ABSTRACT
The evidence of Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle demonstrates just how early the Cervantine counter-romance began to influence the Jacobean stage. Cervantes offered stories that could be plotted into the structure of a play, and he gave characters with emotional affect that an actor could bring to life; these would be some of the factors that would draw John Fletcher back to him time and time again as he went on to become one of the major playwrights of the Jacobean age. It was a happy coincidence that Cervantes was at the peak of his powers at a time when conditions were ripe for his work to become known in English intellectual circles. Although Cervantes did not disappear troni the English literary scene, the intensity of interest that had marked the Jacobean period would not be revived until the eighteenth century adopted Don Quixote as a major influence on the novel in English.
