No abstract

No abstract

The Knight of the Burning Pestle was a famous failure when it was first performed. Its failure has fascinated generations of critics. Jeremy Lopez has gone so far as to say that "failure is the basis of the play's canonical identity" (Constructing 75). Walter Burre, the play's printer, offered one explanation for its lack of success, blaming the 1607 Blackfriars audience who, he claimed, failed to understand its "privy mark of irony" (A2 r), yet scholars have offered an ingenious array of other interpretations. John Doebler is among those who propose that Beaumont was insufficiently critical of the citizens he satirized, alienating the play's elite audience in the process (xii). Andrew Gurr argues just the opposite, suggesting that the play's "elitist satire" offended many citizen playgoers who were in attendance (Shakespearean 102). Richard Rowland contends that the privileged audience may have been embarrassed by seeing plays they secretly enjoyed subjected to scorn ("(Gentle)men" 28). Resisting the citizen/elite binary opposition, Brent Whitted claims that Beaumont caused dissension by conflating "two different audience cultures … the Inns of Court and Blackfriars" (127), while Tracey Hill suggests the root of the problem may be found in Beaumont's conflation of "civic and theatrical dimensions," bringing city and theater together without understanding the relationship already in place (171). Some scholars have blamed the play's shocking newness for its poor reception: for Lee Bliss, Beaumont was ahead of his time (36), for Philip Finkelpearl, he was hampered by an audience who struggled "to accept and comprehend the truly new" (82). Sheldon P. Zitner notes, tentatively, that the fault may lie with the performers rather than with the play, or the audience (38), but other

No abstract

In 1647, Humphrey Moseley and Humphrey Robinson published a folio collection of unpublished works which they attributed to Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, two writers famous for their collaborations from 1606 to 1613. But in affording Beaumont a place on the title page, the publishers misattributed the volume. Scholars now accept that Beaumont had very little direct input in the collection whereas Philip Massinger, who began collaborating with Fletcher soon after Beaumont’s retirement, had a very significant, unacknowledged role in the collected plays. This essay offers the first extended discussion of why it was that Massinger was written out of this canon-defining volume. I argue first that Massinger was by many accounts a popular and vendible dramatist, whose omission from the folio had little to do with him having a poor reputation. Instead, I suggest that the reputation of the names Beaumont and Fletcher, established in the preceding decades, proved irresistible to the publishers. Furthermore, I argue that Massinger’s reputation as a distinctive solo playwright also counted against him, making it harder to apprehend him as a prolific collaborator. Next, I demonstrate how the 1647 folio participated in a process of canonization which elided Massinger’s significant collaborative contribution and discuss the distorting effect this has had on our understanding of Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and playwrighting practice more broadly. I end by pointing towards some ways of rectifying the historical elision of Massinger’s collaboration with Fletcher.