A deep look into a Romantic-era burlesque: John Poole's 'Hamlet Travestie' (1810); A distorting mirror reflects a deformed image of William Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'.

摘要

As an icon of drama and culture, William Shakespeare was the target of the Romantic genre of the burlesque or travesty. This study concentrates specifically on Shakespeare's Hamlet and John Poole's Hamlet Travestie: In Three Acts (1810) in order to indicate the ways in which this travesty functions as a distorting mirror of the tragedy. By investigating the transformation of soliloquies into songs and the subsequent dilution of their seriousness in Hamlet Travestie, I will argue that there is a thematic defamiliarization of the content. This thesis examines the deformed image of Hamlet reflected by Hamlet Travestie and, in doing so, identifies the formal features of burlesque or travesty.