Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Understandably preoccupied with either the early modern or the postmodern or both, Shakespeare critics neglect the Victorian age only at the risk of missing some of the most sublime and ridiculous moments in the staged life of the Shakespeare canon. London had more theaters performing more Shakespeare during the nineteenth century than at any time before or since. Furthermore it had correspondingly more theaters performing something—a combination of intricately topical parody and travesty, complete with outrageous puns and exquisitely incongruous song-and-dance routines, known as Shakespearean burlesque. Here, in shows such as Macbeth Bottled into a Burletta and A Thin Slice of Ham let!, high culture collided and colluded with low; scantily-clad chorus girls bandied arcane literary satire; and virtuoso clowns at once ridiculed Shakespeare and purported to rescue him from the pretensions and affectations of contemporary tragedians. Other present-day devotees of this art form have worked hard to make surviving playtexts available to modern readers. But Shakespeare burlesque, scandalously, has had to wait until now to become the subject of a full-length critical book. Richard W. Schoch has now turned his attention to this fascinating branch of the ridiculous, and the results are compelling. Not Shakespeare is a searching, richly-researched treatment of its subject, as lucidly written as it is delightfully illustrated, and it would have established itself at once as the definitive critical discussion of Shakespearean burlesque even if there had been any existing competition for the title.

Schoch's book is divided into four chapters, the first two considering the dynamics of the genre at large and the latter dealing more closely with case-studies. Chapter 1 deals with burlesque's penchant for puns, slang, and topical allusion, chapter 2 with its professed attitudes towards Shakespeare; these prepare the way first for a meticulous consideration of how the self-consciously bohemian Adelphi Theatre, one of the chief London homes of burlesque, appealed to the particular class-fragment it attracted, and then a detailed examination of the sometimes surprisingly radical political causes espoused by burlesque's scriptwriters. This final chapter, appropriately, devotes a good deal of attention to the Brough brothers' The Enchanted Isle, or, Raising the Wind, an 1848 treatment of The Tempest in which an abolitionist Caliban brandishes a red flag and sings the Marseillaise, while Ariel and his fellow-spirits are transformed into anti-Chartist riot police. Only Schoch's second chapter has very much to say on bardolatry (about the development of which, sadly, it isn't always completely accurate, mistakenly attributing Peter Scheemakers's crucial Westminster Abbey statue of Shakespeare, 1740, to Roubilliac). And this book sometimes gives the impression that it ought to have a stronger central argument. But it is rare enough to come to the end of a critical monograph wishing it were longer, and any other disagreements which this book provokes are likely to be merely over matters of emphasis.

The only one of these worth raising here concerns Schoch's sense, detailed in his opening chapter on the language of burlesque, that these pun-crammed, allusive scripts were opaque even to most of their original audiences. While it is obviously true that, say, Rummio and Judy doesn't exactly make sense, it isn't quite Jabberwocky either; and Schoch's concessionary remark—"To be sure, some topical references were indeed understood by some spectators" (39)—seems absurdly grudging. I suspect that this overstatement simply results from Schoch's having spent too little of his youth absorbing the contemporary British survivals of burlesque in revue, television comedy, and Christmas pantomime. Grateful as one is for all the archival research Schoch has been doing, perhaps he needs to get out more: then he would be less likely, too, to claim that Victorian Shakespeare burlesques are now never performed (I have seen one production of the Broughs's Perdita, and narrowly missed another, within the past two years).

This is a minor...