BURLESQUE. A dramatic or literary com position tending to excite laughter by au exag gerated travesty of some more serious work. or by a ludicrous contrast between the subject and the manner of treating it. A burlesque is distinct from a parody or satire, being of a broader, more pronounced type, and differs from a farce in being even more extravagant in its construction.
The burlesque in literature was first used as a distinct style by Bend, an Halian poet, who, early in the Fourteenth Century, published a vol tine of Burlesque Rhymes. The success of this hook brought forth a host of imitators. among whom were Mauro and Caporali, and introduced the burlesque into France, where Sarrazin, and, later, Scarron, carried the new form to a high degree of excellence. L'•neide travestie was the of a long line of travesties in which beginning Paris, Amsterdam, society, etc.. and by which he established firmly his repu tation as the greatest French writer of burlesque. In England burlesque developed early, along a somewhat irregular line. Chaucer, for instance, in his Rime of Sir Thopas, ridicules the long, dreary tales of the Middle Ages; Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle is a tra vesty on ultra-ehivalrie romances; Butler's Hu dibras contains burlesque motives; and still later The Rejected Addresses of the brothers Smith brought the English form of burlesque to a high level. In Spain Cervantes, with his immortal
Don Quixote, created a new type of burlesque, which was imitated in the next century by Le Sage in France with his diverting history.of Gil Blas. During the later history of literature there have been innumerable travesties, parodies, and burlesques of contemporary poems and au thors, but, with the possible exception of those by Thomas Hood, none of them are of importance.
The dramatic burlesque has varied greatly in its form. Aristophanes uses it in his comedies; Euripides and Plautus contain germs of it; the Italian dramatist Gozzi employs it most success fully in his tragicomedies; and under Moliere burlesque per sc reaches its highest dramatic ex cellence. The most noted of English burlesques on the stage are those of Plaudits, brought out in London in the years following 1818; and a rich vein of travesty runs through many of the plays of W. S. Gilbert (q.v.). But in modern times burlesque has degenerated from comedy to farce, and from farce to a musical medley of travesty and vaudeville. Indeed. in France the `vaudeville' corresponds to the English burlesque. Consult: Flogel, Gcschichte des Burlesken (Leipzig. 1793) ; Morillot. Scarron et le genre burlesque (MS); Burlesque Plays and Poems, in Morley's Universal Library.