Oli. A verse would pay the tax-man all we owed.
Cas (aside). I think he'd be averse, though, to that mode.
To see with my eyes, if I could but make her!
Oli. With a few flowery lines we'd pay the baker.
(With enthusiasm) Tradesmen with gentle feelings we'd pay so, sir;
A comic song would satisfy the grosser.
A poet never yet was a great eater,
We'd pay the butcher with a little meat-a.
The subject of "Mazeppa" was afterwards treated by Mr. Burnand in a burlesque brought out at the Gaiety in 1885.
Of Sergeant Talfourd's dramatic works the only one, apparently, that has been travestied is "Ion," which had to submit to the ridicule of Fox Cooper in 1836. In that year Cooper's perversion was played both at the Garrick Theatre and at the Queen's, in the first case with Conquest as the hero, in the latter with a lady in the rôle—an arrangement quite defensible, inasmuch as, in the original play, the name-part had been played (at the Haymarket) by Ellen Tree.
The pseudo-Elizabethanisms of Sheridan Knowles naturally attracted the attention of the comic playwrights. The opportunities were, indeed, only too tempting; and so I have to record the production of burlesques based upon five plays—"The Wife," "Virginius," "Alfred the Great," "William Tell," and "The Hunchback." The first named has for its full title "The Wife: a Tale of Mantua." The "burlesque burletta," by Joseph Graves (Strand, 1837), is called "The Wife: a Tale of a Mantua Maker." Mariana (first played by Ellen Tree) here becomes Mary Ann Phipps, the said mantua-maker; Floribel is Flora, a servant-of-all-work. Leonardo and Ferrardo Gonzaga figure as Marmaduke Jago, landlord of the Green Man, and Zachariah Jago, usurping that dignity; Count Florio is Floor'em (a police-sergeant), Julian St. Pierre is Jack Peters—and so forth. The travestie is fairly close, but the wit and humour are not of brilliant quality. Even less to be commended is "Virginius the Rum 'Un," perpetrated by William Rogers, the comedian, and performed at Sadler's Wells in the same year as Graves's effort. This is but a tedious assault upon "Virginius." The scene is laid in Islington, and Virginius is a butcher. Appius Claudius, here called Sappyis, is a sergeant of police. Dentatus is "Tentaties"; Icilius is "Isilyus." Claudius claims Virginia as his apprentice, and Virginius stabs her with a skewer; the instrument, however, sticks only in her stay-bone, and so no harm is done.
"Virginius" had very much more justice done to it when Leicester Buckingham made it the basis of a burlesque at the St. James's in 1859. Then Charles Young was the Virginius, Mrs. Frank Matthews the Virginia, and Miss Lydia Thompson a "Mysterious Stranger," introduced, apparently, only for the sake of a pas seul. In this piece the puns are very plentiful, if not always good. Thus, Virginia says:—
Oh, deary me! each day I'm growing thinner:
Nurse says, because I never eat my dinner;
But that's not it;—in my heart there's a pain
Which makes me sigh, and sigh, and all in vain!
I've lost the plump round waist I used to prize,
And grow thin, spite of my long-wasted sighs.
I love—oh! such a nice young man!—but, oh!
Does he love me?—that's what I want to know.
When we met at a party, I could see
That he was just the party to suit me;
And to the words I spoke, on his arm leaning,
Love lent a sigh to give a si-lent meaning.
But he said nothing soft—that's what I cry for;
I sigh for one whose heart I can't deci-pher.
Virginius, like so many other burlesque characters, delivers himself of a reminiscence of "To be or not to be," and at the close it is found that Virginius has not really killed his daughter, because she "pads."