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The Knight of the Burning Pestle By Francis Beaumont Co-produced by Mercury Theatre Company, the Young Vic and BITE:05, Barbican as part of YOUNG GENIUS First performed at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester on 15 September 2005 as part of YOUNG GENIUS

Funders of the YOUNG GENIUS Schools’ Programme across the UK, including workshops, performance projects and free tickets for school students and teachers YOUNG GENIUS would not have been possible without the generous support of The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, The Corporation of London, Arts Council England Grants for the Arts, Ingenious Media plc, The Jerwood Charity, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Genesis Foundation and NESTA.

THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE Resource Pack

Contents

Page

1.

Francis Beaumont’s Life and Work

2

2.

Table of Key Dates

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3.

A Brief Synopsis and Background to The Knight of the Burning Pestle

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4.

Theatre in Francis Beaumont’s London

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5.

Social and Historical Context

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6.

Interview with the Director Anna Mackmin

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7.

Design Images

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8.

Creative Team

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9.

About the Young Genius Season

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10.

Bibliography and Further Reading

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If you have any comments or questions about this Resource Pack, please contact us: The Young Vic, Chester House, 1-3 Brixton Road, London SW9 6DE T: 0207 922 2800 F: 0207 820 3355 E: [email protected] Written by Maria Aberg © Young Vic 2005

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Francis Beaumont’s Life and Work Francis Beaumont was born in 1584 at Grace-Dieu priory in Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire. The Beaumonts were a wealthy, upper-class family. Beaumont’s father and namesake was a distinguished justice of the common pleas1, and Francis junior lived comfortably with his two elder brothers, Henry and John. At the age of twelve, he entered Broadgate College (now Pembroke College) in Oxford together with his brothers. However, when his father abruptly passed away the following year, Beaumont left Oxford without a degree. At the age of sixteen, Beaumont moved to London where he became a member of the Inner Temple in London and studied law. Like many young men at the time, he developed an interest in poetry and drama, and there is little evidence that he applied himself to his legal studies. Instead he began visiting the infamous Mermaid Tavern, where he soon befriended the playwright Ben Jonson. Beaumont’s first published verse was the preface to his brother John’s The Metamorphosis of Tobacco in 1602. It was probably shortly after this that he met John Fletcher, who would become his main creative collaborator. The first work thought to have been jointly written by the two was the 1605 play Love’s Cure. Their collaboration continued for the next seven years, although it is now generally assumed that Beaumont was the sole author of the comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle, probably written in 1607. Beaumont and Fletcher wrote initially for the boy’s company Children of the Queen’s Revels at St Paul’s, and around 1609 they replaced Shakespeare as the chief dramatists for the King’s Men. Well aware of popular tastes, they wrote over six plays in quick succession, including The Maid’s Tragedy (1610) and Cupid’s Revenge (1611). They shared quarters close to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on the South Bank. The seventeenth-century memorialist John Aubrey described their living arrangements: “They lived together on the Banke side, not far from the Playhouse, both batchelors; lay together…; had one wench in the house between them…; the same cloathes and cloake, betweene them.” It is not clear who was the driving force behind their partnership. Beaumont is thought to have written only one or two plays alone, and perhaps nine or ten together with Fletcher – out of a total of 54 plays with which their names are associated. It is also possible that Beaumont collaborated on three other plays written with Fletcher and Philip Massinger. He is also thought to have written a number of masques - elaborate scenic plays written for performance at the court. In 1613, however, Beaumont’s artistic activity came to an abrupt halt. He seems to have given up on the theatre altogether, and married the Kentish heiress Ursula Isley, the same year that saw the publication of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Shortly thereafter, Beaumont had a stroke, and after a slow recovery, he died suddenly of a fever in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. His literary standing earned him a burial in Westminster Abbey, where he is interred in Poet’s Corner, along with Chaucer and Spenser. John Fletcher continued to write until his death of the plague in 1625, and the collected plays of Beaumont and Fletcher were published in 1647. 1

A court for the trial of civil, rather than criminal, cases

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Table of Key Dates 1559

Elizabeth I is crowned Queen of England.

1563

80,000 people die of the plague in England.

1564

William Shakespeare is born. Christopher Marlowe is born.

1567

The first permanent theatre in London, the Red Lion, is built.

1576

The Blackfriars Theatre is built.

1578

The Queen grants permission to six acting companies to perform in London.

1584

Francis Beaumont is born in Leicestershire.

1593

All London theatres are closed in an attempt to prevent the spreading of the plague. Playwright Christopher Marlowe is killed in a pub brawl in East London.

1599

The Globe Theatre is built on London’s South Bank.

1600

Beaumont moves to London to study law.

1602

Beaumont publishes his first verse in the preface to The Metamorphosis of Tobacco, written by his brother John.

1603

All London theatres are closed again due to the threat of plague.

1605

Beaumont writes the play Love’s Cure with John Fletcher.

1607

Beaumont writes The Knight of The Burning Pestle at around this time (exact date not known).

1608

London theatres are shut once more.

1609

Beaumont and Fletcher replace Shakespeare as chief dramatists for the King’s Men.

1613

Beaumont marries Ursula Isley and stops writing altogether.

1614

The Globe Theatre is destroyed in a fire and re-built.

1616

Francis Beaumont dies suddenly of a fever. William Shakespeare dies.

1647

The collected plays by Beaumont and Fletcher are published.

1648

The King orders all playhouses to be pulled down and all players (actors) to be seized and whipped. 3

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A Brief Synopsis and Background to The Knight of the Burning Pestle The play takes place in the theatre, where a wealthy grocer and his wife have gone to watch a play called The London Merchant. It is a conventional love story about an apprentice, Jasper, and his lover Luce, a merchant’s daughter. When the merchant finds out that Jasper is in love with Luce, he sacks him, and the young lovers now have to try and overcome various obstacles standing in the way of their happiness. Shortly after the beginning of the play, a grocer and his wife become dissatisfied with it, and intervene in the action to cast their apprentice, Rafe, as a heroic knight – the Knight of the Burning Pestle. While the grocer and his wife continue to comment on and object to the play, the story develops. Luce’s father has promised her hand to a Master Humphrey, a buffoon in whom Luce has no interest. She has devised a plan with Jasper, however, and she tells Master Humphrey that she cannot marry any man unless he first kidnaps her and takes her to Waltham Forest. Master Humphrey agrees to do the deed. At this point Rafe enters, having been given a costume backstage. He gives an elaborate speech and declares himself ‘Right Courteous and Valiant Knight of the Burning Pestle’. Cheered on by the grocer’s wife, he sets off for the forest where he will dedicate himself to saving damsels in distress. Before heading off to Waltham forest to enact the secret plan, Jasper goes to his family and pleads for his mother, Mistress Merrythought, to give him some money. She dismisses him cruelly. She has been saving for their other son, Michael, and it was Jasper’s father’s job to save for Jasper. The drunken Merrythought, however, has drunk all the money intended for Jasper and not a penny is left. Furious with her husband, Mistress Merrythought moves out of the house with Michael. Rafe, meanwhile, becomes more and more entangled in the action, cheered on by the grocer and his enthusiastic wife. Rafe takes Jasper’s mother and Michael under his wing, thinking them in distress and vowing to deliver them from a succession of fictional torments. Jasper arrives at the forest where he fights Master Humphrey for Luce. The two escape, but are forced to fight Rafe on their way. The Merchant and Merrythought meet and lament the loss of their respective children. The Merchant vows to take his daughter home, and after interrupting the two young lovers in a tender scene, he overthrows Jasper and leaves with Luce. As the story develops, much to the irritation of the actors, the grocer and his wife invent increasingly lavish projects for Rafe to undertake, which have less and less to do with the original play. He sets off to fight the giant Barbaroso, goaded on by his faithful audience, and by killing the giant liberates the knights that were his captives. Mistress Merrythought and Michael, meanwhile, have thought better of leaving Merrythought’s house, and have returned to try and persuade him to take them back. Merrythought will not have his wife back, in spite of the grocer’s wife’s attempts to persuade him otherwise. Jasper has not given up his designs on Luce yet. He writes a letter to the Merchant, in which he says he’s killed himself. He also writes that his last wish is for his body to be brought to Luce and asks for the Merchant’s forgiveness. The Merchant instantly forgives him and calls 4

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for his coffin. When Luce is left alone with the body, she is distraught and mourns her beloved, when suddenly Jasper rises from the coffin. He explains his cunning plan to Luce, and they swap places. Jasper then smears white powder on his face and goes to pay the Merchant a visit as a ghost. He makes the terrified Merchant, who now thinks his beloved daughter dead, throw out Master Humphrey. The lovers then pay a visit to Jasper’s parents, who finally reunite after Mistress Merrythought appeases her husband by singing him a song. Jasper and Luce then appear before the now humbled Merchant, who is finally able to rejoice in their love. Rafe comes on stage to give a final speech about the woes of his travels, before dying in a dramatic fashion. The play is over, and the grocer’s wife addresses the audience, apologises for her interventions and bids them join her for refreshments. Francis Beaumont’s play was written as a parody of current trends in theatre. It belongs to the genre of ‘city comedy’ or ‘citizen comedy’, since it deals with regular London citizens rather than kings and heroes. The play-within-the-play, The London Merchant, is just such a city comedy, and is also a satire on the work of Beaumont’s fellow playwright Thomas Dekker. Beaumont cleverly intertwines this sub-plot with his sprawling, romantic-heroic main plot, deriving much comedy from the friction between the two styles. The play is laced with verbal wit and cheeky innuendoes. For example, the pronunciation of the word ‘pestle’ in Elizabethan London would have sounded very similar to ‘pizzle’ describing the male genitalia. The play was written around a specific theatrical convention of the time, namely that a limited number of audience members were allowed to sit on stage with the actors. This was the convention at the Blackfriars Theatre, where The Knight of the Burning Pestle was first produced. The exact date of the first performance is uncertain, but most scholars agree that it was written around 1607-1608, and printed for the first time in 1613. For the interludes, Beaumont may have been influenced by the Italian convention of intermezzo, a short piece of light entertainment, usually without text, performed between the acts in a play. Often the intermezzo would not bear any obvious relation to the play, and its purpose would be to dazzle the audience with elaborate costumes or brilliant musicians. At the Elizabethan court, the intermezzo developed into a type of performance called court masques, which were lavish, costly affairs mainly intended to entertain and glorify the royal family and the nobility.

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Theatre in Francis Beaumont’s London The first permanent London theatre had been built in 1567, some seventeen years before Francis Beaumont was born, and by the time he reached maturity the Elizabethan theatre was in full bloom. The public feeling towards theatres and actors, too, had changed, thanks to the Queen’s keen interest in theatre – previously, actors had been considered immoral and coarse, but now their status was rising. In 1578, Queen Elizabeth granted special permission to six London companies to perform plays in London. A former member of one of those companies, James Burbage, later helped to establish the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who performed in his own purpose-built theatre. They were re-named the King’s Men in 1603 under James I, and later performed Beaumont’s works. An acting company would consist of about twenty actors, or ‘players’. As women were not allowed on stage, female parts were played by young boys, although older women or comic parts were occasionally played by men. The boys could be as young as six years old, and would stay with the company for up to twelve years. They normally lived with their masters, who would train them and receive a small sum from the company for the boys’ services. The acting troupes relied on two sources for their income – court patronage, and box office takings. However, finances were still tight, and to address this, most companies between 1558 and 1642 were organised on a share-holding plan. This meant that actors could buy shares in the company, often at a premium rate, and the company’s profits were then shared amongst those actors. However, not all actors could afford to become share-holders, and the so-called ‘hired men’ – normally about half of the company - were less well off. They were frequently not paid their weekly wage and often had to function as wardrobe keepers and stage crew as well as taking smaller parts. Touring was frequent, too – at least 100 names of touring troupes survive from the years 1590 to 1642 – but this brought its own difficulties. There were no permanent theatres outside London, and actors were not always welcome due to the fear that they might introduce or contribute to the spread of plague. The troupe might perform in the city hall or a local inn, but sometimes actors were actually paid not to perform. The acting companies in London changed their repertoire on a daily basis, and the demand for successful plays was high. Once a company had commissioned a play, it was the property of the acting company, and had to be fiercely protected against piracy (unauthorised and often inaccurate copying of the manuscript). Collaboration between writers was very common, and each act would often be written by a different author. To prolong the popularity of a certain piece, frequent re-writes and revisions took place, often by someone other than the original writer. Until about 1603, the average payment for a play was six pounds, but this rose over the next ten years to about twelve pounds. This fee included re-writes, additions of scenes, prologues or epilogues. By comparison, a schoolmaster could expect to receive a yearly wage of about £25, while a share-holding actor in the King’s Men might make at least twice as much in a good year.

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To protect the play from being copied by other companies, once the original had been licensed for performance, it was kept safe and each actor was only given copies of the scenes he was in himself. There were two different kinds of theatres in London around the turn of the 16th century, public and private. Generally speaking, the public theatres were open-air structures modelled on the inn-yards where acting companies had previously played. Most of these public theatres had three roofed galleries surrounding the yard, and the stage almost invariably jutted out into the yard so it could be viewed from three sides. The first public theatre to be built was long considered to be The Theatre, built by James Burbage in Shoreditch in 1576, but it is now assumed that the Red Lion, which for a long time was thought only to have been an inn where performances sometimes took place, was actually the very first playhouse, built in 1567. Other, more famous theatres include The Rose (built 1587), The Swan (1595) and the Globe (1599, re-built after a fire in 1614), all located on the South Bank. Private theatres differed from the public theatres primarily through their level of comfort. They were all roofed, lit by candle-light, held about one-fourth as many spectators as a public theatre, and the audience was all seated. Admission prices to the private theatres were also much higher than to the public ones. Another important difference was that until 1608, the private theatres were used only by boys’ companies, saving them from the moral criticism often levelled at adult actors. The first private theatre was built in Blackfriars in 1576, but its importance was superseded by that of the second Blackfriars, built by James Burbage in 1596. For more than ten years, the second Blackfriars was used exclusively by boys’ companies, but in 1608 James I authorised the King’s Men to play there. Consequently, after 1610 the King’s Men played at the Blackfriars from mid-October to mid-May, and returned to the Globe during the summer months. It was here that The Knight of the Burning Pestle was first performed sometime between 1610 and 1613. Performances in public theatres were often rowdy affairs. The average audience capacity was about 2,500, compared to the private theatres’ 500-700, and wine, beer and food were on sale throughout the performance. This was a common way for theatres to make a little extra money, and vendors walked around among the audience throughout the performance offering their goods. The audience itself was noisy and lively – spectators often commented loudly on the performance and talked amongst themselves during the play. Should the audience not find the play to their liking, they would not hesitate to tell the actors, and heckling was frequent. Respectable women rarely frequented the theatre, and if they did they wore masks to avoid being recognised. Performances usually began at 2pm, and would last between two and three hours. In private theatres, there would be intermissions for music while the candles lighting the space were replaced. In the public theatres, the pit or yard, where spectators stood or walked around during the performance, was the cheapest section, while in private theatres it was the upper balcony. Around the turn of the century it became common for spectators in private theatres to sit on the stage itself during a performance. Admission to the public theatres ranged from two pennies for general admission to twenty pennies for a box, while the private theatres charged between six and forty-six pennies. Consequently, although the audience capacity in the private theatres was lower, they frequently made more money than the public ones, and attracted a wealthier, more gentrified audience. With the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, theatre lost its most important patron, and although it continued to flourish for some time, slowly its status began to decline. The old 7

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claims that theatre was immoral and ungodly gradually resurfaced. After 1630, the annual attacks of the plague became increasingly violent, and the Parliament used this as an argument against theatre. In 1642, an ordinance was issued suppressing all stage plays, and in 1648 the Parliament ordered all playhouses to be pulled down, all actors to be seized and whipped and anyone who was caught attending a performance to be fined five shillings. The closure of the playhouses lasted until the dawn of the Restoration in 1660.

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Social and Historical Context Queen Elizabeth I had ruled England successfully for more than 25 years when Francis Beaumont was born. Her reign was a period of relative calm in England. The country prospered in peace, which laid the ground for the literary and artistic achievements that were to characterise her reign. Elizabeth was crowned on the 15 January 1559, and one of her first acts as head of state was to make peace with France. Her only other major foreign intervention was the English victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588. Apart from that, she strove to keep political peace in her country, and was known for her relative religious tolerance. Queen Elizabeth’s London was a filthy, busy city. Few people drank fresh water, and tea had not yet come into vogue. Many drank strong, musty ale – for breakfast, lunch and supper. The city itself was crowded, narrow, dark and smelly, and its streets teemed with animals for trade or work. Apart from London Bridge, the only means of crossing the busy river was by boat, heeding the cry of the notoriously foul-mouthed watermen howling ‘Eastward ho!’ or ‘Westward ho!’. The plague, or the Black Death as it became known, was not new to Londoners, but during the Elizabethan era it rose to devastating peaks. In 1563 alone, 80,000 people are believed to have died, 20,000 of these in London. And the theatres felt the pinch – fear of the plague led to a total closure of all theatres in 1593, 1603 and 1608. The feared epidemic spread quickly and easily in London. There was no sewage system in the city, and all waste was either dumped in the streets or poured out into the Thames. The cramped living conditions and poor hygiene ensured that the rats, which were the main source of the plague, could thrive and multiply, not only in London but throughout England. Apart from the plague, life in fifteenth-century London was hard. Poverty was rife and the punishments for crime severe. Stealing anything over five pence resulted in hanging and begging was prohibited by law. A number of different crimes carried the death penalty; from stealing bird’s eggs to poaching at night (daytime poaching did not result in a death sentence). And members of the aristocracy were not spared the vicious methods of torture and death invented by the reigning Tudors. An array of instruments might be employed, all designed to inflict extreme pain, and no one accused of a crime, from theft to blasphemy, was spared but the very highest nobles. As a deterrent to the citizens, the severed heads of traitors were impaled on sticks and displayed at the gates of London Bridge, which at this time was the only existing bridge over the Thames and the gateway into the city of London. Even travelling in England could be considered a crime, if you didn’t possess the correct licence. A licence was obtained from the Bailiff at the Guild Hall. This law was designed to prevent disease, especially plague, from spreading by ensuring that the poor did not travel from village to village. Suspicion of travellers was therefore strong – they might well be bringing the plague – and this affected how actors were received in the villages around England. Marriages in Tudor England were often practical rather than romantic affairs. Young wealthy ladies would have little or no choice over who was to be their spouse, and it was common that couples met for the first time on their wedding day. There was no legal age for marriage, and most girls got married at the age of fourteen. Once a woman was married, she effectively became her husband’s property, and the law gave him full rights over his wife. 9

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Even the way she dressed was restricted – as an unmarried woman she could wear her hair loose, but once married she had to hide it under a veil and a hood. Divorce was uncommon for religious reasons, and most marriages ended when one spouse died. Because death in childbirth was very common, men would often be married a number of times. Education was relatively well-developed – for boys and men, that is. Women were still largely excluded from formal education, and although daughters of noble families might sometimes be taught languages and dancing skills at home, universities were exclusively for men. Many parents could not afford to send their children to university, however, and they usually had three options: domestic service, farm work or learning a trade. Of these, learning a trade, or becoming an apprentice, was the best way to guarantee a decent job and a proper income. Most children who became apprentices – girls could also learn a trade from a master – started between the ages of ten and fourteen. They would then remain with their master for the next five to seven years, often living in the master’s house. Once the training was over, the apprentice was promoted to journeyman, which was a paid position. A journeyman was also free to look for work elsewhere to gain more experience. Only after another year as a journeyman was it possible to become a qualified tradesman. The contract between a master and his apprentice was called an indenture, and this would list all the things an apprentice was expected to do whilst in service to his master. An indenture from 1655 lists the dos and don’ts of a Hereford apprentice: [The apprentice must] ‘serve his master well… fornication within the house of his said Master he shall not commit, matrimony with any woman dueringe the said tearme he shall not contract… he will not haunt taverns of custom unless about his master’s business, not play at cards or dice or absent himself by day or night.’ The parents of an apprentice had to pay a bond for the indenture, which was to be returned to them at the end of the apprenticeship. It was not uncommon that ruthless masters tried to get their apprentices to run away from them shortly before the end of their term, just so they wouldn’t have to pay back the bond. For particularly poor families, the city had set up a charity fund which might help towards the cost of the bond.

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Interview with the Director Anna Mackmin What attracted you to the play when you first read it? The sense of surprise. I had no idea what was coming next or why. That is fantastically rare. It took at least five reads before I began to make sense of it and it took a fair few more before I allowed myself to relish what was tough about it rather than be freaked out by it. It is very unfashionable to make a piece of art in any art form that is so recklessly insistent that life is not to be taken seriously. And in the spirit of that recklessness and relentless jokiness I loved some of the more incongruous stage directions, which seem to make no sense at all when you read the play. What kind of preparatory work have you done for rehearsals? In terms of pure research, I’m reading a pile of books about other writers working around the same period this was written, to get a better understanding of the theatrical style and conventions of the time. I’m also re-reading a couple of seminal texts about working with plays written around this time, for example John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare. I’m searching through songs of the period and working with the composer and choreographer on a beat-by-beat2 analysis of what we want to achieve so that they can be ready to start working with the actors. I have read the play over and over and I will continue to do that. I’ve cut it and changed a couple of the 1607 jokes to modern equivalents. I’ve spent days with the designer Jonathan Fensom working through the play moment by moment trying to figure out exactly how the story most clearly can be told. I have story-boarded the whole play and have the sketches above the desk where I work. In relation to the characters in the play, I’ve broken down each part as I would if I was acting the part myself into a series of emotional and factual beats, which has led to a sketch of the rhythms of the play and what I suppose I think of as a list of the play’s needs based on the characters’ needs. As I’m casting I use the process of discussing the play with the actors I’m meeting to analyse their initial responses to the text. Instinct is everything and having the gift of all those instinctive first impressions is so useful. I keep a working diary so every time I read the play I jot down new thoughts, and as I get closer to production I re-read and see what keeps coming up. I take serious note of all the things that worry me about the play and the approach I’m taking. The great thing about directing is that the more preparation you do, the more everything else in your life seems to be about the play that you’re working on. So lots of abstract things get into the mix. For instance, I have a series of images ripped out of interiors magazines that felt visually interesting and useful to me but wouldn’t mean a row of beans to anyone else! Could you describe a little about how you work in the rehearsal room? I have a very clear idea of exactly how I want the whole thing to work and I love it when it turns out differently. So whatever I might have planned for the rehearsal room might never happen! 2

A way of dividing a text into smaller sections for easier understanding, invented by Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky.

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What do you think the challenges are in directing this play? I think one of the play’s central themes is summed up in this quote from the play: ‘This is it that keeps life and soul together; mirth. This is the philosopher’s stone they write so much on’. And this is a very unfashionable idea. Lots of people struggle to see the point in this play. It’s scary to do something that might not mean anything. Normally when you are directing a classic people already know it’s a good play – you don’t have to convince them. When you are doing a new play you have to convince everyone that it’s brilliant. So this play has none of the advantages of directing a classic and all the anxiety of directing a new one! And on a technical level I think utilising all those different theatrical forms will be interesting. What questions would you hope to raise with the production? This is a play about making theatre, about what is and isn’t real. What is or isn’t theatre. Is theatre a dying art form? We need new audiences to be connecting with the fascination of that particularly theatrical thing, the transforming moment. If they don’t get excited about it they won’t come back and we won’t have an audience for the future. So I suppose it could be a litmus test for the enduring power of theatre. How do you hope the audience will react to the piece? What’s not to love about this play? It’s a great love story, it’s got audience participation, it’s got improvisation, it’s got a few laughs, it’s got dancing boys, it’s got singing… I could go on and on. Hopefully, the audience will leave the theatre having experienced something quite unlike anything they’ve experienced in the theatre before.

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Design Images

Model Box Images. Design by Jonathan Fensom. Act 1: Prologue

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Act IV: Rafe’s May Speech

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Act V: Final Act

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Creative team Director

Anna Mackmin

Designer

Jonathan Fensom

Lighting Designer

Paul Anderson

Sound Designer

Paul Arditti

Composer

Tim Sutton

Choreographer

Scarlett Mackmin

Assistant Director

Psyche Stott

Costume Supervisor

Charlotte Bird

Casting Director

Lisa Makin

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About the Young Genius Season There’s ability, there’s talent and there’s genius. When we came up with the idea for Young Genius we were faced with a huge number of questions. Everyone is born with creative abilities of various kinds. Talent, it seems to us, is the result of a relationship: between an individual and a particular parent or teacher or even an audience. What is genius? Can it be measured? Some even deny it exists. How is it that some people can ‘do it’ almost – or so it seems – without thinking and almost as soon as they begin? We wanted this season to be a celebration of that extraordinary phenomenon: artists who know at once who they are, who find their voice the moment they start to speak. We decided to focus on plays that were written before the playwright reached the age of 26. We read a great many plays and were delighted and astonished at the range and creative force leaping off the page through history. From the fifteenth century to the 1990s, from Africa to America to Europe, young, bold playwrights were making themselves heard, reinventing their craft and changing the future of theatre. Selecting six plays for production was almost impossible. The plays we’ve chosen range from Elizabethan comedy to French surrealism to modern British drama, and span more than four hundred years of playwriting. From the dawn of Elizabethan theatre, we chose Christopher Marlowe’s epic Tamburlaine The Great, a powerful story about greed and politics, adapted in a new version by David Farr. Written just twenty years later, Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle is an anarchic romp, satirical and hilarious. Then we leap ahead in time – two hundred and thirty years – to Georg Büchner’s visceral pre-modernist Woyzeck, a withering tale of poverty and madness. Sixty years on, and Alfred Jarry is causing a theatrical scandal with Ubu the King in a Paris sizzling with artistic activity, presented here in an outrageous new version by David Greig. Sixty years later, Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka writes The Lion and the Jewel, an exuberant example of ‘total theatre’ which points towards the Nobel Prize Soyinka was later to receive. Finally, we reach the present, with Sarah Kane’s radical, shocking Phaedra’s Love, a re-working of Seneca’s tragedy which has only been seen once previously in this country. To match these works of young genius, we set about finding the most exciting directors and designers we could. Led by our desire to be both local and international, we gathered six creative teams from all corners of the world. Geniuses all? You decide. What we’re sure of is that these 17 full and workshop productions celebrate – across the ages – youthful ambition, provocation, experimentation, confidence and the joy of creativity. Join us. Be inspired.

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THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE Resource Pack

Bibliography and further reading History of the Theatre by Oscar G Brockett (Allyn & Bacon, 1995) Beaumont and Fletcher by Ian Fletcher (Green & Co., 1967) Francis Beaumont: A Critical Study by George Campbell Macaulay (Lemma Publishing Corporation, 1972) Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher by Philip J. Finkelperl (Princeton University Press, 1990) Francis Beaumont by Lee Bliss (Twayne Publishers, 1987) The Influence of the Jacobean Masque on the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher by Suzanne Gossett (Garland, 1988) The Staging of the Beaumont and Fletcher Collaborations by John Harold Astington (University of Toronto, 1974) Links http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc97.html - information about Francis Beaumont’s collaborations with John Fletcher http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=315 - biographical information about both Beaumont and Fletcher http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/beaumont/beaubio.htm - a brief biographical account with a long list of suggested further reading http://f00.middlebury.edu/LI101C/beaumont.html - a simple analysis of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, with suggested questions for students http://www.bartleby.com/216/0501.html - information about dramatic forms in Elizabethan theatre

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