Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

As to Burre, however, I do not think that he had been informed by Keysar of the exact provenience of the manuscript of The Knight, or of the date of first acting. I incline to believe that he had the Epistle Dedicatorie of the newly printed Shelton before him when, in 1613, he wrote his dedication of The Knight to Robert Keysar; for he runs the figure of the book as a "child" and of its "father" and "step-father" through his screed as Shelton had run it in 1612; and he hits upon a similar diction of "bosome" and "oblivion." But, though he may have been gratuitously challenging the wall of Shelton's newly printed Don Quixote in favour of The Knight as in existence by 1610 or 1611, the only interpretation of his "elder above a yeare" that would fit the fact is afforded by the composition of the play, as already demonstrated, in 1607-8, more than a year before Shelton began to circulate his manuscript.

In spite of Burre's assertion of the priority of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, nearly every editor or historian who has touched upon The Knight informs us that it is "undoubtedly derived from Don Quixote." If (as I am sure was not the case) the play was written after 1608, Beaumont, or Beaumont and Fletcher, could have derived suggestions for it from Shelton's manuscript, first circulated in 1609. That Beaumont, at any rate, was acquainted with the Spanish hero by 1610, appears from his familiarity with the Epicoene in which as we have observed, Don Quixote is mentioned; for he wrote commendatory verses for the quarto of that play, entered S. R. September 20 of that year. If, on the other hand, The Knight, as I hold, was written in 1607 or 1608, the author or authors, provided they read Spanish, could have derived suggestions from Cervantes' original of 1605; or if they did not read Spanish, from hearsay. The latter source of information would be the more likely, for although sixteen of the ignorantly so-called "Beaumont and Fletcher" plays have been traced to plots in Spanish originals, there is not one of those plots which either of the poets might not have derived from English or French translation; and in none of the sixteen plays is there any evidence that either of the dramatists had a reading knowledge of Spanish.209 As to the possibility of information by hearsay, other dramatists allude to Don Quixote as early as 1607-8;210 and, indeed, it would be virtually impossible that any literary Londoner could have escaped the oral tradition of so popular and impressive a masterpiece two years after its publication.

All this supposition of derivation from Don Quixote is, however, so far as verbal indebtedness goes, or indebtedness for motifs, episodes, incidents and their sequence, characters, machinery, dramatic construction, manners, sentiments, and methods of satire, a phantom caught out of the clear sky. So far as the satire upon the contemporary literature of chivalry is concerned, when the ridicule is not of English stuff unknown to Cervantes it is of Spanish material translated into English and already satirized by Englishmen before Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote. An examination of The Knight and of the Don in any version, and of contemporary English literature, reveals incontestibly not only that the material satirized, the phrases and ideas, come from works in English, but that even the method of the satire is derived from that of preceding English dramatic burlesque rather than from that of Cervantes.

The title of the play was suggested by The Knight of the Burning Sword, an English translation, current long before 1607, of the Spanish Amadis of Greece, Prince and Knight of the Burning Sword. Ten full years before 1607 Falstaff had dubbed his red-nosed Bardolph "Knight of the Burning Lamp." The farcical, but eminently sane, grocer's apprentice, turned Knight for fun, grows out of Heywood's Foure Prentises, and Day and Wilkins's Travails, and the English Palmerins, etc. He has absolutely nothing in common with the glorious but pathetically unbalanced Don of Cervantes. Nor is there any resemblance between Ralph's Palmerin-born Squire and Dwarf – and that embodiment of commonsense, Sancho Panza.211 The specific conception of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a satire upon the craze of London tradesmen for romances of chivalry, for "bunches of Ballads and Songs, all ancient," for the bombast and sensationalism of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, Marlowe's True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, even of Shakespeare's Hotspur, and of dramas of bourgeois knight-errantry, – a burlesque of the civic domestic virtues and military prowess of prentices and shop-keepers, – is much more applicable to the conditions and aspirations of contemporary Bow-Bells and the affectations of the contemporary stage than to those which begot and nourished the madness of the Knight of La Mancha.

Beaumont may have received from the success of the Don Quixote of 1605 some impulse provocative to the writing of The Knight, but a dramatic satire, such as The Knight, might have occurred to him if Don Quixote had never been written; just as that other dramatic satire upon the dramas of folk-lore romance, The Old Wives Tale, had occurred to Peele some fifteen years before Don Quixote appeared; and as it had occurred to the author of Thersites to ridicule, upon the stage, Greek tales of heroism and British worthies of knighthood and the greenwood still fifty-five years earlier. The puritan and the ritualist, the country justice and the squire, the schoolmaster and the scribbling pedant, the purveyor of marvels of forest and marsh, the knight-adventurer of ancient lore or of modern creation, the damsel distressed or enamoured of visionary castles, had, one and all, awakened laughter upon the Tudor stage. The leisure wasted, and the emotion misspent, over the Morte d'Arthur and the histories of Huon of Bordeaux, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hamptoun, or of Robin Hood and Clim of the Clough, had been deplored by many an anxious educator and essayist of the day. Why was it not time and the fit occasion, in a period when city grocers and their wives would tolerate no kind of play but such as revamped the more modern tales of chivalry, or tricked tradesmen out in the factitious glory of quite recent heroes of romance, – why was it not time for an attack upon the vogue of Anthony Munday's translations of the now offending cycles, Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin de Oliva, Palmerin of England, and upon the vogue of the English versions of The Mirror of Knighthood with its culminating bathos of the Knight of the Sunne and His Brother Rosicleer? These had, in various instalments, befuddled the popular mind for thirty years.

Ben Jonson already, in his Every Man out of His Humour (1599), had satirized the common affectation under the similitude of a country knight, Puntarvolo, who, if not crazed, was at any rate "wholly consecrated to singularity" by reason of undue absorption of romances of chivalry, a singularity of "fashion, phrase, and gesture" of the Anthony Munday type and the type glassed in the Mirror of Knighthood. Sir Puntarvolo, who "sits a great horse" and "courts his own lady, as she were a stranger never encountered before," – who feigns that his own house is a castle, who summons with trumpet-blast the waiting-woman to the window, and, saluting her "after some little flexure of the knee," asks for the lord of the edifice, and that the "beauties" of the "lady" may shine on this side of the building, – who "planet struck" by the "heavenly pulchritude" of his long-suffering and much bewildered poor old wife, conveys to her the information that he is a poor knight-errant pursuing through the forest a hart "escaped by enchantment," and that, wearied, he and his servant make "suit to enter" her fair abode, – Sir Puntarvolo, who every morning thus performs fantastic homage, what is he but a predecessor of Don Quixote and Ralph alike, fashioned out of the materials of decadent chivalric fiction common to both? In 1600, Robert Anton had burlesqued in prose and rhyme the romantic ballads of the day in his ludicrous Heroical Adventures of the Knight of the Sea, where "the queen of the fairies transforms a submissive and apathetic cow into a knight-errant to do her business in the world."212 And in 1605, also before the appearance of Cervantes' burlesque, Chapman, with the collaboration of Jonson and Marston, had, in Eastward Hoe, satirized that other kind of knight, him of the city and by purchase, in the character of Sir Petronel Flash; and, with him, the aspirations of romance-fed merchants' daughters who would wed knights and dwell in country-castles wrested from giants. Nor had these authors failed to specify the sources of delusion, the Mirror of Knighthood, the Palmerin of England, etc. That both Beaumont and Fletcher were alive, without prompting from Cervantes, to the mania of chivalric emulation which obsessed the train-bands of London is attested by the bombastic talk of "Rosicleer" which Fletcher puts into the mouth of the city captain in Philaster, a play that was written about two years later than The Knight, in 1609 or 1610. There had been musters of the City companies at Mile End as early as 1532, and again under Elizabeth in 1559, and 1585, and 1599, when as many as 30,000 citizens were trained there. But the muster in which Ralph had been chosen "citty captaine" was evidently that of 1605, a general muster under James I.

Why, then, should we suppose that it was beyond the genius of a Beaumont to conceive, as Peele, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and others had conceived, a drama which should burlesque the devotees of such romances as were the fad of the day? And to conceive it without the remotest suggestion from Don Quixote? Whether Beaumont read Spanish or not, and there is no proof that he did read it; whether he had heard of Don Quixote or not, and there is little doubt that he had, there is nothing in The Knight of the Burning Pestle that in any way presupposes either verbal acquaintance with, or constructive dependence upon, the burlesque of Cervantes.213 In short, Professor Schevill, in the article cited above, and following him Dr. Murch, in an admirable introduction to his edition of The Knight, have shown that Beaumont's conception of the hero, Ralph, not only is not of a piece with, but is fundamentally different from, Cervantes' conception of Don Quixote; and they have demonstrated with a minuteness of chapter and verse that need not be recapitulated here that the motives, machinery and characters, ideas and phrases are, in so far as they have relation to romances of chivalry, drawn out of, or suggested by, the English translations already enumerated. This demonstration applies to the adoption of the squire, the rescue of Mrs. Merrythought, the incident of the casket, the liberation of the barber's patients, the mock-heroic love-affair, as well as to the often adduced barber's basin and the scene of the inn. Of the situations, there is none that is not a logical issue of the local conditions or the presuppositions of an original plot; whereas there are, on the other hand, numerous situations in Don Quixote, capable of dramatic treatment, that the Elizabethan playwright of 1607-8 could hardly have refrained from annexing if he had used that story as a source. The setting or background of The Knight, as Professor Schevill has said, in no way recalls that of the Don, "and it is difficult to see how any inspiration got from Cervantes should have failed to include at least a slight shadow of something which implies an acquaintance with Rocinante and Sancho Panza." Beaumont, in addition, not only satirizes, as I have said, the chivalric and bourgeois dramas of Heywood, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, etc., and dramas of romantic marvel like Mucedorus and the Travails, and parodies with rare humour the rant of Senecan tragedy; he not only ridicules the military ardour and pomp of the London citizens, and pokes fun at their unsophisticated assumption of dramatic insight and critical instinct, – with all this satire of the main plot and of the spectator-gods in the machinery, he has combined a romantic plot of common life – Jasper, Luce, and Humphrey, – and a comic plot of humours in which Jasper's father, mother, and brother live as Merrythoughts should. He has produced a whole that in drama was an innovation and in burlesque a triumph. The Knight was still an acting play in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. During the past thirteen years it has been acted by academic amateurs five times in America.