Includes bibliographical references (page 368).

"The critical protest against "fustian, bombast, and moral hypocrisy' staged in the eighteenth century by certain irregular, satirical kinds of comedy is well represented in this collection of ten burlesque plays of the period. The Duke of Buckingham's The Rehearsal (1671), with its ridicule of the rhymed heroic tragedy then dominating the theatre, established a tradition to which some of the most gifted writers contributed. 'Regular' comedy was soon to turn sentimental and bathetic, but there is a refreshing frankness about sexual mores in John Gay's The What d'ye Call it (1751), and Three Hours After Marriage (1717) in which Gay, Pope, and John Arbuthnot collaborated. Burlesques such as Fielding's Tom Thumb (1730), Henry Carey's Chrononhotonthologos (1734), George Alexander Steven's Distress Upon Distress (1752), and Bombastes Furioso (1810) by William Barnes Rhodes, with their parodies of the strutting heroes of tragedy and of its verse forms, their mock-pedantic footnotes and barbed allusions, make good and often hilarious reading today." -Publisher.

Also issued online.

SACFinal081324