Traditionally, audiences have attended the theatre in order to escape their realities and momentarily become a part of a different world. Though boundaries inevitably exist between the actors on stage and the audience members, certain theatrical methods create the possibility to enter into a shared world between all members present at the theatre. During the Renaissance, stage conventions and staging limitations often provided obstacles to actors in creating this different world for the audience. With limited special effects, the most effective tools for actors were costumes and language. In this essay, I will explore different staging conventions that utilize these tools to create a convincing world of make-believe for the audience. While I will focus on Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle and his reaction to the relationship between actors and audience, I will also review his contemporary plays and their mostly similar commentaries about this relationship. Eventually, I will attempt to show how bringing two audience members on stage in The Knight of the Burning Pestle allows Beaumont to explicitly mock some viewers’ dramatic ignorance and how this offensive satire led to the play’s unsuccessful first productions.
     In The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Beaumont created two audience members who move their seats to the stage to watch the play. This presents the convention of private theatres that began at the Blackfriars Playhouse that involved gentlemen actually sitting on the stage during a performance. These viewers paid more money to see the play and, more importantly, to be seen by the other audience members. However, though the owners of the playhouses insisted they allow these men to watch the show from the stage, most scholars believe that actors and dramatists did not like the new custom at all. In The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which was written for the Blackfriars Playhouse, George and Nell climb onto the stage to join the gentlemen who are already on stage viewing the play. In this play, Beaumont not only mocks audience members but particularly those who paid money to view the play from the stage. This placement of the citizen and his wife is most significant though because it further satirizes, and quite blatantly, the audience member who does not understand the fiction of theatre, as neither George nor Nell cannot theoretically cross the boundary between stage and audience even though they have physically crossed it. Their inability to escape London is evident throughout the play with such outbursts as Nell’s to the character of Humphrey as she questions whether he were “never none of Master Monkester’s scholars” (1.1.95-7). Nell thus shows that she has not been absorbed into the world of the play to temporarily believe the actor is actually the character of Humphrey but continues to think in terms of her own reality. However, a successful play must captivate its audience to allow viewers to think in terms of the play’s reality.
     In a “successful” play, perhaps categorized by popularity and endurance, the action on stage and the relationships between characters evoke certain emotions in the audience members, and viewers become involved with the characters because they believe, if only subconsciously, that the audience is a part of the players’ reality. Often, the actors ensure that this world of the stage is briefly the “real” world by exercising numerous stage conventions. Sometimes, a character delivers significant lines meant only for the audience and not for the other characters onstage in what literary critics refer to as an aside, in which a character directly addresses the audience members. Perhaps the vast use of soliloquies is the most successful form of drawing the audience into the action, as the audience is otherwise unaware of the characters’ personal thoughts. In addition to such wordplay and language, the physical state of theatres can also create an ambiance that fuses actors and audience members. During Beaumont’s time, lighting was unlike modern theatrical stage lighting and actually was evenly distributed across the entire theatre. Therefore, actors could observe the audience and transform them into part of their own spectacle because the actors and audience were not visually separated. With the creation of private theatres, seating created a similar effect, as it was different from the public theatres. Generally, viewers sat on an even level with the stage, which again failed to physically separate the two worlds of fiction and reality. All of these staging conventions were used before and during the time of Francis Beaumont, and they illustrate that while the actors’ world is separate from the viewers’ world, the players can use different methods to attempt to break these boundaries and make the viewers a part of their own world.
     Previous uses of these traditions are evident in prior plays as well as the plays of Beaumont’s contemporaries. For example, one of the most famous soliloquies in drama is in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the title character considers whether “to be, or not to be” (3.1.55). With this lengthy soliloquy, Hamlet is able to convey his thoughts to the audience, as language was the foremost method of relating events, inner dialogue, and feelings during this time. Essentially, this dialogue creates a conversation between the character and audience and allows the audience to view Hamlet as a character rather than the actor who plays him. Another of Shakespeare’s characters who uses the convention of directly addressing the audience to explain some aspect of his play is Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Puck reminds viewers that this play is not reality when he suggests that “If we shadows have offended,/ Think but this, and all is mended--/ That you have but slumbered here/ While these visions did appear” (5.Epilogue.1-4). With these lines, Puck extends the illusions and mystification of the play’s world to the world of the audience, thus transposing the theme from the play to the audience. While this tactic unites the two worlds in a fictional world, it also explicitly reminds the audience that the world they have briefly entered is in fact fictional. This need to explain the fiction of the play to the audience actually mocks the audience’s perceived inability to separate themselves from the play once they have become a part of it. In fact, the actors of Pyramus and Thisbe, the play within A Midsummer Night‘s Dream, are so concerned that the audience will believe the action on stage is real that they think they must include prologues to explain that the lion is not a lion and the characters die, not the actors (A Midsummer Night‘s Dream 3.1). With this play, Shakespeare satirizes the idea that audiences are so convinced that the world onstage is real. Still, the actors, like the actor who plays Puck, are the people who break the fourth wall in the first place to create the coexistence between the audience and the world of the play, so the actors and author inevitably mock their audience for buying into their own performance.
     The Knight of the Burning Pestle similarly, if not much more definitively, explores this idea that audience members mistake fiction for reality. Though most plays had previously employed the actors to challenge the barrier between fiction and reality, Beaumont breaks this theatrical convention with his immediate introduction of the characters of George and Nell. By creating characters who are audience members, Beaumont allows for the possibility of observing their understanding of the play, the idea of fiction, and their perception of reality. These two characters explicitly question the actors’ play and suggest different ways to please the audience. George and Nell defy the convention in which characters in the world of the play interact with the audience to invite the viewers into the characters’ lives. Rather, Beaumont creates an audience who interacts with the actors in order to invite the characters into the world of the audience. By doing this, Beaumont shows some people’s inability to understand the art of theatre and the need to suspend disbelief in order to enter the fictional world. The tradition of the actors playing the host has been evaded; thus, George and Nell never become a part of the play’s world and can never separate themselves from their own world in London. This is ironic considering they are physically within the world of the play, as they have moved their seats to the actual stage. So, while Shakespeare seems to believe viewers become too lost in the fictional world of the stage, Beaumont seems to believe the audience cannot become lost enough in that world. Or perhaps Shakespeare was actually making fun of actors who think they are so convincing that the audience will be confused, and Beaumont’s response was that the audience memebrs, not the performers, are the problem with a failure of interweaving the two realities.
     Throughout The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Nell and George exhibit their lack of understanding of the art and purpose of theatre and this interweaving. To gain the most from viewing a play, a person must be willing to suspend disbelief and forget that the characters are really actors and the forest or grocer’s shop is actually a stage. A viewer will not actually believe he has been magically transported to another country or is observing the scandal of the monarch, but he can ignore his logic and enjoy the art of the theatre if he allows himself to imagine that the world on stage is real. Besides language, the most useful tools for creating this believable world are the set and costumes. In Renaissance theatre, however, stages remained relatively bare, so the language and costumes were particularly imperative for creating a new world. Beaumont’s contemporaries often used costumes and disguises to show that a person’s exterior reflects his inner self in theatre and gives the audience a visual clue about the character. For example, costuming is the most effective method of portraying a character’s status because he can wear raggedy clothing to represent a commoner or exquisite clothing to represent a gentleman. This was especially effective in the 17th Century because the contemporary Sumptuary Laws determined who was able to wear what clothing (Introduction 5). Clothing also serves as an extremely useful hint about the gender of a character, since female characters were represented by males wearing dresses. Other Renaissance plays show the importance of clothing and disguises, like Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday. In this play, Simon Eyre pretends to be an Alderman by donning an Alderman’s gown, after which Eyre’s foreman comments that “now [he looks] like [himself]” (7.136). Similarly, Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew explores this relationship between outer self and inner self and questions whether putting on different clothes changes a person.  In Knight of the Burning Pestle, Nell and George demonstrate that they misunderstand the purpose of costumes as creating a new person and merely believe they are extravagances that add to the aesthetic spectacle of the theatre. Nell tells Rafe that “[her] husband shall lend [him] his/ jerkin,… and… a scarf. For the rest, the house/ shall furnish [him], and [they]’ll pay for’t” (5.1.62-4). She then tells Rafe to “think before whom [he performs], and what person [he represents]” (5.1.65-6). Nell seems to understand that a costume will make Rafe’s representation more evident, yet she and George continue to call to “Rafe” and think of him as their apprentice instead of as a knight. Thus, Rafe’s person has not been transformed to the character of the knight to the two citizens, despite the costumes they have provided for him, and the boundary between life on stage and their own life remains clear.
     In more modern forms of theatre, including television and film, the boundaries between “stage” and “theatre” become more easily blurred with the use of an imaginary fourth wall through which the audience must imagine it is observing the action. This fourth wall was made explicit in 19th Century theatre with the surge of realism. However, during Beaumont’s time, in the 17th Century, the boundary between stage and audience still existed. This boundary is most obvious in plays that continually remind audiences that they are watching a play. Plays most successfully present these reminders with the inclusion of another play within the play. Then, the characters in the frame play actually become viewers of another play, and an audience members are consciously aware that they, like these characters, are watching a play. Beaumont is so successful with this reminder during Knight of the Burning Pestle because he presents three plays that are tied together into one and “[makes] one plot intervene in another plot in his larger play, [thus keeping] audience and play, life and art, perpetually entangled” (Arthur Kinney 524). However, though the ultimate goal of the theatre would be for George and Nell to escape their world, Beaumont’s perpetual entanglement demonstrates their movement between the two worlds and constant awareness of London and their own selves.
  Plays during the Renaissance were products of an industry and must satisfy shareholders, actors, writers, and stage hands. However, a play most importantly must meet the needs of its audience. I believe this is the reason that Knight of the Burning Pestle was unsuccessful during its first productions. If an audience must be satisfied with a play, then audiences of  Knight of the Burning Pestle would most likely be offended by its blatant mockery of them. This play’s offensive nature to its audience of citizens who are much like George and Nell’s characters would equate to a play put on for the court that abrasively mocks the monarch. Clearly, modern critics can understand why the egregious ridicule of the play’s own audience would limit its success.