Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher
John Stuart Mill · en
The conclusion of Burre's dedicatory address to Keysar in the first
quarto, of 1613, has unnecessarily complicated both the question of the
date of composition and that of the source of _The Knight of the Burning
Pestle_. "Perhaps," says he, "it [_The Knight_] will be thought to bee
of the race of Don Quixote: we both may confidently sweare, it is his
elder above a yeare; and therefore may (by vertue of his birth-right)
challenge the wall of him. I doubt not but they will meet in their
adventures, and I hope the breaking of one staffe will make them
friends; and perhaps they will combine themselves, and travell through
the world to seeke their adventures." This denial of indebtedness to
Cervantes has been generally taken to refer to Shelton's English
translation of Don Quixote, entered S. R. January 19, 1611-12, and
printed 1612; and it has, therefore, been supposed by many that _The
Knight_ was written and first acted in 1610 or 1611. But if Burre was
dating _The Knight_ as of 1610 or 1611, he was ignorant of the fact, as
established above, that the play was the elder of Shelton's printed _Don
Quixote_, not merely "above a yeare," but above four years. There are
only two other constructions to be placed upon Burre's statement: either
that the play was the elder above a year of the first part of _Don
Quixote_, issued in the Spanish by Cervantes in 1605,[206] or that it
was the elder above a year of Shelton's translation as circulated among
his friends in manuscript, at any rate as early as 1609. If Burre was
dating the play, according to the former interpretation, as of 1604, he
was ignorant of the fact that it could not have been written till after
the appearance of _The Travails of Three English Brothers_, June 29,
1607. The latter interpretation would, if we could adopt it as his
understanding of the matter, not only comport with the date of the
production of _The Knight_ in 1607-8, but also, somewhat roughly, with
his own statement that he had had the manuscript already in a battered
condition in his "bosome" since 1610 or 1611.