5. Beaumont and Fletcher. The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

Both dramatists came from the higher strata of society. Beaumont was Shakespeare’s junior by twenty years but died in the same year as the older dramatist, at the age of 32. He was the son of a judge and was buried in the Westminster Abbey. A collection of 34 plays was published in 1647 under the names of Beaumont and Fletcher, the number was increased to fifty-two in the second Folio (1679). The problem of the authorship of the so-called Beaumont and Fletcher plays belongs to the most controversial questions. The spirit and attitude in these plays mark a significant change in English Renaissance drama. Shakespeare’s stories are often silly and improbable, yet he tells them without violently offending against truth of character or the truth of life. His plays reveal something essential about man and life. By contrast, the Beaumont and Fletcher plays are saturated with moral unconcern: they present a chain of exciting events designed to produce the maximum of emotional effect. The moral basis has been replaced here by an emotional scale of value. The structure of their plays is extremely skilful. The dramatic material is constructed into theatrically telling situations which lead by a series of surprises to effective climaxes and catastrophes. The characters belong to certain conventional types, such as the sentimental or violent hero; his faithful friend, a blunt (tompa), outspoken (szókimondó) soldier; the sentimental heroine, often a love-lorn maiden disguised as a page to serve the hero; an evil woman defiant (dacos) in her crimes. The theme is often the struggle between love and honour, with high flown ideas of friendship between man and man. Such stock characters and situations foreshadow some of the basic subjects of the heroic drama of the Restoration comedy. Many attempts have been made to separate the work of the two playwrights. Some suggest that Beaumont supplied ‘judgment’ and checked his friend’s exuberance of ‘wit.’ The usual view was that Beaumont is the deeper, more tragic author whose architectonic gift imposed discipline on Fletcher’s fluency. But Beaumont was also a master of the burlesque as is shown by the delightful play, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, usually assigned to Beaumont alone. It is an outpouring of his spirits, composed in eight days in 1607 or 1610, and performed by boy actors.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle 

Beaumont created two audience members who move their seats to the stage to watch the play. This presents the convention of private theatres that began at the Blackfriars Playhouse that involved gentlemen actually sitting on the stage during a performance. These viewers paid more money to see the play and, more importantly, to be seen by the other audience members. However, though the owners of the playhouses insisted they allow these men to watch the show from the stage, most scholars believe that actors and dramatists did not like the new custom at all. In The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which was written for the Blackfriars Playhouse, George and Nell climb onto the stage to join the gentlemen who are already on stage viewing the play. In this play, Beaumont not only mocks (gúnyolni) audience members but particularly those who paid money to view the play from the stage. This placement of the citizen and his wife is most significant though because it further satirizes, and quite blatantly (nyilvánvalóan), the audience member who does not understand the fiction of theatre, as neither George nor Nell cannot theoretically cross the boundary between stage and audience even though they have physically crossed it. The Knight of the Burning Pestle similarly explores this idea that audience members mistake fiction for reality. Though most plays had previously employed the actors to challenge the barrier between fiction and reality, Beaumont breaks this theatrical convention with his immediate introduction of the characters of George and Nell. By creating characters who are audience members, Beaumont allows for the possibility of observing their understanding of the play, the idea of fiction, and their perception of reality. These two characters explicitly question the actors’ play and suggest different ways to please the audience. George and Nell defy the convention in which characters in the world of the play interact with the audience to invite the viewers into the characters’ lives. Rather, Beaumont creates an audience who interacts with the actors in order to invite the characters into the world of the audience. By doing this, Beaumont shows some people’s inability to understand the art of theatre and the need to suspend disbelief in order to enter the fictional world. The tradition of the actors playing the host has been evaded; thus, George and Nell never become a part of the play’s world and can never separate themselves from their own world in London.