Paratexts in Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Standing among the new books in Walter Burre's retail shop at the sign of the Crane in Paul's Churchyard in 1613, a customer could have encountered the first quarto printing of Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The potential purchaser and reader might even have seen an earlier production of the play, possibly in 1607. This buyer would notice immediately a couple of things about the text: the title page does not indicate any author, but the text contains an epistle dedicatory written by the publisher Burre. A similar reader could decades later encounter a new printing in 1635, possibly in Nicholas Okes's print shop. He or she would find on the title page the attribution to Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher as authors of The Knight and a reference to a recent performance. The book also includes an address to readers and a prologue, neither present in Quarto 1. If this potential buyer had nascent textual scholarly urges, he or she might recall the earlier text in light of the new one and note the differences, not so much in the play's text (Q2 reprints Q1) but immediately apparent in the paratexts.¹ This essay focuses on these prefatory documents to puzzle out their significance and meaning and to observe that the prologue in Quarto 2 has the unusual distinction of having been borrowed from an earlier, unrelated drama from the late sixteenth century. I suppose that we could then talk about the "intertextual" paratext. I will also note that unlike most other dramatic texts with multiple editions, The Knight changes the paratexts rather than merely repeating them.²

Before examining Burre's dedication of Beaumont's play to Robert Keysar, Goldsmith, and one of the managers of the Children of Black-friars company, the one that apparently first performed The Knight, I want to comment on the occasional difficulty that the modern reader has in becoming aware of the play's paratextual apparatus. For example, the David Bevington Renaissance drama anthology reproduces the dedication to Keysar and the prologue from Q2 but does not include the address to readers found in Q2. The editor offers no explanation for this choice. The Arthur Kinney drama anthology includes only the Burre dedication to Keysar and has no discussion of the two different texts. Thus, in the two latest, most widely used anthologies, students would gain little inkling—or at least incomplete information—of the textual situation and the paratexts. The older John Doebler single edition of The Knight also includes only the Burre dedication, as does the Andrew Gurr Fountainwell text. Fortunately, the New Mermaids and Revels editions include all of the paratextual material, as does, of course, the Cyrus Hoy edition in the Cambridge edition of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon.³ As one now focused insistently on paratexts, I have been struck time and again at how editors rather blithely ignore the material or reproduce only parts of it (this happens several times in the Bevington anthology, for example). Of course, our students do not complain. How could they, if the material is not even present?

We know that no one entered The Knight into the Stationers' Register; but we are confident that Nicholas Okes printed the text of 1613, thanks to the work of W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama, who tracked down the printer's ornaments and made the identification.⁴ Every textual discussion since Greg has accepted his conclusion. But what about this Walter Burre, the publisher? For a rewarding discussion and analysis of Burre's "publishing program," I turn to Zachary Lesser's chapter on Burre and The Knight in his Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication.⁵ Lesser suggests that Burre took a calculated risk, based on his earlier experience in publishing plays that had had a hostile reaction from theater audiences. Burre published eight new plays in his career, a total of 15% of all his publications, including four of Jonson's plays, such as Catiline and The Alchemist before...