It is because of a faith in the approximate reliability of the conjoined methods that, with little hesitation, I ascribe the whole of The Knight of the Burning Pestle to Beaumont, with the exception of the three specified scenes which are devoted to the love-episodes. These I attribute to Fletcher.

D. ANALOGUES AND ATTRIBUTED SOURCES.

In its conception, The Knight of the Burning Pestle is in a marked and peculiar sense original. Its place among the dramas of its age is unique and unapproached. In its function as a burlesque, it is the only complete embodiment of a new dramatic type, and, from its very nature, is independent of the leading theatrical and literary tendencies of its day, to all of which, indeed, it in some degree runs counter. Unlike the typical plays of its own authors, of Shakespeare, or of the other romanticists, it does not lift into finished dramatic expression some theme borrowed from heroic or popular legend; on the contrary, though its burlesque is by no means inclusive of the whole of romantic lore, its appropriations from the literature familiar to the times are made, not because of their dramatic adaptability, but for the sake of exposing their inherent absurdities to open view. Unlike a typical play of Ben Jonson, the stalwart defender of tradition and law against a flood of innovation, it is in no sense the expression of a dramatic theory, nor is it a labored, arbitrary judgment upon the literary and social standards which it disavows; on the contrary, its designedly loose, hit-ormiss construction, though resultant in a new form and a type all its own, is, in so far, an abnegation of form in the Jonsonian sense, while its satire is implicit in its material, not imposed by an eccentric

and biased censor from without Most of all, it is unlike the innumerable stage-productions of a meaner order, designed to attract the uncultured London middle-class with flattering displays of the deeds of their eminent representatives, or to please their childish fancy with some pompous but absurd extravaganza : on the contrary, it depicts these untutored, but egotistical tradesmen, and their theatrical tastes, not for the sake of honoring them. but of exposing them to a salutary ridicule and reproof. In a word, its spirit is essentially the spirit of burlesque and the mock-heroic, and, as such, it is irreverent of tradition, of its literary material, and of its public.

Since the play is a satire on a whole class of society and a whole species of literature, its constituent episodes are typically reflective; they are, therefore, drawn merely from the general nature of its objects, and cannot be traced to specific and assignable origins. The search for its sources, then, in the ordinary sense of that word, would seem to be futile from the outset. All that can be attempted with security is to adduce such parallelisms from the romances of chivalry and elsewhere as may serve to illustrate the satirical pertinence of the plot, always with the fact in mind that the various episodes in the play are coincident with similar themes in the romances rather than, in any certain sense, derivative from them. This study will also involve the examination of certain attributions of sources for the play which have been more or less emphathically made ever since its first appearance.

1. The Romances of Chivalry and Don Quixote. It is an assertion which is frequently encountered, and which, so far as I know, has never been con

tradicted, that Beaumont drew his idea for The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and much of his material, directly from Don Quixote. Now, of course, the community in spirit between the play and Cervantes' great burlesque is so apparent that he who runs may read. The objects of their satire are the same; their methods of developing a humorous situation-through bringing into ludicrous juxtaposition the commonplace realities of life and the high-flying idealisms of knight-errantry- are the same; and, moreover, a few of the incidents are remarkably alike. But these similarities are the natural outcome of allied purposes in the two works; they do not of themselves argue any interdependence whatever. To prove that Beaumont fashioned his play upon the novel would involve the necessity of proving that he could not have drawn the hint for his episodes from the romances of chivalry themselves quite as easily as from Don Quixote, and that his burlesque conception could not have been original Moreover, it would be necessary to show that he was acquainted with ? the Spanish language, for in 1610, the date of the play's composition, he could have read the novel only in the original, since the first English translation was not printed until 1612. Let us examine these difficulties standing in the way of the assumption that Don Quixote is the source of our play.

The large indebtedness of Beaumont and Fetcher to Spanish literature is undeniable. According to Miss O. L. Hatcher1, the latest investigator to publish a treatment on the dramatists' sources, 'of the thirtyfour plays whose sources are already known, either entirely or in part, seventeen draw upon Spanish material.' Within this number, however, the author 1 John Fletcher, A Study in Dramatic Method, 1905, p. 47.

с

includes The Knight of the Errung Fedle Setting aside this ascription for the moment the remaining sixteen plays can be shown to have been derived from Spanish works which were at the time of the play's composition, existent in English or French translations1. They cannot therefore, be adduced as evidence that Beaumont and Fletcher knew Spanish. It remains to examine the possibility of their having known the Spanish original of Don Quizure. A pointed though of course not conclusive, evidence that they did not know this original is the statement of Burre, the first publisher of The Knight of the Burning Pestle :

Perhaps it will be thought to bee of the race of Don Quote: we both may confidently swear, it is his elder about a yeare: and therefore may by vertue of his birth-right challenge the wall of him As I have elsewhere shown. Burre alludes to Shelton's English translation of Don Quizote, which appeared in 1612, and to the fact that our play was written in 1611 or 1610. Manifestly the publisher was not aware of the authors' possessing any know!edge of Spanish, and he emphatically denies any dependence of the play upon Don Quizote. Of course, Burre may not have been fully informed as to the dramatists' linguistic attainments, and his denial of the alleged source cannot be taken as proof; but in the absence of any positive evidence to support the opposite contention, its significance must be recognized. There is absolutely nothing to show that Beaumont and Fletcher knew Spanish, and in discussions of the matter the burden of proof rests upon those who assert that they did know it; moreover, those who make this assertion must meet the difficulty of disproving the presumptive evidence that the

• Dr. Rudolph Schevill of Yale University has kindly informed me of this fact,

dramatists drew their Spanish plots from English and French translations. Of the details of this evidence I am not exactly informed', but so far as regards The Knight of the Burning Pestle, I have become confident, after careful examination, that its authors wrote it in complete independence of its accredited source, Don Quixote. This independence is witnessed by the significant omission of some of the most salient features of the Spanish novel, and, more positively still, by a resemblance between the play's episodes and the romances which is demonstrably greater than that between the play and Don Quixote. I shall now set forth these parallelisms in some detail.

It will be best to list the features in Don Quixote and the play which are approximately coincident, and then to consider the assumed dependence of the play upon the novel in view of the larger area of chivalric romance itself. The most specific exposition of the Don Quixote theory was made in 1885 by Dr. Leonhardt, who published at Annaberg, Germany, in that year, a monograph entitled Über Beaumont und Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, in which he set forth the following parallels between the play and the novel:

a. Ralph's adoption of a squire: Don Quixote's engagement of Sancho Panza.

b. Ralph's rescue of Mistress Merrythought: Don Quixote's rescue of the Biscayan lady.

c. Ralph's adventures at the inn: Don Quixote's similar adventures at an inn.

d. The barber's basin: the 'helmet of Mambrino.' e. The liberation of the barber's patients: the liberation of the galley-slaves.

1 Again, I have depended upon the conclusions of Dr. Schevill, who has made a careful study of the question.