Victorian burlesque

Victorian burlesque, sometimes called travesty or extravaganza, was a type of stage show popular in Victorian England and New York City during the mid-1800s. It worked as a parody, taking a well-known opera, classical play, or ballet and turning it into a broad, comic musical—often with a risqué edge. These productions mocked the theatrical and musical styles of the original, and they frequently quoted or pastiched its text or music. It was one of several forms of burlesque.

Like ballad opera, these burlesques used musical scores that pulled from a wide range of sources—popular songs of the day and operatic arias alike—though later examples, from the 1880s onward, sometimes had original scores. Dance was a key element, and great care went into staging, costumes, and other spectacular stagecraft, since many pieces were staged as extravaganzas. Many male roles were played by actresses in breeches roles, showing off women’s legs in tights, while some older female roles were taken by male actors. Originally short one-act pieces, burlesques later grew into full-length shows that took up most or all of an evening’s program. Writers of burlesques included J. R. Planché, H. J. Byron, G. R. Sims, F. C. Burnand, W. S. Gilbert, and Fred Leslie.

Burlesque theatre became popular around the start of the Victorian era. The word “burlesque” comes from the Italian *burla*, meaning “ridicule or mockery.” According to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Victorian burlesque was “related to and in part derived from pantomime and may be considered an extension of the introductory section of pantomime with the addition of gags and ‘turns.’” Another forerunner was ballad opera, where new words were set to existing tunes.

Madame Vestris produced burlesques at the Olympic Theatre starting in 1831 with *Olympic Revels* by J. R. Planché. In these shows, comedy came from the absurd contrast between grand classical subjects—with realistic historical costumes and settings—and the everyday modern activities the actors performed. For instance, *Olympic Revels* opens with the gods of Olympus in classical Greek dress playing whist. In early burlesques, song lyrics were written to popular music, as had been done earlier in *The Beggar’s Opera*. Later in the Victorian era, burlesque mixed operetta, music hall, and revue, and some large-scale spectacles were called extravaganzas. The English style of burlesque was successfully introduced in New York in the 1840s by manager and comedian William Mitchell, who opened his Olympic Theatre in December 1839. Like the London originals, his burlesques featured characters with nonsensical names like Wunsuponatyme and The King of Neverminditsnamia, and they made fun of all kinds of music then being performed in the city.

Unlike pantomime, which aimed at all ages and classes, burlesque targeted a narrower, highly literate audience. Some writers, such as the Brough brothers, aimed at a conservative middle-class audience, while H. J. Byron’s success came from his skill in appealing to the lower middle classes. Some of the most frequent subjects for burlesque were Shakespeare’s plays and grand opera. From the 1850s onward, burlesquing Italian, French, and later German opera was popular with London audiences. Verdi’s *Il trovatore* and *La traviata* had their British premieres in 1855 and 1856, and British burlesques of them followed quickly. *Our Lady of the Cameleon* by Leicester Silk Buckingham and *Our Traviata* by William F. Vandervell (both 1857) were followed by five different burlesque treatments of *Il trovatore*, two of them by H. J. Byron: *Ill Treated Trovatore, or the Mother the Maiden and the Musicianer* (1863) and *Il Trovatore or Larks with a Libretto* (1880). The operas of Bellini, Bizet, Donizetti, Gounod, Handel, Meyerbeer, Mozart, Rossini, Wagner, and Weber were also burlesqued. In a 2003 study, Roberta Montemorra Marvin noted that by the 1880s, almost every truly popular opera had been turned into a burlesque. These usually appeared after an opera’s premiere or a successful revival, often running for a month or longer. The popularity of stage burlesque in general, and operatic burlesque in particular, seems to have come from the many ways it entertained a diverse audience and from how it fed on—and fed into—the circus-like, carnivalesque atmosphere of public Victorian London.

W. S. Gilbert wrote five opera burlesques early in his career, starting with *Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack* (1866), the most successful of which was *Robert the Devil* (1868). In the 1870s, Lydia Thompson’s burlesque troupe, with Willie Edouin, became famous for their burlesques by authors such as H. B. Farnie and Robert Reece, both in Britain and the United States. Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells notes that while parodies of Shakespeare had appeared even in Shakespeare’s lifetime, the heyday of Shakespearean burlesque was the Victorian era. Wells observes that the typical Victorian Shakespeare burlesque “takes a Shakespeare play as its point of departure and creates from it a mainly comic entertainment, often in ways that bear no relation to the original play.” As an example of the puns in these texts, Wells points out that Macbeth and Banquo make their first entrance under an umbrella. The witches greet them with “Hail! hail! hail!”; Macbeth asks Banquo, “What mean these salutations, noble thane?” and is told “These showers of ‘Hail’ anticipate your ‘reign’.” Musically, Shakespearean burlesques were as varied as others in the genre. An 1859 burlesque of *Romeo and Juliet* contained 23 musical numbers, some from opera.