1. cit. Hold your peace good-man boy.

2. pro. What do you meane sir?

3. cit. That you haue no good meaning: This seuen yeares there have beene playes at this house, I haue obserued it, you haue still girds at Citizens; and now you call your play, The London Marchant. Downe with your Title, boy, downe with your Title.

The light-hearted confrontation staged in the opening scene of Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, first performed around 1607, is typical in many ways of the material dramatised between 1603 and 1613 by the Children of the Queen's Revels. The Queen's Revels was the most enduring and influential of the Jacobean children's companies. Its plays are ambitious and innovative, even avant-garde; its relationship with the audience was informal and, occasionally, combative, with a tendency either to risk confusing spectators with metatheatrical or generic experimentation, or to overstep the bounds of what was considered acceptable in political or social satire. Staging a play like The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which opens with this striking and potentially baffling metatheatrical intervention, was a risky move, but the Queen's Revels were accustomed to financial, social and political hazard.