ABSTRACT
In their provocative ‘cultural history’ of English drama, Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack identify the intrusion of the Citizen and his wife onto the Blackfriars stage in The Knight o f the Burning Pestle (1607) as a consequence of what they call an error in ‘product identity’.1 The Citizen, accustomed only to the heroics of the Globe and Red Bull repertories, intrudes on a hostile audience of gentry with his expectation of a different kind of product from the one they had come to buy. The play itself, Alfred Harbage claimed, failed because its authors and producers mistook the product identity that its first audience expected. It ‘probably did not fail’, he asserted, ‘so much because it satirized citizens as because it did so without animosity’.2 Harbage’s thesis, that the boy companies were used to playing for ‘coterie’ audiences of gentry who were hostile to citizens, while the ‘popular’ plays of Shakespeare and others were designed for the workers, has now largely been rejected, not least for its cultural oversimplifications. But the question of plays about citizens having distinctive product identities is basic to any consideration of the genres of citizen or city comedy. In that context, Beaumont’s play deserves closer scrutiny.
