Why was The Knight of the Burning Pestle Revived?

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

‘’Las sir! I’m no Ghost’: the misprision of spectral presence in Caroline drama

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