STAGE PARODY.* THIS conscientious record of the growth and progress

of stage parody has enabled us to understand more clearly than ever how it comes about that dyspepsia and melancholy are so often the lot of the professional humorist, whether public or private. Here we have the jester without his paint, his characteristic gestures, his voice, or his "ad libs." Mr. Adams has, indeed, unconsciously performed the function of the anatomist of mirth. Making no pretence to criticism, he has contented himself merely with recording the names and

natures of the various travesties that have seen the light, from The Knight of the Burning Pestle down to the present day, and giving copious extracts to illustrate the methods of their authors. Very few comic pieces stand such a test, the modern punning libretto least of all, and the result of a conscientious

perusal of these pages is neither exhilarating nor reassuring. As Mr. Adams tells us, in what he calls the " palmy " days of burlesque, the one-act travesty was, on the whole, deemed sufficient. Burlesque did not claim the whole evening to itself. But of late years a growing tendency has been observable to devote the entire programme to burlesque. "The pieces," says Mr. Adams, "having now become the staple of the night's amusement, were to be placed upon the boards with all possible splendour. Money was to be spent lavishly on scenery, pro- perties, and costumes. Dancing was to be a prominent feature —not the good old-fashioned 'breakdowns' and the like—but choregraphic interludes of real grace and ingenuity." The amount of time and money and talent that is now consumed by burlesque is something portentous. There is perhaps greater temptation at the present moment than there ever was before, for actors of talent to devote abilities to this de- partment which might have achieved solid distinction for them in the higher walks of the drama. George Eliot was perhaps inclined to take an exaggerated view of the dangers of burlesque, but there is certainly more ground for complaint now than there was when she uttered the following memorable protest in 1879 :—

" Some high authority is needed to give many worthy and timid persons the freedom of muscular repose under the growing demand on them to laugh when they have no other reason than the peril of being taken for dullards : still more to inspire them with the courage.to say that they object to the theatrical spoiling for themselves and their children of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men, by burlesque associations adapted to the taste of rich fishmongers in the stalls and their assistants in the gallery. The English people in the present generation are falsely reputed to know Shakspere (as, by some innocent persons, the Florentine mule-drivers are believed to have known the Divine Commeclia, not, perhaps, excluding all the subtle discourses in the Purgatorio and Paradiso) ; but there seems a clear prospect that in the coming generation he will be known to them through burlesques, and that his plays will find a new life as pantomimes. A bottle-nosed Lear will come on with a monstrous corpulence from which he will frantically dance himself free during the midnight storm ; Rosalind and Celia will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and shepherdesses; Ophelia in fleshings and a volumin- ous brevity of grenadine will dance through the mad scene, finishing with the famous attitude of the scissors' in the arms of Laertes ; and all the speeches in Hamlet will be so ingeniously parodied that the originals will be reduced to a mere memoria technics of the improver's puns—premonitory signs of a hideous millennium, in which the lion will have to "lie down with the lascivious monkeys whom (if we may trust Pliny) his soul naturally abhors."—(" Debasing the Moral Currency," from The Impressions of Theoph.rastus Such.)

George Eliot could hardly be expected to approach the subject of burlesque in a sympathetic spirit. Humour she possessed and could appreciate, but not drollery; and the irresistible fooling of the famous travesty of Hamlet in The Light Green, would have probably shocked her just as much as the unredeemed vulgarity of the parodies of Mr. Dowl- ing, quoted by Mr. Davenport Adams. The fancy-picture she draws is exaggerated, but her opening remarks are just enough. A work of art is never quite the same after one has seen or witnessed a travesty or caricature of it, no matter how bad the latter may be. Bad jokes have an irritating way of sticking in one's head, and to a fastidious mind their recurrence is peculiarly hateful. But to read third-rate travesties in cold blood is to court a kind of mental stomach-ache of the &cutest kind ; and it must be confessed that in Mr. Adams's collection there are very few that stand the test of perusal: In nineteen out of twenty, the terrible

• A Book of Burlesque : Sketches of English Stage Travesty and Parody. By 'William Davenport Adame. London: Henry end Cio.

iteration of excruciatingly bad puns is the solitary feature that calls for comment and condemnation. Some of the worst that were ever perpetrated have been unearthed by Mr. Adams in the course of his diligent researches. Thus, we gather that Mr. G. A. Sala produced a burlesque in 1869 in which this memorable couplet occurs :— " It seems to me the duty of a pa

Is simply all his children's bliss to mar."

Mr. Adams calls this one of the author's best puns : we must be thankful, then, for the small mercy of being spared any jests of inferior quality from the same hand. In the matter of taste, however, the palm must be awarded to an Australian parodist who produced a burlesque entitled King Arthur ; or, Launcelot the Loose, Gin-ever the Square, and the Knights of the Round Table and other Furniture. Mr. Adams has considerately refrained from quoting farther from the work in question. As instances of the ubiquitous profanity of the parodist, it is worth noticing that neither Joan of Arc nor Christabel have escaped his desecrating hand. Mr. Burnand, as we all know, does not believe that Shakespeare is suited to the nineteenth-century stage,—at least, as he stands. It is interesting to ascertain from Mr. Adams's pages that Mr. Burnand has adapted three of Shakespeare's plays to the requirements of the modern burlesque stage.

Of all the burlesques which figure in Mr. Adams's record, none lends itself more happily to quotation than Carey's Chrononhotonthologos. It is free from puns, and yet full of excellent fooling. Bombardinian's soliloquy on being struck by the King, is a thing of rare bombastic beauty :—

" A blow! shall Bombardinian take a blow ?

Blush, blush, thou sun ! Start back, thou rapid ocean !

Hills! vales! seas ! mountains ! all commixing crumble, And into chaos pulverise the world : For Bombardinian has receiv'd a blow, And Chrononhotonthologos must die.

[They fight. He kills the King.

Ha! what have I done ? Go, call a coach, and let a coach be call'd ; And let the man that calls it be the caller ; And in his calling let him nothing call,

• But coach, coach, coach ! Oh, for a coach, ye gods ! [Exit, raving."

With regard to Sheridan's Critic, Mr. Adams offers a very proper protest against the vulgar garbling of the text in the acting edition. Burlesque as we know it was practically founded by Planche, whose work, whether in regard to lightness of touch, geniality, or. finish, compares very favourably with that of his successors. For the last thirty years, the word- twister has had it nearly all his own way, unless we except the works of Mr. W. S. Gilbert, and a really humorous parody of The Lady of Lyons by Mr. Herman Merivale. To Mr. Gilbert belongs the almost unique distinction—if it be one—of having perpetrated a travesty on one of his own works. But for the rest, the extracts given by Mr. Adams are, as the word-twister would say, "most music-hall, most melancholy." To all parents or guardians who may be concerned about the punning propensity of their children or wards, we can cordially recom- mend the perusal of this volume as an antidote to that disease. Confectioners cure their apprentices by encouraging them to overeat themselves. Similarly, the incorrigible punster may be healed by such a surfeit of bad jokes as is to be found in these pages.