A Book of Burlesque: Sketches of English Stage Travestie and Parody — Reading Companion

Poole's Pioneering Travesty

Adams devotes considerable space to John Poole's Hamlet Travestie (1810), the first formal Shakespeare travesty. He quotes the opening dialogue, where King Claudius urges Hamlet to “cheer up” and proposes they “all get drunk together.” The soliloquies are turned into songs with refrains like “Derry down, down, down, derry down.” Adams judges the piece “dreary reading” despite its good intentions, noting that Poole made “all due apology for his temerity.” This early example sets a pattern: burlesques often retain the original plot but replace blank verse with doggerel, and characters speak in anachronistic slang. Adams uses Poole to illustrate the tension between reverence and ridicule that pervades the genre.

The Business of Burlesquing Shakespeare

Adams argues that Shakespeare burlesquers were never “wholesale or intentionally irreverent.” He lists a lineage of writers—a'Beckett, Talfourd, Coyne, Brough, Halliday, Burnand, Byron, and Gilbert—who approached the Bard with a “genuine sense of fun.” The chapter traces how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satirists left Shakespeare alone until Poole broke the taboo. Adams quotes Poole's ironic relief that, after three editions, Shakespeare was “neither expelled from our libraries, nor banished from our stage.” The section emphasizes the literary craft behind burlesque: the best examples, Adams implies, succeed by cleverly mimicking the original's structure while subverting its tone. He distinguishes these from mere “extravaganzas,” which he excludes from his study.

Limits and Methods of the Survey

Adams repeatedly stresses the constraints of his project. He cannot supply a “consecutive and comprehensive history” within the allotted space. Instead, he offers sketches of groups into which burlesques “naturally fall,” with extracts to exhibit individual methods. He thanks living writers for access to their prompt books, allowing quotation from unpublished work. The preface makes clear that his focus is literary and humorous, not theatrical. This self-imposed limitation shapes the book's content: readers will find analysis of dialogue and structure rather than performance history. Adams's taxonomic approach—grouping burlesques by source—provides a framework for comparing how different writers treated similar material, from Shakespeare to contemporary dramas.

Adams's book is best approached as a curated anthology of examples rather than a narrative history. Readers interested in the mechanics of parody will find value in his extracts and his grouping of burlesques by source. The preface's frank acknowledgment of limitations—and its reliance on unpublished prompt books—gives the work a provisional, insider quality. Those seeking a broader cultural analysis of Victorian burlesque may need to supplement this volume with studies of the theatrical context Adams deliberately sets aside.

I think of A Book of Burlesque as a shelf where laughter echoes, heavy with masks and mock grandeur. It reminds me of the old tract on damnation, that other volume of thunderous tempests pretending to be certain. My hand wanders between them—the jest and the sermon—and finds a quiet kinship in the warmth of their shared, stubborn breath. Hell: Warm Words on the Cheerful and Comforting Doctrine of Eternal Damnation — Inside the Classic.