Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband! - The Knight of the ...

2026-10-17T03:22:22Z

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.

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Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband! - The Knight of the ...