and reprinted (2004).
I read several English Renaissance plays last year, some mentioned above, and references to The Knight of the Burning Pestle were in at least one of them. I thought it was an interesting title. I didn't necessarily recognize it as a joke due to its age, thinking a pestle at a larger size could potentially have been an actual weapon. It refers to a garish parody of a the grocer's guild seal as it was similarly featured in Thomas Heywood's The Four Prentices of London , which is mentioned throughout the introduction and notes. I suspect The Winter's Tale is the one with the most references to The Knight, due to them both (as detailed by Zitner and Arden Winter's Tale editor John Pitcher) mocking the recent translation of Aristotle's Poetics , or at least the prescriptive use of it. Ben Jonson immediately accepted what it had to say as the truth of how plays should be written--specifically with the unities of time space and action. The one Jonson play I have read, The Alchemist , definitely respected the unities of space and action--it takes place entirely in the master's house as his servants try to scam various people. It was hard for me to imagine people making so many return visits to the "alchemist" without any lapse of time, however, but This is what became known as "the "well-made play." Pitcher discusses the translation of Poetics and Zitner details its influence in making certain types of theatre, particularly the Romances (which we would think of today more as adventures than as romances of the Harlequin sort), to be looked down upon by a certain class of people. Pitcher describes how Shakespeare wrote The Winter's Tale to go into all-out defiance of the Aristotelian unities. Zitner notes that Beaumont quite precisely keeps the unities of time space and action by setting it entirely in the theatre, no matter where what George and Nell are watching is supposedly taking place, having "audience" members on stage constantly reminds us that we are in the theatre, while a member of the company interacts with them, telling them they don't have the resources, for example, to show Princess Pompiona in a room of gold and velvet, as well as have George go off stage to get beer and so forth. the constant reminder that one is in the theatre breaks any illusion that one might be seeing an adventure play for any length of time. I tweeted out that Beaumont and Shakespeare "lampoon" the Aristotelian unities. After I posted that, I learned that the temporally correct word is "burlesque," both words having been coined around the mid-seventeenth century, and the difference between the two noted in the anonymous prologue that was added to a performance in the late 1660s (163), the difference being in the level of harshness. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, while quite witty towards the play's class issues, lacks the harshness "lampoon" would imply back then, which Zitner also theorizes as being cause for the play to initially flop, as the children's companies were expected to be more strongly satirical and have the effect of youths mocking their elders (13).
Beaumont's play should appeal to the casual fan of Shakespeare with its gentle satires of moments in Hamlet , Romeo and Juliet , and Macbeth (all identified in the footnotes, but often readily apparent), but perhaps the most commonly referenced scenic comparison is to King Henry IV, Part Two , from which Zitner tells us Samuel Taylor Coleridge considered a passage in this play plagiarism. The play is also valuable for a glimpse at how the plays were actually executed by its use of music in dances in way that normally would not have been included in the script because of the way that George and Nell comment on these moments. I am reminded of my college screenwriting professor, Ying Zhu, telling us "Don't direct," as we read each others' screenplays aloud in class with heavier and camera stage directions than are industry standard, but when you're being creative, it's difficult to resist even if you know you would need to cut it later to submit it on spec. Here we get more than usual put on paper than we do in other dramatic writing of the period.
March 1, 2023
this took a few attempts to get through purely because there’s about a million characters but I rlly enjoyed it when I got into it (but I had to had to keep going to the character list which was v annoying)
May 22, 2025
Yeah, this is great.
April 3, 2024
where the bee can suck no honey, she leaves her sting behind; and where the bear cannot find origanum to heal his grief, he blasteth all other leaves with his breath.
February 26, 2019
Incredibly close to modern parody. Enjoyed way more than I expected!
November 23, 2025
3,5*
As far as early modern plays go, I think 'The Knight of the Burning Pestle' is about as chaotic as it can get.
As far as early modern plays go, I think 'The Knight of the Burning Pestle' is about as chaotic as it can get.
July 12, 2016
I have little idea what to say about this play... I've seen it twice now at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (the indoor theatre at Shakespeare's Globe in London) and it is the most hilarious thing ever. I think it might be my favourite theatrical experience - certainly it is the funniest play I've seen, and very very clever, too.
That it was originally written 400 years ago just boggles my mind. 'Early-modern post-modern' I dubbed it, and my sis approved.
I enjoyed reading the play, and there's certainly plenty of good things on the page. But I think its brilliance is in the scope it allows for a humdinger of a performance. I guess that is true for most plays: they are written to be performed rather than read. (And it's not just me who loves it. Timothy Spall played the part of Rafe some years ago, and named his even more brilliant son after the role.) If you ever get the chance to see this on the stage, please do yourself the proverbial favour.
Francis Beaumont, I do ♥ you truly.
♦
17 June: OK, so I can't work out how to review multiple editions, despite consulting GR's 'Help'.
I originally read the Nick Hern Books edition edited by Colin Counsell (9781854596246).
I've also now read the Bloomsbury edition edited by Michael Hattaway (9780713650693) which is terrific for providing more substance in the intro and notes. Currently my preferred edition.
♦
10 July 2016: And I've now read the Revels Plays edition, edited by Sheldon P Zitner (9780719069673).
This is The One, folks! Absolutely wonderful and very thorough Introduction, which made me feel I was finally getting a grasp on the fact that the play didn't quite appear out of nowhere. Also, very useful appendices on the play's Interludes and Songs. If you need to choose just one edition, this is the one I'd recommend.
That it was originally written 400 years ago just boggles my mind. 'Early-modern post-modern' I dubbed it, and my sis approved.
I enjoyed reading the play, and there's certainly plenty of good things on the page. But I think its brilliance is in the scope it allows for a humdinger of a performance. I guess that is true for most plays: they are written to be performed rather than read. (And it's not just me who loves it. Timothy Spall played the part of Rafe some years ago, and named his even more brilliant son after the role.) If you ever get the chance to see this on the stage, please do yourself the proverbial favour.
Francis Beaumont, I do ♥ you truly.
♦
17 June: OK, so I can't work out how to review multiple editions, despite consulting GR's 'Help'.
I originally read the Nick Hern Books edition edited by Colin Counsell (9781854596246).
I've also now read the Bloomsbury edition edited by Michael Hattaway (9780713650693) which is terrific for providing more substance in the intro and notes. Currently my preferred edition.
♦
10 July 2016: And I've now read the Revels Plays edition, edited by Sheldon P Zitner (9780719069673).
This is The One, folks! Absolutely wonderful and very thorough Introduction, which made me feel I was finally getting a grasp on the fact that the play didn't quite appear out of nowhere. Also, very useful appendices on the play's Interludes and Songs. If you need to choose just one edition, this is the one I'd recommend.
February 6, 2024
Just read The Knight of the Burning Pestle for the second time: I'm leaving my first review as is, because I think two reviews from the same person, separated by eighteen months shows either how much I have changed, or how much the play has.
I gave it four stars last time: it's clearly five.
Mad as a barrel of brushes, and utterly filthy almost throughout: there is one soliloquy where the "hero" Jasper addresses his erection as his enemy; there is a scene where Rafe plans a military campaign and every sentence is a double-entendre; there is a scene where the thwarted lover Humphrey starts saying what he wants to do to his lover's "hole" and gets carried away into thinking he wants someone to do it to his; and these are just some bits.
And if you're read any Arcadia or Faerie Queene, you can see exactly what Beaumont is getting at: the foreign princess who has heard of all these exotic dishes the English have: beer and beef-with-mustard.
If you have only read this once, it's worth a second time. I would love to see this.
My first review:
Well, what a phenomenally silly play. It's sort of Enchanted + The Purple Rose of Cairo mixed with The Actor's Nightmare with a smattering of Don Quixote, but that makes it sound highbrow. It isn't: this is very possibly the silliest play I have read in a long time, and written 400 years ago. It's effortlessly entertaining (like a Renaissance Mrs Brown's Boys, but funnier) but what the hell the point is, or why, or to whom, and in whose trousers? I'll leave that to the experts.
I read the whole thing in about a day, and I've never read any other Beaumont, but I feel like judging the playwright on the basis of this would be a bit like judging Shakespeare on a bad quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
It is bonkers, and would probably be great fun to watch, but.....
I gave it four stars last time: it's clearly five.
Mad as a barrel of brushes, and utterly filthy almost throughout: there is one soliloquy where the "hero" Jasper addresses his erection as his enemy; there is a scene where Rafe plans a military campaign and every sentence is a double-entendre; there is a scene where the thwarted lover Humphrey starts saying what he wants to do to his lover's "hole" and gets carried away into thinking he wants someone to do it to his; and these are just some bits.
And if you're read any Arcadia or Faerie Queene, you can see exactly what Beaumont is getting at: the foreign princess who has heard of all these exotic dishes the English have: beer and beef-with-mustard.
If you have only read this once, it's worth a second time. I would love to see this.
My first review:
Well, what a phenomenally silly play. It's sort of Enchanted + The Purple Rose of Cairo mixed with The Actor's Nightmare with a smattering of Don Quixote, but that makes it sound highbrow. It isn't: this is very possibly the silliest play I have read in a long time, and written 400 years ago. It's effortlessly entertaining (like a Renaissance Mrs Brown's Boys, but funnier) but what the hell the point is, or why, or to whom, and in whose trousers? I'll leave that to the experts.
I read the whole thing in about a day, and I've never read any other Beaumont, but I feel like judging the playwright on the basis of this would be a bit like judging Shakespeare on a bad quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
It is bonkers, and would probably be great fun to watch, but.....
February 15, 2014
The interrupting Citizens of Beaumont's play make for a rare romp in dramatic literacy, and their insistence on an apprentice as the Knight of the Burning Pestle is an odd choice. Yet the satire of popular children theatre companies (Hamlet's often cited "little eyases") and the striving merchants who are bettered by their apprentices signals a shift in popular entertainment. Even the romances popular at the end of Shakespeare's career seem to be a bit dated here. Wow I never heard of this play before, it is no surprise that it is now being performed on the Globe's Sam Wanamaker stage until March 30th! While I wish I could be instantly there to see it, I had a good sense from reading this play of how it might play out with a modern audience. Nell would be a yoga pants-wearing, new-age dieter (for all her medicinal advice for other actors) who has a bloodlust for TV wrestlers or hockey fights: "kill, kill, kill, kill, kill". Her husband, the Grocer, on the other hand would be wearing a Bluetooth on stage, insistently micromanaging the child actors on stage while taking calls from head office. What to make of the continually warbling dead-beat dad Merrythought, whether he belongs to the made-up world of the London Merchant or is a closer kin to our own, would be up for the director to decide. Anyone going to the Sam please let me know!
November 4, 2021
I picked this up as required school reading. What a funny play! I usually think of comedies from this time as just having a happy ending, but this one had me laughing out loud.
August 29, 2016
Read as part of Renaissance Drama: an anthology of plays and entertainments, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Blackwell 2013)
July 26, 2017
Just like the 17th Century Monty Python sketch you always dreamed of. Great companion to Tieck's Puss in Boots.
June 23, 2024
ok so far the comedies we've read for this class are way better and more coherent and i generally like them more but still this was sus but i guess it was funny
June 25, 2024
400 years ahead of its time
March 9, 2025
double yawn
December 18, 2023
An utterly delightful and exceptionally relevant satire of shitty audiences who just want fan-service and violence. Especially notable in that it gave a female audience member the most prominent voice, as well as other quite healthy relationships between men and women, such as the Citizen and his wife's baby-animal pet names for each other, as well as the language between the lovers Jasper and Luce being "best friends." Though it pokes some fun at conventions of the stage, I think that this play really shines in that it critiques bad audiences and the negative impacts that they can have on the media that they bully around. For example, it takes someone of particularly small mental capacity to "need the main character to look like them" in order to care about the story. Shakespeare mostly writes plays about nobility not only because they literally have power and what happens to them has an outsized impact on other people, but because they have freedom of movement, action, and language which allows for more dynamism than some preposterous "Grocer Errant," which stinks of the same politically-correct box-checking that many characters today seem to slip into.
January 16, 2020
Honestly found this a very interesting play to read. It opened many questions in regard to early modern audiences. I kept, for example, wondering how common it was for spectators to actually interrupt the play, try to change parts of it or just in general to comment on it.
The interweaving of The London Merchant and the romance-satire The Knight of the Burning Pestle was very amusing and I have to say the only thing that really bothered me was Merrythought’s incessant singing...
I would love to see this play in performance, though I have been told that it is normally not very successful. This makes sense since it calls for a certain shape of the play space and interruptions like Nell’s and George’s would probably drive most modern playgoers mad (in fact, I have been told that in the production on one of the Globe’s stages a few years ago, audience members tried to shush these characters).
Either way, it was very entertaining and I would recommend it to everyone who has a special interest in meta-theatricality.
The interweaving of The London Merchant and the romance-satire The Knight of the Burning Pestle was very amusing and I have to say the only thing that really bothered me was Merrythought’s incessant singing...
I would love to see this play in performance, though I have been told that it is normally not very successful. This makes sense since it calls for a certain shape of the play space and interruptions like Nell’s and George’s would probably drive most modern playgoers mad (in fact, I have been told that in the production on one of the Globe’s stages a few years ago, audience members tried to shush these characters).
Either way, it was very entertaining and I would recommend it to everyone who has a special interest in meta-theatricality.
September 5, 2023
Definitely a thing I read. Mined this one for wiktionary quotes pretty good. I wish the play outside of the play-within-the-play was a little better and a little bigger--George and Nell are funny but especially in the first few acts they're pretty tedious. This gets lumped with the Shoemaker's Holiday pretty often in criticism--two sides of the theatre's reaction to the ascendant middle/merchant class--and I think that's actually a pretty good grouping because I didn't particularly like either of them. They're fine. Doebler of the UNP edition tries to make the case that the satire in this play is not only nuanced but unified and that he's parodying Johnson's obsession with the classical unities, but this sounds to my like Bloom's defense of Titus as a send-up of Marlow: desperate defense, and for what? I started reading Zitner's critical apparatus but I stopped because I don't care. This isn't even a "the humor has aged and jokes have been lost" kind of thing because I get the jokes, they're just not that funny. And certainly this isn't a great work.
Three stars.
Three stars.
April 25, 2023
It's hard for me to stop thinking about this play. It's meta-theatrics take me by surprise for sure, but it's delivery is something unique.
As the Citizen, George, and his Wife Nell interrupt the play called the "London Merchant," it might be easy to think that they're a bunch of dimwits who don't get the point of theatre. They constantly ask to see a different play about the real citizens of London. So the players on stage agree that on top of the London Merchant, they'll perform the Grocer's adventure play called the Knight of the Burning Pestle, starring the Grocer's apprentice Rafe, who must improvise his part of the play alongside some other actors. It seems from the start we might not want to sympathize with George and Nell. In fact, it's clear the players on stage are against them, making jokes about their trade they don't understand or are oblivious to. Yet, as the play goes on, and we get to know George and Nell more, we see that the way they take in theatre, and art, and poetry, is far beyond what anyone in the room can comprehend. It's clear to them they understand what is beautiful and what isn't, what is poetic and what isn't. Even more so, they devise the best moments of the actual performance alongside Rafe, and by the end of the show, we are meant to extol the brilliant work of George, Nell, and Rafe, and by extension the audience members in lower stations.
To me, The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a love letter to the theatre audience. That what makes a show so revered, so great, so poetic and complex are the complex people, the citizens, who come and watch it. When you get to know a Grocer and his wife for more than first impressions, you realize that the idea of a first impression is deceitful. People can be amazing when you give them the space, time, and patience to do so.
As the Citizen, George, and his Wife Nell interrupt the play called the "London Merchant," it might be easy to think that they're a bunch of dimwits who don't get the point of theatre. They constantly ask to see a different play about the real citizens of London. So the players on stage agree that on top of the London Merchant, they'll perform the Grocer's adventure play called the Knight of the Burning Pestle, starring the Grocer's apprentice Rafe, who must improvise his part of the play alongside some other actors. It seems from the start we might not want to sympathize with George and Nell. In fact, it's clear the players on stage are against them, making jokes about their trade they don't understand or are oblivious to. Yet, as the play goes on, and we get to know George and Nell more, we see that the way they take in theatre, and art, and poetry, is far beyond what anyone in the room can comprehend. It's clear to them they understand what is beautiful and what isn't, what is poetic and what isn't. Even more so, they devise the best moments of the actual performance alongside Rafe, and by the end of the show, we are meant to extol the brilliant work of George, Nell, and Rafe, and by extension the audience members in lower stations.
To me, The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a love letter to the theatre audience. That what makes a show so revered, so great, so poetic and complex are the complex people, the citizens, who come and watch it. When you get to know a Grocer and his wife for more than first impressions, you realize that the idea of a first impression is deceitful. People can be amazing when you give them the space, time, and patience to do so.
November 6, 2024
It is a testament to the rapid evolution of the theatre in Renaissance England that basically within 20 years of the medium establishing itself we get deconstructions like this. Here a rote city comedy with shades of Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday is disrupted by a grocer family who park themselves on the stage and insist on the addition of a heroic adventure subplot (heavily influenced by Don Quixote). Their interjections provide a meta commentary on the different tastes and expectations of the audience, although the jokes do start to wear a bit thin towards the end. The author’s preface seems to be a defence against accusations of snobbery – the play is written to “please all, and be hurtful to none”. It’s certainly a delight.
March 2, 2018
Absolutely fantastic! So fun and meta. A citizen and his wife interrupt a play and insist on having things performed to their specific preferences and chaos ensues. Plenty of satire and parody not only of the culture, theatre, and theatrical audiences, but also of other plays in the era including Shakespeare. Though it can be confusing trying to work out the storylines and meta aspect just from reading the play, the attempt is absolutely worth it and the humor is wonderful. An entertaining, unconventional play that was far ahead of its time.
December 25, 2024
I had higher expectations for this play but ended up feeling like I was reading a bad rip off of Shakespeare's comedies. My favorite part was the commentaries of the Citizen and his Wife during the play and the meta aspect it added to the story. Aside from that, the motivations of any character in the play are just vague AF.
May 12, 2025
The central joke of this--that a grocer and his wife barge their way on stage in the middle of the prologue, insist that their shop assistant be added to the cast, and continually interrupt to demand alterations to the play--is a good one, but reading Elizabethan drama that isn't by Shakespeare mostly just reminds me how good Shakespeare is.
November 9, 2019
I cannot decide how many stars to give this. On the one hand it's a fractured play of little beauty. On the other hand it contains some of the most delicious sarcasm anyone working in the theatre and having been exposed to "the audience knows best" must appreciate.
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