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C h a p t e r 2 Knights and Merchants . . . 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 40 Chapter 2 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 selfconscious , 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...

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