The Knight of the Burning Pestle and the Menace of the Audience

Abstract

In The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Francis Beaumont offers a satire of his dramatic working conditions and the precarious nature of his own authority in relation to that of a potentially informing audience. KBP uses its onstage audience to stage malconnections between representation and authority, and the success of its metadrama rests upon its reference to a sense of the twisted interaction between the producers and the receivers of dramatic representation. The chapter considers the ways in which these citizen auditors ‘inform’ the fictional Rafe who represents their interests. The casual inclusion of the threat of the informer in even these light entertainments forms a sinister element in these problematic connections as KBP’s metadramatic interlopers signify the intention of an all-encompassing surveillance, and operate not merely as an audience but also as proxy overseers. The result is a dramatic form which reproduces its own the material critical context, commenting not only on the interchange of dramatic levels, but also including the ubiquitous hazard of humiliating and potentially debilitating prosecution. This metadrama registers the solid contemporary fear that mistaking the author’s intention may lead not only to unkind reports but also, ultimately, to the horrors of the early modern gaol.