Plot
A grocer and his wife "in the audience" of the play interrupt to complain loudly that plays are always about nobility and that it is they, the common people, who pay for most of the tickets. The Citizen has a seat on the side of the stage, and he brings his wife up to sit with him (a violation of decorum). They demand that the players put on a play of their own choosing and suggest that one of them—in fact, their apprentice, Rafe—should have a part in the play. Rafe then gets the part of the "Grocer Errant" in the interrupted drama. He has a burning pestle on his shield as a heraldic device and has to undertake the daring rescue of patients being held by a barber named Barbaroso. The meta-fictional plot is intercut with the main plot of the interrupted play, where Jasper Merrythought, a merchant's apprentice, is in love with his master's daughter, Luce, and must elope with her to save her from the arranged marriage with Humphrey, a "swell" or City man of fashion. Humphrey is not at the level of fop, but he has multiple malapropisms and indications that his learning and breeding are false. Luce pretends to wish to elope with Humphrey so that her father will be expecting such a flight, but her and Jasper's plans go awry, and Humphrey and the merchant capture the lovers, and the merchant locks Luce in her room. Jasper feigns death and gets his coffin carried to the merchant's house (as the merchant is responsible for his apprentice). He then gets up from the coffin and pretends to be his own ghost and frightens the merchant into giving consent to his match with Luce.
The play hits a number of satirical and parodic points. The audience is satirized, with the interrupting grocer, but the domineering and demanding merchant class is also satirized in the main plot. Beaumont makes fun of the new demand for stories of the middle classes for the middle classes, even as he makes fun of that class's actual taste for an exoticism and a chivalry that is entirely hyperbolic. The Grocer and his wife are bombastic, sure of themselves, and certain that their prosperity carries with it mercantile advantages (the ability to demand a different play for their admission fee than the one the actors have prepared).
The broader humour of the play derives from innuendo and sexual jokes, as well as joking references to other dramatists. The players, for example, plant a winking joke at the Grocer's expense, as the pestle of Rafe's herald is a phallic metaphor, and a burning pestle/penis implies syphilis, on the one hand, and sexual bravado, on the other. The inability of the Citizen and Wife to comprehend how they are satirized, or to understand the main plot, allows the audience to laugh at itself, even as it admits its complicity with the Citizen's boorish tastes.
Read more about this topic: The Knight Of The Burning Pestle
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
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