The Future Francis Beaumont

This essay attends to Beaumont’s recent performance and reception history, documenting a range of academic and popular responses to demonstrate the challenges and affordances of engaging with Beaumont’s plays. The first section examines several twenty-first century performances of Beaumont plays, focusing especially on the Globe’s stimulating production of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The second section considers how Beaumont was both acknowledged and ignored in 2016, the year of his 400th anniversary. The final section suggests some avenues for further research into the performance of Beaumont’s plays.