. . . our Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle was a sort of Quixot on the Stage.
—Nahum Tate, A Duke and No Duke
The early years of James’s reign provided a bonanza of Spanish materials for English readers. The end of the protracted hostilities in 1604 and the mutual peace embassies from Spain to England and England to Spain offered the occasion for English readers to encounter materials that had been harder to procure during the war. The Jacobean era is one of the richest periods for England’s turn to Spain, both because it corresponds to a truly dazzling moment in Spain’s own literary production, and because the peace afforded new channels of transmission. The coincidence of the English embassy to Valladolid with the 1605 publication of Cervantes’s Don Quijote, in particular, was to make available with remarkable speed the most influential of Spanish texts, one that quickly made its way onto the London stage in a variety of guises.
If the currency and popularity of Don Quijote made it a source to reckon with, they also made it an irresistible target for the kind of combative translatio I trace through this book. This chapter analyzes how Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, generally dated to 1607, negotiates Spanish influences and the English taste for Spanish chivalric romances, which had been consistently translated during the war. I trace how the play attempts to domesticate Don Quijote, transforming it into a rumination on a national and local mercantile identity as the essence of Englishness. As a highly self-conscious and fragmented text, The Knight of the Burning Pestle reflects on questions of appropriation, originality, and popular reception. Yet I am interested also in how The Knight’s own debts have been negotiated. Exactly what the play owes to Don Quijote has been hotly debated from at least its first printing, and the critical negotiation of that indebtedness reveals a profound discomfort with England’s larger debt to Spanish sources.
The Knight is an exceedingly complicated play, overflowing with plots and their interruption. As the play opens, a Grocer and his wife, who have come to the theater to watch The London Merchant, a typical city comedy of money and marriage, hijack it by insisting that the play honor their class, instead. The fourth wall is broken almost immediately, as the grocer George interrupts the Prologue to demand “something notably in honour of the commons of the city” (Induction, 25–26). As Leslie Thomson points out, George apparently enters with the gentlemen of the audience to sit on the stage, as was common in the indoors Blackfriars playhouse, suggesting the conflation of his status with theirs and further confusing the lines between reality and representation.1 Meanwhile, his wife Nell and their apprentice Rafe muscle their way up from the audience, with Nell clamoring for room among her betters and effectively performing her social climbing as they clamber onto the stage. Dissatisfied with what the company is attempting to perform, George and Nell call for a heroic Grocer who would “kill a lion with pestle” (Induction 42–44), in a clear dig at the improbable stage romances that glorified the London trades. Undeterred by the problems with casting such a role, they offer up Rafe to play the part. Thus the self-conscious, mock-chivalric plot that recalls Don Quijote is only one of two plays-within-a-play, juxtaposed with the conventionality and domesticity of the much interrupted London Merchant.
Rafe’s reading of chivalric romances, which is acted out on stage, inspires him to become a “grocer-errant” (I.262), with the burning pestle as his emblem. As the mock-knight, he mistakes an inn for a castle and refuses to pay for his lodging; encounters a barber Nick with a great red beard, whose prisoners he must release; and rejects the love of the Moldavian princess Pompiona because he has a lady of his own in Sue, the “cobbler’s maid in Milk Street” (IV.96–98). The grocer and his wife (referred to in the dramatis personae as “the Citizens”) spur him on to ever more spectacular feats, as they gradually lose patience with the more sophisticated play they are interrupting. By the end, these Citizens demand instead separate set-pieces: a May-Day celebration, a muster for battle, and Rafe’s eloquent, speechified death as a farewell. The strange amalgam that is The Knight of the Burning Pestle is thus as much about the struggle for and over representation as it is about any one plot-line; perhaps the only constant is the grocer and his wife’s dissatisfaction with being passive spectators and their desire instead to influence what is represented.
Already in the first edition of the text, published by Walter Burre in 1613, the question of the play’s relation to Don Quijote was paramount. Burre protests in his prologue that the English play, the “unfortunate child” whom he had taken in as his foster son, came before the Quijote: “Perhaps it will be thought to be of the race of Don Quixote: we both may confidently swear it is his elder above a yeare, and therefore may (by vertue of his birth-right) challenge the wall of him.”2 Yet Burre’s claim is qualified by the extended metaphor that governs his explanation: the text as defective son may be a commonplace, but it is one used brilliantly by Cervantes in his own prologue, where he famously refers to himself as the text’s stepfather (the metaphor reprised by Jonson to describe Mabbe’s translation of Alemán, as I noted in Chapter 1). Moreover, Burre moves from his combative insistence on “birth-right” to an oblique recognition of the advantage in linking his foster son to Cervantes’s creation: “I doubt not but they [the two would-be knights] will meet in their adventures, and I hope the breaking of one staff will make them friends; and perhaps they will combine themselves, and travel through the world to seek their adventure” (52). Even as he denies filiation, Burre obliquely recognizes the affinities between the texts and the benefit inherent in their connection.
In general, critics have acknowledged The Knight’s relation to its Spanish predecessor only to discount its importance. In some cases, they claim that the two texts are merely parallel—so that parallelism takes on its own ideological weight as the absence of influence. Yet parallelism seems a hard argument to make given the ubiquity of Don Quijote in England from the time of its 1605 publication. As J. A. G. Ardila has charted, the novel “exerted a continuous and regular influence . . . from as early as 1607,” with multiple written references to the text before 1610, and certainly long before the publication of Thomas Shelton’s translation in 1612.3 The English probably encountered the novel immediately on its publication, through Charles Howard’s 1605 peace embassy to Spain, on which he was accompanied by six hundred Englishmen. Educated English readers, accustomed to consuming Spanish literature, would have been prepared to feast on the original, and to contribute to its immense and immediate popularity. Notably, just months after the publication of Don Quijote, the earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s great patron, donated one hundred pounds to the new Bodleian library for the purchase of Spanish books, in swift recognition of the opportunities the peace with Spain would afford for readers. Though the primary goal of the first librarian, Thomas James, was to acquire books of Catholic theology, in order to polemicize with them, a few historical and literary texts were purchased as well. Don Quijote, one of only two works of literature acquired, was catalogued on August 30, 1605.4 The Bodleian Quijote and the larger donation of which it was part establish the availability of the text in England5 and confirm the existence of a reading public perfectly capable of consuming it in the original.
Strikingly, most of the earliest references to Don Quijote in England come from the theater, from George Wilkins’s The Miseries of Inforst Marriage (as early as 1607 or possibly 1606), to Middleton’s Your Five Gallants (1607), to, in the years immediately following The Knight, Jonson’s Epicoene (1610) and The Alchemist (1611). This theatrical currency, with allusions to fighting windmills or to the hero himself, makes it impossible to imagine a context for The Knight of the Burning Pestle that would not have been thoroughly saturated with an awareness of Don Quijote. The most recent wave of critical interest in the lost Cardenio may finally have established the influence of the novel on English drama of the period, so that Tiffany Stern, focusing on the Cardenio/Double Falshood controversy (which I turn to in Chapter 4), can refreshingly describe The Knight, in passing, as “a parody of Don Quixote.”6 Thus my point is not to try to right the record on the influence of the Spanish text, a goal now fortunately superfluous. Instead, I am interested in both the rationale for and the metaphorics of the long-term resistance to Cervantean influence on the part of Anglo-American editors and critics. Whereas Burre, writing in 1613, is most concerned with the fortunes of the singular play, and his investment in bringing it to press, later critics participate in a complex dynamic of disavowal where Spain is concerned.7 Unthinkingly incorporating the suspicion toward Spain and Spanish properties that characterized the Elizabethan moment, these critics repeatedly attempt to contain Spanish influence in an effort to promote a national English canon that seems to depend on a refusal of influence, or its transmutation into a triumphant appropriation, as in so many of the instances I chart throughout this book.
Among modern readings of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, perhaps the most interesting attempt to construct a high English canon by denying a debt to Cervantes is Herbert Murch’s 1908 edition, which emphasizes the play’s satire of low or middle-class tastes. Murch painstakingly goes through all possible resemblances between the play and Don Quijote, only to deny them:
The objects of their satire are the same; their methods of developing a humorous situation—through bringing into ludicrous juxtaposition the common-place realities of life and the high-flying idealisms of knight-errantry—are the same; and, moreover, a few of the incidents are remarkably alike. But these similarities are the outcome of allied purposes in the two works; they do not of themselves argue any interdependence whatsoever.8
Murch concludes that because there is no evidence that the authors (he ascribes the play to Beaumont and Fletcher) knew Spanish, they could not have worked from Don Quijote, and adduces the late date of Shelton’s translation as sufficient evidence for the play’s “complete independence of its accredited source.”9 There follows a list of suspiciously similar moments: seven hallmarks of Quixotic particularity, including the inn, the barber’s basin, and so forth, some of which I have detailed above.10 But for Murch these quintessentially Quixotic moments betray instead the shared targets of the play and the novel. Don Quijote and The Knight, Murch claims, are satirizing the same chivalric romances: Amadís de Gaula, Palmerín de Oliva, and their like, which had been translated into English by Anthony Munday, Margaret Tyler, and others. The fact that these, too, are Spanish, and that they were being translated for a ravenous English reading public during the war with Spain, seems less important than establishing the independence of the text at hand from its most immediate Spanish predecessor.
Murch strongly emphasizes both the originality and the Englishness of the text, even when both Don Quijote and Rafe happen upon inns which they mistake for castles, and where they refuse to pay for their lodging:
It will be readily granted that, even if Beaumont did draw the idea of the inn-scenes from Cervantes, his development of it is independent and original. But what reason is there for presuming that he so derived it? Is not its employment a very logical issue of the conditions of the play, and may not the conception of it, therefore, have been wholly original with its author? Ralph with his squire, his dwarf, Mistress Merrythought, and Michael, is wandering about in the uninhabited Waltham Forest in search of food and a resting-place. Suddenly the party emerge into the open, and find themselves at the end of Waltham Town, where is situated a tavern called the Bell Inn (2.393). This is a local touch which does not have the least connection with Don Quixote. . . . I see no reason why, in the logic of the movement, this feature of the play should not have been conceived in complete independence of Don Quixote. Furthermore, the ascription of the source of the scene to the novel seems nullified by the thoroughly English and local tone of the dwarf’s account of the castle and its inmates.11
The importance of the local is also stressed by Rudolf Schevill, equally skeptical of the play’s debt to Don Quijote, in his 1907 essay on Spanish influence in England, which touches on many of the same points as Murch’s introduction. The later episodes of the play, Schevill observes, “if very carefully considered have an absolutely local, and not a borrowed flavor.” He stresses that the butt of the satire, too, is purely local: “What object would there be in a satire on conditions which did not exist in England? Beaumont and Fletcher saw fit to parody merely local conditions.”12
As I argue below, it is precisely the translation of the Quijote material and its relocation into a domestic sphere, marked by the specifics of place, that makes The Knight of the Burning Pestle such a striking example of “Englishing” in the period. By domesticating its mock-chivalric model the play offers a mercantile, London-based alternative to the transnational circulation of romance, but this ideological effect becomes invisible if we deny the parodic text’s relation to its source simply because the Quijote’s geography has been replaced with the local. Murch and Schevill’s emphasis on the English text’s originality and “complete independence” as marks of literary value erase the vectors of translation along which we might trace its ideological work, promoting instead an English product unburdened by foreign debts.
Michael Hattaway’s introduction to the New Mermaids edition of 1969 provides a more balanced assessment of The Knight of the Burning Pestle’s sources. Hattaway recognizes the Iberian origins of the chivalric romances, yet moves quickly to praise their “transmutation,” and that of the Quijote, in the play: “But one should not stress Beaumont’s debt to Cervantes too much, as The Knight is basically an accumulation of conventional episodes from romances and English plays as well as of elements from a native tradition of satire, all of which are welded into a splendid entertainment.”13 While Hattaway recognizes the play’s multiple debts, he fails to note how its satirical take on romance aligns it most closely with Don Quijote. His emphasis on a “native tradition,” moreover, points to the real ideological stakes of the play: to what extent can we read this translatio of Cervantes as an attempt to negotiate the tensions between imported fantasy and domestic carnival?
Clearly, The Knight reprises not only Don Quijote but also the “native” apprentice-romances of Thomas Heywood and the like, in which apprentices are granted an unexpected protagonism and discovered as unlikely heroes. The Four Prentices of London (1594, pub. 1615) is perhaps the most obvious dramatic referent, but there is also some of the ludic spirit of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599, pub. 1600). Beaumont’s text pokes fun at these earnest visions of apprentice heroics, yet it remains most concerned, I suggest, with the problem of local versus transnational attachments. In its final scenes, the play stages both the fascination with chivalric romance and its transcendence, in national, local, and class terms. Its promotion of the local, for its part, overgoes “native” plays such as Heywood’s Four Prentices, which improbably stages distant settings and romance wanderings. For Heywood’s play is hardly concerned with the local scene: its four noble protagonists, who are merely slumming as apprentices, must leave behind their London toil and join a crusade to reveal their true greatness. Conversely, The Knight invokes a community that ultimately rejects the individual—even solipsistic—appeal of a chivalric literature largely marked as foreign for the communal, English pleasures of May-day and local London hi-jinks. Much as in Cervantes’s novel, the point is not the single addled reader and his wandering fantasy but the domestic community that serves as his cure.14
In The Knight, the pleasure in the local aligns the audience with the witty apprentice—the knowing reader—in contradistinction to his crude masters and to the improbable knights that Rafe mocks. The wily native son, closely associated with London and the dodges necessary to prosper in the city, emerges as the desirable alternative to the circulation of readerly desire beyond English borders. National allegiance trumps class difference, as the apprentice Rafe, foregrounding his national citizenship, steals the show from his masters, whose citizenship was conferred by the London guild. Ultimately, the promotion of the local and the national transcends the play’s satire of the trades and their tastes, as the bonhomie of national belonging triumphs over differences in class and sophistication.
Moreover, the play performs a double operation of Englishing: even as the chivalric romances and the Quijote are transposed into the English language, the mythical geography of romance is replaced with the domesticated and familiar London of the comedy. The transformation of England from the space of romance to the locus of mercantile hi-jinks is coded in the play not as any kind of diminution or fall into realism, but as the occasion for patriotic revelry and praise of the local. Donna Hamilton has argued that the Iberian romances translated into English in the latter part of the sixteenth century promote a united Christian empire, and thus forcefully challenge the “Protestant cultural project” of Sidney, Spenser, and others.15 Anthony Munday’s translation of the Iberian Palmerin of England16—the romance Rafe is reading in The Knight of the Burning Pestle—engages such delicate topics as the succession to the English throne, the destruction of ancient religion, and the fate of Ireland. Given such content, it is not surprising that city comedy might offer a domestic Protestant alternative to the continental vision of England.
Part of The Knight’s intrinsic interest lies in the indeterminacy of the local, of what exactly counts as domestic space in the play. Janette Dillon’s suggestive reading emphasizes the text’s “investment in the symbolic importance of the city boundary,” and its problematization of both the imaginative and the actual limits of the city.17 Dillon astutely notes how the three plots on stage—The London Merchant (the play originally announced in the prologue), the adventures of Rafe as apprentice-errant, and the play that the Grocer and his wife keep trying to mount, all depend on “a tension between mobility and staying put.”18 Although Dillon elucidates the boundaries between city and suburbs in the play, these spaces actually remain quite fluid, as she herself notes. More important, London is consistently foregrounded as the synecdochal center of the nation—a city that can summon or stand in for the national. “Is not all the world Mile End?” Dillon’s title, echoes the question posed in the play about the liminal space outside London proper where display battles were often held. Whereas Dillon reads this moment as a reflection on London authority and its limits, I would suggest that it signals precisely the synecdoche by which London and its environs can invoke all of England.19
In a brilliant reading of the erotics of domesticity in The Knight, Wendy Wall notes that the play, through the figure of the Citizen’s exacting wife, “asks its audience to think about the potential fantasies that infiltrate domesticity—the postures of loss, mastery, dependency, and submission played out in strong form in the home regimen of kitchen physic.”20 Wall is attuned to the national inflection of the domestic in the play, arguing that it “champions domesticity as the staple of true Englishness,” as home is gradually tied to patriotic ritual.21 Yet given the connections between foreignness and chivalric romance in the play, its own “Englishing” of its sources privileges domesticity.
The play’s validation of the local as a stand-in for the national must be read within a broader consideration of its foreign sources. Beyond the London/not London anxieties that Dillon recovers through her historical reconstruction of liminal spaces, and Wall’s domestic regimen, the play offers a sustained relocation of errant romance into the domestic and the local bounds of Englishness. Jean Howard has argued that London-based comedies of the period “negotiate the presence of non-native Londoners and non-native commodities within the space of the city,”22 and The Knight of the Burning Pestle is no exception. But it also grapples with the presence of other representations, from the Iberian chivalric romances to their reprise in Don Quijote, and their transnational appeal for an English reading or viewing public. For a play so invested in favoring the local, the transnational context against which it defines itself becomes key.
The tension between the foreign and the domestic pervades the play, by dint of the oxymoron implicit in the figure of the grocer-errant, with its echoes of Heywood’s improbable apprentices. The contrast is more explicitly set up in Act III via an extended joke on the ravages of syphilis and piracy—twin international scourges of the age. In reading these scenes, in which the grocer-errant Rafe must fight the barber Barbarossa or Barberoso, Patricia Parker has noted the associations between Barbary, barbers, and emasculating captivity in the period. As she points out, Barbarossa has a very precise referent in the famous pirate Khaired-Din, a renegade who terrorized Europe for decades and took countless captives.23 The captives in The Knight of the Burning Pestle all suffer from syphilis, amplifying the joke that gives the play its title, and the tortures that the barber inflicts are ostensible cures. The foreignness of syphillis, also known as the “French pox,” is itself transposed to one of the victims’ genealogy:
2 Knight: I am a knight, Sir Pockhole is my name,
And by my birth I am a Londoner,
Free by my copy; but my ancestors
Were Frenchmen all; and riding hard this way
Upon a trotting horse, my bones did ache . . . (III.395–99)
The English victims, ostensibly afflicted by a foreign pox, have all been captured as they depart London, and Rafe sends them back “to the town / where [they] may find relief” (III. 388–89).
Jokes aside, Rafe’s confrontation with Barberoso stages a kind of wishful thinking about renegades, as Rafe embodies a fully English identity that is impervious to any seduction. Instead of joining the renegade, as was historically most likely, the heroic Englishman handily defeats him, racing into battle with a cry of “Saint George for me!” (III.339). The scene concludes with an imperfect quarantine, as the barber/pirate promises “henceforth never gentle blood [to] spill” (III.466) and seals his promise with a kiss on Rafe’s burning pestle. Yet the bawdy circulation of the pox and the disruption of what was at least in part an establishment for curing the afflicted, suggest how partial and provisional the retrenchment from “foreign” dangers must necessarily be, no matter how loudly Rafe trumpets his English triumph.
The play patriotism continues in Act IV, which begins with Rafe’s encounter with Pompiona, Princess of Moldavia. George and Nell insist on this scene, over the pertinent objection of the players’ Boy: “Besides, it will show ill-favouredly to have a grocer’s prentice to court a king’s daughter” (IV. 46–47). The Citizen bristles at the boy’s protest, countering with romance models for the lionization of the lowly: “Will it so, sir? You are well read in histories! I pray you, what was Sir Dagonet? Was not he prentice to a grocer in London? Read the play of The Four Prentices of London, where they toss their pikes so,” (IV.48–51). Sir Dagonet, of course, was the king’s fool in Malory’s Mort d’Arthur, and nothing in The Four Prentices comes close to the exalted union proposed for Rafe, given that the “prentices” in that play are, improbably, the sons of a duke. But, as we soon see, Rafe refuses even so advantageous a union as a marriage to a princess if it means succumbing to foreign seductions.24
Rafe introduces himself to Pompiona with, “I am an Englishman / As true as steel, a hearty Englishman / And prentice to a grocer in the Strand.” Although the lady speaks positively about England (“Oft I have heard of your brave countrymen,” IV.79), amid jokes about ale and salt beef, Rafe will have none of her. He rejects her for her foreignness, and will not even consider converting her, as the Citizen suggests he should do:25
Rafe: I am a knight of a religious order
And will not wear the favour of a lady’s
That trusts in Antichrist and false traditions.
Citizen: Well said, Rafe; convert her if thou canst.
Rafe: Besides, I have a lady of my own
In merry England, for whose virtuous sake
I took these arms; and Susan is her name,
A cobbler’s maid in Milk Street, whom I vow
Ne’er to forsake whilst life and pestle last. (IV.92–100)
The domestic and the local are here aligned with the religious difference of a Protestant England, in contradistinction to the “false traditions” of the presumably Catholic princess. Rafe’s concerted effort to maintain national distinction trumps both the class advancement that marrying a princess would afford a “Grocer-errant” and the transnational fellowship among aristocrats that characterizes romance. Even though in the play neither of these are serious alternatives, as the lady is clearly one more artifice provided to placate the Citizens, the humor does not undo the scene’s privileging of national allegiances over romance fantasy. By upholding a loyalty to England that is more powerful than the illusion that Nell and George orchestrate for him, Rafe replaces his masters’ emphasis on class with a fantasy of national belonging. Nell seals the matter with her approval, expressed now in terms of national and local pride: “I commend Rafe that he will not stoop to a Cracovian. There’s properer women in London than any are there, iwis” (IV.128–30).26 Rafe effectively teaches the Citizens to prefer a shared sense of Englishness to the temptations of social advancement through romance.
The act ends with Rafe’s obliging performance as May Lord, at the Citizen’s request: “I will have Rafe do a very notable matter now, to the eternal honour and glory of all grocers . . . Let Rafe come out on May Day in the morning and speak upon a conduit, with all his scarfs about him, and his feathers, and his rings and his knacks,” (Interlude IV.5–11). Historically, urban May Day celebrations had been largely suppressed by this period and effectively replaced with more ordery civic pageantry, as part of the city authorities’ efforts to control ribaldry in London.27 The text instead repurposes the revelry as a national celebration that reaches beyond the city, suturing it to the countryside.
As the revels begin, Rafe forgoes the morris (morisco) dance suggested by the Citizen’s wife, with its foreign or Spanish overtones, and launches straight into the celebration of Englishness:
London, to thee I do present the merry month of May.
Let each true subject be content to hear me what I say . . .
Rejoice, O English hearts, rejoice, rejoice, O lovers dear;
Rejoice, O city, town, and country; rejoice, eke every shire . . .
(Interlude IV.27–37)
With each iteration of rejoicing, Rafe reaches further, convening a centripetal nation around the city as around the maypole. Although the Citizen had requested the celebration “in honour of the City” (Interlude IV.16), when Rafe invites the revelers to “march out . . . to Hogsdon or to Newington” (Interlude IV.54–56) he invokes an Englishness that transcends London. The festival propounds the national as an alternative to the international circulation of both chivalric characters and the texts themselves, reveling in a local pleasure that transcends the satiric thrust of much of the play.
In Act V, the second skit—a muster of soldiers for war—both sends up and recuperates patriotism, as burlesque exchanges about shot-pieces, touchholes, powder-horns and flint-stones give way to repeated invocations of St. George. Here, too, the individual chivalric ethos gives way to the troop, joined together in a merry company. However performative (and silly) the military might on display here, it evokes for the Citizen actual memories of his soldiering. As he tells his wife, “I was there myself a pikeman once, in the hottest of the day, wench” (V.75–76).
Rafe, for his part, conjures subjects from a wide range of classes in mercantile London:
Gentlemen, countrymen, friends, and my fellow-soldiers, I have brought you this day from the shops of security and the counters of content to measure out in these furious fields honour by the ell and prowess by the pound. Let it not, O, let it not, I say, be told hereafter the noble issue of this city fainted, but bear yourselves in this fair action like men, valiant men and freemen. Fear not the face of the enemy, nor the noise of the guns. For believe me, brethren, the rude rumbling of a brewer’s car is far more terrible, of which you have daily experience. Neither let the stink of powder offend you, since a more valiant stink is nightly with you. . . . Remember, then, whose cause you have in hand and, like a sort of true-born scavengers, scour me this famous realm of enemies. I have no more to say but this: stand to your tacklings, lads, and show to the world you can as well brandish a sword as shake an apron. Saint George, and on, my hearts! (IV.140–59)
If these prosaic, though alliterative, measures of honor poke fun at the mercantile version of bravery, they also suggest how theatricality can animate a national spirit for a commercial age, in contradistinction to the exhaustion of chivalry. The humor works from the inside, to confirm Rafe’s participation in a knowing, resolutely local, and pragmatic nation that has elaborated its own, anti-heroic brand of patriotism. If this is satire, it embraces rather than ostracizes its targets. Moreover, the muster connects national feeling to the domestic space: these “furious fields” are not in France (well though that might serve Rafe’s alliterative bent) but in London itself, and, in the long shadow of the Gunpowder Plot, the soldiers are charged primarily with finding enemies within England (“scour me this famous realm of enemies”). Thus patriotism is brought home from the imperial concerns of a play such as Henry V, evoked by Rafe’s rhetorical flourishes, to a more proximate arena, where heroism might instead animate and bring together the various classes of London.
Perhaps more than any of Rafe’s set-pieces, the muster performs a leveling nationalism that sutures class difference, negating not only the historical repression of May-Day festivities in order to control the lower classes, but the suspicion of playgoing by citizens who feared the dissipation of their apprentices and servants. If, as Andrew Gurr has noted, “any apprentice at a playhouse was taking time away from his working day,”28 in the version offered by Rafe stage-apprentices instead become patriotic exemplars. Merely two years before the 1599 The Shoemaker’s Holiday, which stages the sanctioned revelry of the apprentices, the Lord Mayor had written to the Privy Council to express the citizens’ disapproval of the theater as a place where apprentices and servants might join “in theire designes & mutinus attemptes.”29 Yet Rafe is not involved in mutiny; he has been specifically instructed by his masters to provide them with entertainment. The solidarity of the muster that Rafe recreates, and which leads the Citizen to reminisce about his own time on the battlefield, transcends the class lines that divide masters from servants.30 Just as when, in an earlier episode, Rafe refuses a foreign princess and brings Nell around to applauding the rejection, Rafe’s playacting promotes in his masters a national feeling that transcends class difference and social climbing. In this sense, the entire Rafe plot provides a striking alternative to the swirling plots of The London Merchant, the play the Citizens are sabotaging, in which the apprentice’s marriage to his master’s daughter, after many vicissitudes, is a zero-sum game: for the apprentice to win, the master must lose. Here, by contrast, the apprentice convinces his masters that theirs is a shared enterprise.
Rafe’s performances provide a powerful alternative to the more adversarial relations set up between the players’ Boy and the audience, on the one hand, and the Citizens on the other. As Zachary Lesser notes, “The Boy of The Knight repeatedly refers to the ‘Gentlemen’ of the audience, urging them to ‘rule’ George and Nell and prevent them from ruining the play, or excusing the outmoded features George asks for, which ‘will not doe so well’ with a witty audience whose tastes are au courant.”31 But in fact it is Rafe who manages to rule them, by initially giving them what they want and gradually bringing them around, as in his rejection of Pompiona. Despite the play’s privileging of wit and ironic distance, Rafe’s rousing defense of the local effects surprising alliances between the classes. Even if, that is, The Knight of the Burning Pestle is invested in creating social distinction based on wit, and in censuring the characters on stage,32 it manages simultaneously to offer a fond version of mercantile heroics, and, more importantly, to bring together apprentices and their masters in a national brotherhood.
These two dimensions do not seem to me incompatible: a more sophisticated audience (including the reading audience sought by Burr upon publication, with which Lesser is primarily concerned) might well have appreciated the satiric thrust of the play as a whole, while a broader audience at the theater might have warmed to the comic, commercial heroics purveyed by Rafe in the muster scene.33 Ultimately, while The Knight of the Burning Pestle both stages and dismantles chivalric romance and popular entertainment, it achieves along the way a performative nationalism that succeeds in eliding the differences between Rafe and his masters.
Rafe’s performances also allude to the best known version of Spain on the English stage, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Since its initial success in the late 1580s, Kyd’s play had been revived multiple times, becoming both a metaphor for theatricality itself and a constant reference. Rafe’s introduction of himself as May Lord invokes the famous opening of Kyd’s play. “My name is Rafe, by due descent though not ignoble I, / Yet far inferior to the flock of gracious Grocery” (Interlude IV.31–32) reprises the lines spoken by the ghost of the dead Andrea: “My name was Don Andrea; my descent, / though not ignoble, yet inferior far / to gracious fortunes of my tender youth.”34 Yet unlike Andrea, whose death stems from his affair with Bel-Imperia, Rafe seems to have skirted the dangers of foreign princesses and social climbing. Once again, a domestic and domesticated version of mercantile agency replaces heroism.
Instead of tragedy, The Knight gives us a mock-death, specifically requested by Rafe’s demanding audience. As part of his extraordinarily talkative demise, Rafe reviews his past life, and summons his popular dramatic predecessor with great economy. “When I was mortal, this my costive corpse / Did lap up figs and raisins in the Strand” (V.290–91) closely echoes Andrea’s “When this eternal substance of my soul/ Did live imprisoned in my wanton flesh.”35 With its homely and local referents, Beaumont’s play domesticates its sources, although in this case what is Englished is not a Spanish text but a dark English fantasy of Spain. The much cited and recirculated faux-Spanish play supplements the extensive material actually taken from Spain, which animates The Knight of the Burning Pestle at so many different levels. When Rafe is done playing Quijote, he turns, via Kyd, to a different, and even more improbable, version of Spain.
The Knight is not explicitly about tensions between England and an encroaching Spain; indeed, whatever its exact dating, it is a play of the 1604 peace. Yet it stages via its relation to the Spanish material at its source the self-fashioning of an English commercial subjectivity in contradistinction to the chivalric, and to other threats that—imaginatively, at least—lie beyond England, in the circulation of both pox and pirates. The intrusion of money into the world of romance, which is so discomfiting to Don Quijote, is often the point in The Knight, as the Citizen and his wife cough up over and over again to subsidize Rafe or the original players.36 Rafe the resourceful apprentice—he of the vocal death—does not seem to bear the brunt of the satire that the citizen-grocers or rich merchants suffer.37 In the person of its most ingenious character, The Knight holds out the appeal of the communal and the local despite, or perhaps precisely because of, its own roots in beguiling foreign matter, imperfectly transmuted here into “native” form.
Yet for all its emphasis on local pleasure, The Knight of the Burning Pestle itself does not seem to have appealed overmuch to its first audience. From its first printer on, critics have attributed this initial failure on the stage to the lack of sophistication of its audience, unable to make heads or tails of a fragmented plot, or to perceive the irony with which the Citizen and his wife are portrayed. “The wide world,” Burre tells us, “for want of judgment, or not understanding the privy mark of irony about it (which showed it was no offspring of any vulgar brain) utterly rejected it” (51). The play nonetheless enjoyed a healthy afterlife, as viewers presumably adjusted to its metadramatic and self-referential exigencies. In the context of the larger theoretical problem of appropriation that concerns me here, The Knight’s initial failure suggests just how unstable that process can be. Beaumont starts from a wildly popular text, Don Quijote, and effectively transmutes it into a carnivalesque promotion of London and Englishness. Yet the formal discontinuities Beaumont learns from the Quijote, no less than its own “privy mark of irony,” get in the way, complicating the audience’s identification with any character and interrupting the theatrical illusion. Cervantes famously deprives his readers of the pleasure of seamless text, by breaking off after a few chapters, at a crucial moment in Don Quijote’s battle with the ornery Vizcayan. He leaves his characters, swords aloft, until the narrator finds some scraps of paper that seem to continue the story in Arabic, and a translator to translate them, in the Quijote’s own fiction of appropriation. So, too, does Beaumont’s imitation constantly interrupt itself, dismantling the fourth wall from the very start and dispensing with any continuity in plot. This appropriated aesthetic of knowing interruption and self-consciousness—perhaps most evident in the Boy’s running commentary on the Citizens’ follies—suggests that the Spanish source both is and is not trumped in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The play ultimately rejects both chivalric and mock-chivalric content, but not the Quijote’s form. Yet by impeding identification, that imported and interruptive form in turn undoes the easy pleasures of the local and the familiar that the text otherwise promotes.
Appropriation is an uncertain business. In a moment of early national self-definition, Beaumont’s play Englishes its far-ranging sources and foregrounds the local as an alternative. In its eager appropriation of Iberian and mock-Iberian predecessors, from Palmerín to Don Quijote to The Spanish Tragedy, it nonetheless refuses the transnational geography of romance to insist instead on a national frame of reference. Yet the stability of national identity and of national belonging are cast into doubt by the insufficiency of that very process of translatio, by the uneasy fit between texts and their new surroundings. As Kathleen Ashley and Véronique Plesch usefully recall, appropriation is a two-way process.38 While it generates new meanings for a new context, and contributes to the formation of new collective identities around them, those meanings often remain unstable or conflicted, as in the vexed dynamics of identification in Beaumont’s play. This is especially the case for the play’s Englishing of Don Quijote, a text at once wildly popular for its story, but potentially alienating in its reflexivity and self-consciousness. In England, Don Quijote becomes a source to be reckoned with, offering in its challenging imported form a treacherous ground for local sympathies.