[IX.]
BURLESQUE OF FICTION AND SONG.
The writers of stage travestie have gone less to fiction for subject-matter than might have been expected. Half a dozen romances previous to Scott, half a dozen of Scott's own stories, about the same number of modern novels, and still fewer foreign masterpieces—these represent the sources of all the most important of the burlesques which have been based upon invented prose narrative.
The earliest of the tales which have been thus dealt with is "Robinson Crusoe." Of this time-honoured story, the first whimsical treatment was that which took the shape of a piece called "Crusoe the Second, or the Shipwrecked Milliners," presented at the Lyceum in 1847. This was written by Stocqueler, and had for interpreters Mr. and Mrs. Keeley, with Alfred Wigan (as Crusoe). It was followed, in 1860, at the Princess's, by the "Robinson Crusoe" of H. J. Byron. Seven years later, no fewer than six writers joined in the production of a perversion of Defoe's tale, brought out at the Haymarket in 1867, and bearing the names of H. J. Byron, W. S. Gilbert, T. Hood, jun., H. S. Leigh, W. J. Prowse, and Arthur Sketchley. In this (which was given at a matinée for the benefit of the family of Paul Gray, the artist) the parts were all sustained by well-known men of art and letters. After this there came, in 1876, at the Folly, the "Robinson Crusoe" of Mr. H. B. Farnie,[48] which, in its turn, was followed, just ten years later, by yet another arrangement of the story, in which Mr. Farnie had the co-operation of Mr. Reece.
To the Adelphi, in 1846, belongs an "extra extravagant extravaganza," founded by Gilbert Abbott a'Beckett and Mark Lemon on the "Peter Wilkins" of Robert Paltock (first printed in 1750). This burlesque had for its full title—"Peter Wilkins, or the Loadstone Rock and the Flying Indians," and had for its chief interpreters—Miss Woolgar as the hero, Paul Bedford as Jack Adams, and Miss E. Chaplin as Youriwkee. Dr. Johnson's "Rasselas" attracted the attention of William Brough, and was made, in 1862, the foundation of a burlesque produced at the Haymarket.
In 1765 Horace Walpole published his mediæval imagining, "The Castle of Otranto," by which so many of us have in our youth been thrilled. In 1848 Gilbert Abbott a'Beckett set himself to make fun of its singularities, and the result was a very brightly written piece, enacted at the Haymarket.[49] In this, Manfred's son Conrad is found imprisoned under the gigantic helmet of Alphonso, and the distracted father at once begins to give way to comic word-splitting:—
If he's beneath that hat,
His bier, by this time, must be precious flat!
I'll not believe it! no, my life upon it!
No one would dare my Conrad thus to bonnet.
But stay!—has anybody got a lever,
To give a lift to this gigantic beaver?
(The helmet is raised at the back; Manfred looks under it.)
Alas! he speaks the truth—my son lies low,
Poor little chap, under this great chapeau.
My. Conrad gone!—This is a sad disaster,
The die is cast by this unlucky castor!
Can no one tell me how or whence it came?
Is there no ticket with the hatter's name?
If I knew grief before, this hat has capped it,—
My boy, crush'd 'neath this hated nap, has napped it!
In the opening scene, Hippolita, Conrad's mother, ventures to suggest to Manfred that the boy is not of marriageable age, sixteen summers not having yet passed o'er his head:—