Burlesque

John D. Jump

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781032031316
• eBook ISBN: 9781351630658
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1972, this book provides a helpful introduction to burlesque literature, a term used by critics from the seventh-century onwards to describe work in which an incongruity between serious subject-matter and style is used to provoke laughter. It examines the four main types of burlesque writing: Travesty, Hudibrastic, Parody and the Mock-Poem, as well as dramatic burlesques.

1

Definitions

For many Americans today, a burlesque is a kind of variety show with a heavy emphasis upon sex, featuring broad comedians and strip-tease dancers. This is not the sense that concerns us here. For more than three centuries English-speaking literary critics have been using the word in a sense that Richmond P. Bond admirably defines. ‘Burlesque consists,’ he writes, ‘in the use or imitation of serious matter or manner, made amusing by the creation of an incongruity between style and subject’ (English Burlesque Poetry 1700–1750, p. 3). Examples of such incongruous use or imitation include Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, Butler’s Hudibras, Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews, and Byron’s Vision of Judgment.

These represent several different species of burlesque. One line of distinction among them would separate those in which a relatively trifling subject is ludicrously elevated by the style of presentation from those in which a relatively important subject is ludicrously degraded by the style of presentation. The Rape of the Lock and Shamela would fall on one side of this line as instances of the high burlesque, and Hudibras and The Vision of Judgment on the other as instances of the low burlesque. Another line would divide those which burlesque particular originals from those which burlesque something more general. Shamela and The Vision of Judgment imitate and ridicule particular works by Richardson and Southey respectively; The Rape of the Lock mocks the epic in general, and Hudibras degrades the lofty pretensions of Puritanism.

These two intersecting lines of demarcation give us four species of burlesque:

1.  Travesty, the low burlesque of a particular work achieved by treating the subject of that work in an aggressively familiar style: e.g., Byron’s Vision of Judgment.

2.  Hudibrastic, the low burlesque of a less confined material: e.g., Butler’s Hudibras.

3.  Parody, the high burlesque of a particular work (or author) achieved by applying the style of that work (or author) to a less worthy subject: e.g., Fielding’s Shamela.

4.  The Mock-Poem, commonly the mock-epic, the high burlesque of a whole class of literature achieved by lavishing the style characteristic of the class upon a trifling subject: e.g., Pope’s Rape of the Lock.

Historically, the low burlesque prevailed in the seventeenth century, travesty and Hudibrastic flourishing vigorously during the Restoration period. The high burlesque came into its own in the eighteenth century, which saw the composition of most of our finest mock-epic or mock-heroic works. There was great activity in parody, too, and this persisted throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. We must not over-simplify, however; each of these periods can show examples of all four species of burlesque. Examples occur in earlier periods, too. But concentration upon post-medieval examples, and in the main upon examples in English, seems prudent in a study as brief as the present.

After a discussion of each of the species in turn, I shall devote a separate chapter to dramatic burlesques. These represent so well-established a tradition in the English theatre that dividing them among the species and considering them apart from one another would obscure a good deal of their interest.

2

Travesty

Travesty enjoyed a great vogue in seventeenth-century France, the Virgile travesti (from 1648) of Paul Scarron being the most famous example of the species. The fashion quickly spread to England, where it flourished during the Restoration period and into the eighteenth century. Admittedly, there had been English travesties of earlier date: for example, the puppet-show in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614). But the French influence, and above all that of Scarron, caused a rapid increase in the production of familiar and irreverent renderings of works by Virgil, Homer, Ovid, and other respected authors.

One of the most genial of these is Swift’s ‘Baucis and Philemon’ (1709), which burlesques a story told in the eighth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. According to Ovid, Baucis and Philemon, an elderly Phrygian couple, show hospitality to Jove and Hermes without recognizing their guests. In gratitude, the gods transform their humble cottage into a temple and ask what more they can do for them.

A while they whisper; then to Jove address’d,

Philemon thus prefers their joint Request.

We crave to serve before your sacred Shrine,

And offer at your Altars Rites Divine:

And since not any Action of our Life

Has been polluted with Domestick Strife,

We beg one Hour of Death; that neither she

With Widows Tears may live to bury me,

Nor weeping I, with wither’d Arms may bear

My breathless Baucis to the Sepulcher.

(tr. Dryden)

The gods grant these requests and Baucis and Philemon at the end of their days are metamorphosed into two trees.

Swift retains the names Baucis and Philemon but turns the pagan gods into Christian saints and locates the action in Kent. The saints transform the cottage into an English parish church; and, when they ask the couple what more they can do for them,

Philemon, having paus’d awhile,

Return’d ’em Thanks in homely Style;

Then said, My House is grown so fine,

Methinks I still would call it mine:

I’m old, and fain would live at Ease,

Make me the Parson, if you please.

He spoke, and presently he feels

His Grazier’s Coat fall down his Heels;

He sees, yet hardly can believe,

About each Arm a Pudding-sleeve;

His Wastcoat to a Cassock grew,

And both assum’d a sable Hue;

But being Old, continu’d just

As Thread-bare, and as full of Dust.

His Talk was now of Tythes and Dues;

He smok’d his Pipe, and read the News;

Knew how to preach old Sermons next,

Vamp’d in the Preface and the Text;

At Christ’nings well could act his Part,

And had the Service all by Heart;

Wish’d Women might have Children fast,

And thought whose Sow had farrow’d last:

Against Dissenters would repine,

And stood up firm for Right Divine:

Found his Head fill’d with many a System,

But Classick Authors, – he ne’er miss’d ’em.

Swift elaborates each of the transformations in this fanciful way. When the cottage becomes a church, its chimney becomes the steeple, its kettle the bell, its jack (for turning the spit) the clock, a chair the pulpit, the bedstead the pews, and so on. Everything is so thoroughly naturalized and familiarized that Swift can even permit himself a little good-humoured satire at the expense of Philemon as representing the Anglican clergy. From beginning to end, his style is simple, easy, and informal.

Perhaps an even finer travesty, and certainly a more savage one, is The Vision of Judgment (1822) by Byron. This differs from the travesties mentioned so far in that it relates not to any of the works of classical antiquity but to a poem by one of its author’s contemporaries. It burlesques A Vision of Judgement (1821) by Southey.

In 1820, George III had died, old, mad, and blind, after a reign of sixty years. As Poet Laureate, Southey felt it incumbent upon himself to celebrate the reception of the deceased monarch into celestial bliss, and as a convert to Toryism he was the readier to do so because he approved of the policies of the late King’s governments. A Vision of Judgement tells how the King awakens after death and raises his eyes heavenward. The spirit of a Tory Prime Minister who had been killed about the time the King went permanently insane notifies him of the firmness and wisdom with which the Prince Regent has been ruling in his place and of the defeat of Napoleon. He confesses that, despite this triumph, the spirit of Jacobinism, or subversive Liberalism, remains dreadfully active. The King progresses to the gate of heaven, where he is to be judged. Invited to ‘bring forth his accusers’, the Fiend responsible for the revolutions which had troubled the reign just ended produces John Wilkes the agitator and ‘Junius’ the political journalist. But even they lack the effrontery to accuse so blameless a monarch, and the Fiend hurls them back into hell. Some of those who had wronged George III in life are now ready to admit their fault, and George Washington is prominent among these. The beatification of the King and his welcome into heaven by his predecessors on the throne, by the great men of the past, and by those members of his family whom he had outlived, complete Southey’s poem.

Southey writes in unrhymed accentual hexameters and with a deliberate assumption of dignity. But his hexameters limp and drag; his Miltonic vagueness cannot obscure the absurdity of his identification of the heavenly host with the Tory party; his writing is flat, and his tone is merely pompous.

Byron thought A Vision of Judgement a presumptuous poem because it told God what he ought to do with George III; he detested it as a Tory poem, the work of one whom he considered a bigoted renegade; and he knew it to be a bad poem, inflated, tame, stilted, and preposterous. A travesty covering very much the same ground in an aggressively familiar style seemed the obvious corrective.

He did not take over Southey’s metrical form any more than Scarron took over Virgil’s. He relied upon the octave stanza, ottava rima, which lon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• 1 Definitions
• 2 Travesty
• 3 Hudibrastic
• 4 Parody
• 5 The Mock-Poem
• 6 Dramatic Burlesque
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX