Over the course of four days in September, 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery turned four-fifths of central London to dust. Wandering the streets around his home three days after the Great Fire subsided, the diarist John Evelyn describes a city in ruins—its buildings and landmarks “mealted, & reduc'd to cinders by the vehement heats,” its “bielanes & narrower streetes … quite fill'd up with rubbish, nor could one have possibly known where he was, but by the ruines of some church, or hall, that had some remarkable towre or pinacle remaining.” John Dryden echoes Evelyn's sense of disorientation in Annus Mirabilis, his poem dedicated to the people of London and published in 1667; he describes “the Cracks of Falling houses,” the “Shrieks of Subjects” as the Fire “wades the Streets,” threatens the palace, and lays the city's famed financial centers “to waste.” And he describes, too, the desperate attempts by those left homeless by the Fire to make spaces for themselves in the ruins:

Those who have [no home] sit round where once it was,
And with full Eyes each wonted Room require:
Haunting the yet warm ashes of the place,
As murder'd Men walk where they did expire.

Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies, King Richard III was never turned into a comedy through the insertion of a happy ending. It did, however, undergo a transformation of dramatic genre, as the numerous Richard III burlesques and travesties produced in the nineteenth century plainly show. Eight burlesques (or nine, including a pantomime) were written for and/or performed on the London stage alone. This essay looks at three of these plays, produced at three distinct stages in the history of burlesque's rapid rise and decline: 1823, 1844, and 1868. In focusing on these productions, I demonstrate how Shakespeare burlesques, paradoxically, enhanced rather than endangered the playwright's iconic status. King Richard III is a perfect case study because of its peculiar stage history. As Richard Schoch has argued, the burlesque purported to be “an act of theatrical reform which aggressively compensated for the deficiencies of other people's productions. . . . [It] claimed to perform not Shakespeare's debasement, but the ironic restoration of his compromised authority.” But this view of the burlesques’ importance is incomplete. Building on Schoch's work, I illustrate how the King Richard III burlesques not only parodied deficient theatrical productions but also called into question dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. In so doing, these burlesques paradoxically relegitimized Shakespeare.

After storming the Bastille on 14 July 1789, Joseph Arné had little time to take in the significance of his actions. Earlier that day, the twenty-something soldier from Franche-Comté had led a daring assault, neutralized several Swiss Guards with his bare hands, and supposedly disabled a cannon that was pointed at his charging comrades. As the sun set, Arné was greeted by throngs of cheering Parisians, who joined the young grenadier in patriotic songs, chants, and dancing. What Arné perhaps did not understand when he finally went to sleep that night was that he was about to become a theatrical star and a public figure. The next morning, Arné was back in the streets, this time “drawn through Paris in a triumphal chariot.” Several weeks later, he was portrayed as the protagonist in La Fête du grenadier, the first play dedicated to the July events, which premiered at the Théâtre de l'Ambigu on 3 September. That evening, the real-life Arné, and not the actor who was playing him, was “enthusiastically celebrated by the spectators and at the end of the piece went onstage to standing ovations.”

The Oberammergau Passion Play became internationally famous in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1840s and 1850s and through the early twentieth century, English-speaking foreign tourists from Ireland and the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and even Australia published a surprising number and variety of accounts of travel to the village and attendance at the Passion Play. Professional and amateur historians described the production as an evolutionary throwback or curious hybrid of ancient Greek and medieval theatre, regarding it as an object and event of antiquarian interest. Foreign female travelers attended the play in impressive numbers, and their accounts provide insight into contemporary women's readings of theatre, travel, spirituality, gender inequality, gendered spaces, and cultural difference. Protestant writers reflected uneasily on the play's communication of spiritual truth by means of images. And all of these accounts, whether published in the popular periodical press or as monographs, in turn encouraged increasing numbers of travelers to make the same journey—represented sometimes as a religious and sometimes as an artistic pilgrimage—to the isolated Bavarian village.

It is difficult to exaggerate the level of critical praise that American solo performer Ruth Draper received during her long career, which stretched from 1920 until her death in 1956. As one critic notes: “Very few people have ever talked very coherently about Ruth Draper. There are no standards by which to gauge her. The magic she conveys is as inexplicable as air or light or love.” Indeed, after reading the myriad panegyrics that collected during her career, words like “magic,” “genius,” “powerful,” and “consummate” begin to lose their meaning. Her critics were so adoring that by 1956, one admitted, “London has long ago worn its most extravagant adjectives, clichés, and superlatives to tatters in its attempt to cope with her achievement.”