The Knight of the Burning Pestle (New Mermaids) - Softcover

Beaumont, Francis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0713650699 ISBN 13: 9780713650693

Publisher: Methuen Drama, 2002

Synopsis

'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.

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.

About this title

Review:

A playwright whose experimental writing still seems fresh almost 400 years after his early death, in the same year as Shakespeare. --British Theatre Guide

Synopsis:

Rarely was the device of the play-within-the-play used to morehilarious satirical effect than in this Jacobean burlesque of romanticknight-errantry, which by the late sixteenth-century had been adoptedby London's civic elite to ennoble themselves in literature andspectacle. An upright London citizen and his wife 'interrupt' aperformance of 'The London Merchant' at one of London's prestigiousindoor playhouses because they assume it will mock the citizenry andits values; instead, they demand to see their apprentice Rafe in thelead role of tales of chivalric derring-do. The introduction to thisedition sets Rafe's metamorphosis from prentice-hero to Lord of Misruleinto the context of early modern festive culture and argues that theplay might even be understood as an endorsement of this culture,persistently attacked by puritans.

About this edition

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0713650699
• ISBN 13: 9780713650693
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 154