“Their Form Confounded”: Studies in the Burlesque Play from Udall to Sheridan by Robert F. Willson, Jr

Abstract

354 Comparative Drama complex concepts with clarity, concepts that frequently are misunder­ stood, misconceived, and even missed altogether by many writers on dramatic theory. The book provides a thoughtful, cogent, provocative, and useful beginning for a systematic way of viewing the processes essential to the meaningful transformation of “drama” into “theater.” We should firmly recommend that The Actor’s Freedom become standard reading for any serious student of drama and theater, and we should fervently hope that Professor Goldman will be prompted to complete what he has so admirably begun—a viable theory of drama. ROBERT L. SMITH Western Michigan University Robert F. Willson, Jr. "Their Form Confounded”: Studies in the Bur­ lesque Play from Udall to Sheridan. The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1975. Pp. 170. 48 Dutch Guilders. Well-intended, written in a meticulous and pleasant style, providing a useful survey of some six plays, this study is also a perfect example of just what is wrong, of what is so expendable in a good deal of literary scholarship. And, of course, I point the accusing finger at myself, when­ ever applicable. Mr. Willson traces the conventions of the burlesque play, a fairly distinct dramatic genre which, as he sees it, mocks serious literary and dramatic forms for purposes both moral and aesthetic. He includes for discussion Udall’s Rafe Roister Doister, two of Shakespeare’s comedies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labour’s Lost), The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and three later plays, Buckingham’s The Re­ hearsal, Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies, and Sheridan’s The Critic. Though he talks about the dramatic origins of burlesque in the Italian theater, the genre’s larger context—the political, sociological, cultural, psychological, anthropological dimensions— is not examined in any depth. Mr. Willson lists the conventions of burlesque—exaggeration, mockery of the language and characters of romantic drama, caricature, parody, mock-heroes, and the like. He offers a history of the growth and decline of the genre, as well as a chapter by chapter portrait of the emergence of burlesque’s mock-hero. He suggests that the “sources” of characters such as Bottom and of his wretched Pyramus and Thisby were earlier burlesques by Shakespeare and other hands. I must add that once a play is designated as burlesque, or as having elements of burlesque in it, we then get a minute examination of the “evidence.” But when all is said, one has to ask: what have we learned? What is the product of this well-intentioned effort? If these chapters were grad­ uate student papers, I would have often scribbled in the margins, “Plot rehash” or “I know this already” or “Besides telling me what happens in the play, where are you leading us?” With a definition of burlesque that is alternately loose (and hard to separate from a definition of comedy) or strict as fits the purpose, with a sometimes suicidal attempt Reviews 355 to pull burlesque apart from such a complex subject as comedy gen­ erally, with little sense of these plays as pieces meant to be performed before audiences (many of Mr. Willson’s general conclusions could apply equally well to, say, Fielding’s Tom Jones), Mr. Willson ultimately gives us readings of the plays. But these swamp his gimmick— carving out a genre—and we are left with plot rehashes, characters seen as case studies, and morals educed from what was to have been “living theater.” When a critic plies a bias—James Calderwood talking about Shake­ speare’s portrait of the artist and his theater, Thomas McFarland push­ ing a particular comic theory through five of Shakespeare’s plays, and so on—at the very least we get a critical performance, the clear response of one “spectator,” a diary of the interaction between play and audience that goes on the market-place to be sold or rejected. But when a cate­ gory is pursued as if it were a theory, readings of the plays taken as “evidence” in some court trial of definitions, then we gain, most often, not more than what we had before taking up the book. This search-and-destroy method of scholarship—if I may borrow...