The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Beaumont created two audience members who move their seats to the stage to watch the play. This presents the convention of private theatres that began at the Blackfriars Playhouse that involved gentlemen actually sitting on the stage during a performance. These viewers paid more money to see the play and, more importantly, to be seen by the other audience members. However, though the owners of the playhouses insisted they allow these men to watch the show from the stage, most scholars believe that actors and dramatists did not like the new custom at all. In The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which was written for the Blackfriars Playhouse, George and Nell climb onto the stage to join the gentlemen who are already on stage viewing the play. In this play, Beaumont not only mocks (gúnyolni) audience members but particularly those who paid money to view the play from the stage. This placement of the citizen and his wife is most significant though because it further satirizes, and quite blatantly (nyilvánvalóan), the audience member who does not understand the fiction of theatre, as neither George nor Nell cannot theoretically cross the boundary between stage and audience even though they have physically crossed it. The Knight of the Burning Pestle similarly explores this idea that audience members mistake fiction for reality. Though most plays had previously employed the actors to challenge the barrier between fiction and reality, Beaumont breaks this theatrical convention with his immediate introduction of the characters of George and Nell. By creating characters who are audience members, Beaumont allows for the possibility of observing their understanding of the play, the idea of fiction, and their perception of reality. These two characters explicitly question the actors’ play and suggest different ways to please the audience. George and Nell defy the convention in which characters in the world of the play interact with the audience to invite the viewers into the characters’ lives. Rather, Beaumont creates an audience who interacts with the actors in order to invite the characters into the world of the audience. By doing this, Beaumont shows some people’s inability to understand the art of theatre and the need to suspend disbelief in order to enter the fictional world. The tradition of the actors playing the host has been evaded; thus, George and Nell never become a part of the play’s world and can never separate themselves from their own world in London.