Rise of Dramatic Burlesque in Court Entertainments. Gesta Grayorum.
Love's Labour's Lost. The Player's Speech in Hamlet. Burlesque of
the "Heroical" Drama. Ancient Pistol, etc. The Puritan. Burlesque
in the Masque. Ben Jonson a Burlesque Wit. Hishiomastix. The
"War of the Poets." Marston, Dekker and Jonson. Jack Drum's
Entertainment. The Return from Parnassus.

IN the mediæval period we found little that could be called
literary parody. Such burlesques as we did meet arose directly
out of the pressing occasions of life and the ordinary man's
relations to the Church. The attempts were very rude.
Literary life was not yet an organised part of social activity.
In the age of Elizabeth the calling of letters is definitely
established, and the quarrels of authors and scholars will soon
result in a mass of parody, which has some claim to literary
form. We shall then have something which may be studied
as a living criticism of current literary fashions.

But the new age does not emerge suddenly without a
mingling and confusion of forms. It will be the work of the
satirist to laugh out a great deal of the old "monkish" culture.
At the same time the new culture, through its fantastic excesses,
will offer sport to the parodist, who, we generally find, is more
happy in the task of repelling new adventures in literary
fashion than in attacking long-established modes of thought
and feeling. The memorable outbursts of burlesque have
indeed been directed against the new, not the old; and it is
a measure both of the nuisance the old Latin learning had
become in the sixteenth century, and of the greatness of its
three princely satirists, Erasmus, Rabelais, and the obscure
author of the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, that they did not
aim so much at the easier mark of contemporary follies. We
are safe to say that no civilisation has been so devastatingly

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