A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Act v. Sc. 1.
The burlesque among serious writers has a bad reputation. George Eliot, in Theophrastus Such, says that it debases the moral currency; and George Crabb, in his English Synonymes, thus dismisses it: “Satire and irony are the most ill-natured kinds of wit; burlesque stands in the lowest rank.”
Burlesque, from the Italian burlare, “to joke,” “to banter,” “to play,” has been defined as “an expression of language, a display of gesture, an impression of countenance, the intention being to excite laughter.” In art caricature is burlesque, in literature parody is burlesque, in the drama comic pantomime, comic opera, travesty, and extravaganza are burlesque. All dramatic burlesque ranges under the head of farce, although all farce is not burlesque. Burlesque is the farce of portraiture on the stage; farce on the stage is the burlesque of events. Bret Harte’s Condensed Novels and George Arnold’s McArone Papers are representative specimens of burlesque in American letters; Arthur B. Frost’s famous domestic cat, who supped inadvertently upon rat poison, is an excellent example of burlesque in American art. What America has done for burlesque on the stage it is the aim of the following pages to show.
Hipponax, of Ephesus, who lived in the latter half of the sixth century before Christ, is credited with having been “The Father of Burlesque Poetry.” He was small and ill-favored physically, and his natural personal defects were the indirect cause of the development of his satirical powers and of his posthumous fame. Two sculptors of Chios caricatured him grossly in a statue publicly exhibited, and he, in return, fired his muse with the torch of hatred, and burned them in effigy with terrible but clever ridicule. He parodied the Iliad, in which he made Achilles an Ionian glutton; he did not spare his own parents; he poked fun at the gods themselves; he impaled Mrs. Hipponax with a couplet upon which she is still exhibited to the scoffers, and he is only to be distinguished from his long line of successors by the curious fact that he does not seem to have spoken with derision of his mother-in-law! His tribute to matrimony is still preserved in choice iambics, roughly translated as follows: “There are but two happy days in the life of a married man—the day of his marriage, and the day of the burial of his wife.” From this it will be seen that twenty-five centuries or more look down upon the Benedict of the modern burlesque, who leaves his wife at home when he travels for pleasure!
Aristophanes, the comic poet of Athens, who wrote fifty-four comedies between the years 427 and 388 B.C., may be termed “The Father of the Burlesque Play.” He satirized people more than things, or than other men’s tragedies, and to his school belong Brougham’s Pocahontas and Columbus, rather than the same author’s Dan Keyser de Bassoon, or Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice. The plots of Aristophanes are as original as his wit. In The Wasps he caricatured the fondness of the Athenians for litigation; in The Birds his object was to convince the Athenians of the advantages of a clean political sweep; in The Female Orators he satirized the Sorosis and the women suffragists of his time; in The Feast of Ceres he pointed out how useful and ornamental woman is in her own sphere; and in Peace, written to urge the close of the Peloponnesian war, he reached the sublimity of burlesque in creating a stage heroine who never utters a word. The argument of The Knights will give a very fair idea of the plots of his plays. Athens is represented as a private house, whose master, Demos (the people), has more servants and more servants’ relations than he can comfortably wait upon or decently support. Nicias and Demosthenes are his slaves, and Cleon, a political boss of the period, is his butler and confidential valet. Demos is irritable, superstitious, inconstant in his pursuits, and dull in character. Agoracritus, a sausage-seller, subverts the plots and the plans of the demagogue Cleon—originally played by Aristophanes himself—shows the householder that his favorite servant is utterly unworthy of the public trust, and brings the entertainment to a close with the discomfiture of the Ring and the relief of the taxpayers. Demos is said to have been the prototype of “John Bull,” the personification of the Englishman, as he was first exhibited by Dr. Arbuthnot in the early part of the eighteenth century, and The Knights is regarded as “an historical piece of great value, because it furnishes a faithful picture of the nation and of its customs.” What curious ideas of American life and manners will posterity gather from Adonis and Evangeline!
Classical critics credit Aristophanes with being distinguished for the exuberance of his wit, for his inexhaustible fund of comic humor, and for the Attic purity and great simplicity of his language; while at the same time he is accused of introducing, when it suits his purpose, every variety of dialect, of coining new words and expressions as occasion offers, and of making bad puns, whether occasion offers or not; in all of which his disciples persistently and consistently follow him.
Samuel Foote, who lived in an age of epithets, was called “The British Aristophanes.” He respected no person and no thing. He satirized every subject, sacred or profane, which struck his fancy, from Chesterfield’s Letters to the Stratford Jubilee; and he caricatured everybody, from Whitfield to the Duchess of Kingston. His serious attempt at Othello, in the beginning of his career as an actor, was considered a master-piece of unconscious burlesque, only inferior, in its extravagance and nonsense, to his Hamlet, and he failed in every legitimate part he undertook to play. As a mimic, however, in dramatic productions of his own writing, he met with immense success; and as a writer of stage burlesque he ranks very high. He made Italian opera ridiculous in his Cat Concert; he gave serious offence to a hard-working, respectable trade in The Tailors, a Tragedy for Warm Weather; he attacked the medical profession in The Devil on Two Sticks; he parodied sentimental romance of the Pamela school in his Piety in Pattens; and he offended all right-thinking persons, heterodox as well as orthodox, in The Minor, a travesty upon the methods of Wesley and his Church.
The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruell Death of Pyramus and Thisbie, originally published in the year 1600, if not the earliest burlesque in the English language, is certainly the model upon which are based all subsequent productions of the same class which have been written for the British or American theatre. Stevens believes the title to have been suggested to Shakspere by Dr. Thomas Preston’s Lamentable Tragedy Mixed Ful of Pleasant Mirth—Conteyning the Life of Cambises, King of Percia. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is to be found in the fourth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and a volume called Perymus and Thesbye was entered on the Stationers’ Register in 1562-63. Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid was published in 1567, and several other versions of the tale were extant before the birth of Snout or Bottom, the incidents, of course, being the same in all. Shaksperean scholars find traces of other works in the different speeches of the hard-handed men of Athens, but the general impression is that the author’s purpose was to travesty the verse of Golding. Limander and Helen are intended for Leander and Hero; Shafalus and Procrus for Cephalus and Procris, and Ninny for Ninus; a form of verbal contortion displayed by the modern burlesquer in Sam Parr for Zampa, and The Roof Scrambler for Sonnambula; while the lines—
“Whereat, with blade, with bloody, blamefull blade,
He brauely broacht his boiling bloody breast,”
read like the blank-verse mouthed by the deep tragedians of the negro minstrel stage of to-day.