Francis Beaumont Misdirects Nell

The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Introduction Lines 50-51

Wife
By your leave, gentlemen, all, I'm something troublesome;
I'm a stranger here

Just how meta was Francis Beaumont being when he wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle? First of all, he wrote a play that takes place during a play. He filled his play with social commentary relevant to the theater in his time. So it is safe to say that Beaumont understood nuance and specifically understood the nuances of a gendered theatrical field. Nell's line is a bit of a joke about how women were not allowed to act on stage, that is why she is "a stranger here" as she joins her husband on stage. The prior line shows that Beaumont did not have the intention of outwardly allowing a women on a stage, within a stage. Instead, having Nell say that she is "troublesome" foreshadows all of her behavior afterwards. She instructs her husband to interject when she has an idea, she offers up actors, and stops the children to fawn over them. She is domestically troublesome and the subtleties of placing a women in this role hold way more weight than the annoying George on stage. Nell's character seems to be reasons why a women should not be allowed on the stage. She will be distracted, she will be too motherly, she will make suggestions that have nothing to do with the plot, she will get her husband involved and that will be one more man to deal with.

Beaumont might not have been commenting on women being allowed on the stage or within a theater company. But I find it hard to believe that a man with the ability to layer so many ideas onto one another, was not making some kind of gendered statement when it came to placing a women on a stage in the manner that he did.