The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Around 1607, about the time he began his famous collaboration with John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont penned this play, perhaps his most celebrated solo work, for a company of boy actors. Within a decade he would be dead, but the fruits of the relatively brief collaboration would eclipse even Shakespeare's popularity in decades to come.

KBP is most admired as a metatheatrical satire of middle-class London merchants, filled with snatches of song by the lighthearted Master Merrythought. The main plot is the familiar romantic conflict of runaway lovers being kept apart by a father, a London merchant who wishes his daughter Luce to wed his old friend Humphrey, not his apprentice Jasper. But though the boy actors try valiantly to keep the story show more on track, their play is repeatedly and hilariously interrupted by auditors who become actors. A grocer and his wife climb from the audience to take up stools on the stage and demand that Rafe their apprentice be given a knightly costume and made the star of the performance. Soon he is acting out his own adventure, taken from popular prose romances of the time, featuring knights errant pricking across desert plains on their palfreys to rescue distressed damsels.

The adventurer Rafe, the titular "Knight of the Burning Pestle," undertakes quests worthy of Don Quixote though patriotically English - vanquishing the giant Barbaroso and releasing his syphilitic clients, charming the Princess of Moldavia, performing as Lord of May Day, mustering all of London's apprentices in a skirmish, and ending the comedy with a mournful death-speech. Though Rafe the knight momentarily loses in his duel with Jasper the lover, the story of the grocer's apprentice quite eclipses the plotted drama of the love-contest for the hand of Luce -- in part because of the deep pockets of the grocer, who is called upon in medias res to pay the bills incurred by Rafe's adventures. Throughout the performance the two chatty spectators argue with the players and each other, but by the end both stories are knitted up - and like Rosalind in As You Like It, the grocer's wife gets the last word in an epilogue.

This Regents Renaissance Drama edition offers a brief introduction to the play and two extensive, helpful appendices: the music for the nearly 20 songs that fill the play, and a century's chronology of crucial dates relevant to early modern drama. show less