We are excited to be one of the venues for this year’s touring programme of Edwards’ Boys, the theatre company of King Edward VI school of Stratford upon Avon. This year’s play is The Knight of the Burning Pestle, an early
seventeenth play by Francis Beaumont first performed at Blackfriars Theatre in 1607. The play is a satire on chivalric romances, similar to Don Quixote.
Since 2005 Edward’s Boys have been performing rarely-seen plays from the repertoire of the early modern boys’
companies. In the sixteenth- century, these boy acting companies grew out of the humanist grammar school and choir school systems, performing at the royal court and the private houses of the aristocracy, before coming to prominence in the emergent commercial theatre of the 1570s-1580s and terminating in the early 1590s. The companies later enjoyed a resurgence around the turn of the seventeenth-century, from the re-founding of “Paul’s Boys” in 1599, who disbanded c.1606, until the Children of the Queen’s Revels were assimilated into the Lady Elizabeth’s Men in 1613.
Edward’s Boys have toured extensively, by invitation, to many venues over the years. For example, the universities of Oxford, London, Warwick and Cambridge, to Middle Temple Hall, Inner Temple, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe, the RSC Swan and The Other Place theatres, and to Genoa, Italy, Montpellier, France and now The Upper Floor of the Old Grammar School. The performance here in Ledbury will be for one night only, on 13 July 2026 with tickets ON SALE NOW, available on The Courtyard website.
