Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband! - The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont

Innovations in art to tend towards Mannerism.  As a form matures it turns on itself, as creators, and some portion of the audience, become more interested in the form itself.  So we get more art about art.  The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) is young (age 22, 23) Francis Beaumont’s play about plays, where the sophisticated six-penny boys’ company audience gets to indulge in mockery of the vulgar taste of the petty bourgeois one-penny theater-goers.

The play is supposed to be The London Merchant, a city comedy about ordinary Londoners where the apprentice ends up with the daughter of the merchant, something like Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.  But a “citizen,” a “real” London merchant, and his wife, seated on the stage, demand a different play, something full of heroic adventures, and while we are changing things why shouldn’t it star the citizen’s apprentice Ralph. 

WIFE: [below – the play has not started yet, and the characters are not seated]  Husband, husband!

RALPH:  Peace, mistress.

WIFE:  Hold thy peace, Ralph; I know what I do, I warrant ye – Husband, husband!

CITIZEN:  What sayest thou, cony?

WIFE:  [below]  Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband; let him kill a lion with a pestle!

So what we see is a mishmash of the London play and a separate string of episodes where Ralph, inspired by chivalric romances, becomes the “Grocer Errant,” with his own Sancho Panza although sadly, given the limits of Jacobean staging, no horse.  Meanwhile the grocer and his wife comment and demand additional changes to the play, down to changes in the music (Act II, Scene 8).

If some of this sounds rather like Don Quixote, yeah, what is up with that?  Nobody knows.  Don Quixote existed (1605) but was not available in English.  Some episodes get strangely close to Cervantes.  Others do not.

The grocer and his wife are seated on the stage, presumably along with actual paying customers, dressed in their finest, showing off for the audience.  Such is my understanding of the stage seating, which cost extra, which is perhaps why the actors give in to the ridiculous demands.

The wife is wonderful.  She comments, she digresses, she urges violence :

Break’s pate, Ralph; break’s pate, Ralph, soundly!  (II.5)

… cut him I’ the leg, boys, cut him i’ the leg!  (III.2)

She sometimes seems to know she is watching a play, and sometimes not.  Her attention occasionally wanders off completely:

But of all the sights that ever were in London, since I was married, methinks the little child that was so fair grown about the members was the prettiest; that and the hermaphrodite.  (III.3)

A magnificent comic masterpiece of a part.  Startling to think it was originally played by a teenage boy.  However good a revival might be, and how I would love to see one, it will not recapture the original performance by a company of boy actors.

I find the humor The Knight of the Burning Pestle is cumulative.  The straight play is thin, the goofy scenes with the grocer-knight are amusing but not exactly surprising, and the commentary of the “real” grocer and his wife are a mix of the funny and banal.  But as the pieces trip over each other, the chaos spreads, and even the “real” play turns into a pastoral, with the characters wandering around in a forest like in As You Like It, the play becomes funnier.  It is like many plays, yet I do not know another like it.

Beaumont was ahead of his time.  The Knight of the Burning Pestle was a flop.  The audience for pure satire about theater was not quite there yet.  But the Beaumont and Fletcher team became popular for a different kind of theatrical theater, tragicomedy, and the taste for city comedies grew, and the more sophisticated, or decadent, audience did develop, so Pestle became a big, much-revived, hit, too late for poor Beaumont, dead at age 32 or so, to enjoy it.

My text is the 1911 Everyman’s Library Select Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.  I borrowed the photo from a 2010 American Shakespeare Center production.  Steve Martin fans will be interested to know that the helmet with the arrow through it is in the original play.  "Enter RALPH with a forked arrow through his Head" (V.3).

Next up: George Chapman wrote a series of tragedies based on recent French history.  The best known is Bussy D’Ambois, which I see I have a bit out of place in my chronology.  It was published in 1607 but likely performed in 1604 or so.  I remember it as quite good.