Cheltenham. Printed for G. A. Williams, 1823. This little volume of 88 pages contains the supposed remarks of the following individuals:—The Chairman, a member of the Committee, and the shades of Aristotle, Longinus, Æschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence, Lope de Vega Del Carpio, Molière, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, La Harpe, Gray, Garrick, Mademoiselle Claison, Warburton, Johnson, Malone, Steevens, Susanna Shakespeare, John-a-Combe, Alfieri, R. B. Sheridan, Porson, and a number of other less distinguished persons. Very few of the remarks are either witty or clever, nor have they many of the characteristics of the personages to whom they are ascribed.
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Coriolanus Travestie, by J. Morgan, was produced in Liverpool in 1846, and a burlesque of King Lear, entitled, King Queer and his Daughters Three, was played at the Strand Theatre, London, in 1855. It will therefore be seen that travesties have been written upon nearly every one of William Shakespeare’s Tragedies, and that not even his comedies, or historical plays, have quite escaped burlesque. The enumeration here given is probably incomplete, as many burlesques which have been produced in provincial towns, and some which have been played in London, enjoyed too short a run to obtain the advantage of being printed.
Before closing this chapter on the burlesques of Shakespeare, the following remarks on the subject which appeared in The Daily News, of October 25, 1884, may be quoted:—
Few more striking proofs could be given of the great and growing popularity of the theatre than the most recent fluctuations of stage humour. The experience of the present thus far confirms the judgment formed during the two preceding seasons, that the comic element in stage representation has undergone an important mutation both in motive and in method. Fun is aimed at, and probably achieved, as frequently as of yore; but the kind of fun and the means employed to produce it are entirely different, and possible only under the new conditions of the theatre. Only a few years ago, when London had comparatively few theatres, and supported, after a fashion, two opera-houses, the theatrical world filled a ludicrously small space in English life.
Only when the public are so keenly interested in the dramatic world as they are at present could success attend the profuse introduction of personal parody or caricature into the lightest of stage plays. It would be poor fun to present an elaborate caricature of a serious actor to a spectator who knew little, and cared less about him, and probably had not seen him in the part more especially selected for ridicule. Recent burlesque or travesty depends almost entirely for success upon such caricature, and assumes perfect knowledge of all the mannerisms of prominent actors and actresses. The art of inverting a noble story so that it may appear grotesque occupies quite a secondary position in the category of effects. It would not, for instance, be considered funny at this present juncture to travesty the Venetian Senate into policemen drinking pots of porter, and Othello himself into a negro, with plantation songs, dances and accent. Nor would it be thought amusing to dress Shylock with three hats upon his head, and make him in the intervals of the Trial Scene try to sell cigars to the young Venetians present in court. Yet this is precisely what Frank Talfourd, the great master of the word torturing school, and the inventor of the agglutinate system of punning, did. Henry J. Byron, too, made perhaps his greatest burlesque hit in The Lady of Lyons by making up Beauseant as Napoleon III. and Claude Melnotte as Napoleon I. Again, Talfourd in The Merchant of Venice Preserved wrote amazingly funny dialogue and songs for Robson, but depended in no kind of way upon imitations of Charles Kean and Phelps, which Robson could have done to perfection. What would now be required in Othello would be a low-comedy imitation of Signor Salvini with an Iago made up like Mr. Irving, and a Desdemona who could at least give a general impression of Miss Ellen Terry. We are not propounding that the words should be witless and senseless, all that we maintain is that the caricaturists would in theatrical parlance “get all the laughs.” An instance in point is that the song of the hermit in Paw Clawdian neatly written by Mr. Burnand, and capitally sung by Mr. E. D. Ward, although received with hearty merriment, by no means threw the audience into the convulsions provoked by Mr. Toole’s appearance as Mr. Wilson Barrett. It is not the perversion of motive and character, not the curious piling of pun upon pun, which makes the success of modern travesty. What is looked for is a clever presentment of the surface peculiarities of the serious artist, such as those of the Misses Linden in Silver Guilt, Stage Dora, and Paw Clawdian, in which by turns Miss Eastlake, Madame Sarah Bernhardt, and Mrs. Bernard Beere were parodied with exceeding cleverness. It is only a few nights since Miss Farren “brought down the house” by her brilliant caricature of Mr. Kyrle Bellew, as Gilbert Vaughan in Called Back.
The amusement to be obtained from putting counterfeit presentments of statesmen, lawyers, and soldiers upon the stage has been forbidden in theatres properly so-called, and is only endured in music-halls in a modified shape. Plenty of fun in the worst possible taste could be produced by this ancient expedient, but as public opinion and police reasons forbid it, recourse is had to the device of hoisting the histrion with his own petard. All the clever devices of his own art, all his mysteries of “make-up,” and his talent for characterization, are devoted to the object, not of parodying either Shakespeare or Sardou, but the aspect of their creations embodied by the foremost artists at present on the stage.
Isaac Watts, D.D.,
Born at Southampton in 1674. Died November 25, 1748.