The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a play by Francis Beaumont, first performed in 1607 and first published in a quarto in 1613. It is notable as the first whole parody (or pastiche) play in English. The play is a satire on chivalric romances in general, similar to Don Quixote, and a parody of Thomas Heywood's The Four Prentices of London and Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday. The play is notable for breaking the fourth wall from its outset.
Read more about The Knight Of The Burning Pestle: Text, Staging, Plot, Reception
Famous quotes containing the words knight and/or burning:
“By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summon’d am to a tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end:
Methinks it is no journey.”
—Unknown. Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song (l. 57–60)
“Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)