Myth and popular culture: Brough’s Victorian Burlesque Medea as a heterotopic cultural space

ABSTRACT

While Victorian classical burlesque has been traditionally dismissed as low culture for both, its insouciant treatment of classical mythology and its inability to raise serious social issues, this article focuses on Robert Brough’s Medea to demonstrate that his burlesque and its performance constitutes a fascinating example of a product of popular culture that discusses Victorian socio-political matters. Based on Brough’s political mindset, this paper reads his classical burlesque using a heterotopic perspective to analyse its potential to discuss Victorian paradigms of class, gender and racial divisions, even if it did it using music, puns, anachronisms and vulgar jokes.

KEYWORDS:

• Medea
• Robert Brough
• Victorian Burlesque
• popular culture
• heterotopia

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Thomas Hailes Lacy 1856 edition used in this paper

2. Performances in 1856, Royal Olympic Theatre, London; in 1861, Grecian Theatre, London; (Gowen 2000, 239–240), Première and revivals shown in reviews from London Standard, 15 July 1856; The Times 15 July 1956; ILLN 19 July 1856; The Daily Scotsman 7 April 1857; Saturday Review 10 July 1958¸ ILLN 19 July 1865. According to Sala ‘“Robson took over management of the Olympic Theatre from Wigan in 1857, and in the years that followed he produced Medea several times”’ (1864, 66): Burkhard also reports an undated 1855s performance in New York at The Fifth Avenue Theater (in Foley 2012, 336, n, 11)

3. Further references to Brough’s Medea are to Thomas Hailes Lacy 1856 edition and will include page numbers only.

4. The overseers were parish officers responsible for organising poor relief and employment, and the Union was the association of these parishes under the Poor Law Guardians after the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834 (Monrós-Gaspar 2015, 185).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marta Villalba-Lázaro

Dr. Marta Villalba-Lázaro is an associate lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands where she teaches 18th-century English literature, Children’s literature in English and Business English. She holds an international PhD in Philology from the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB, 2018). She has a BA degree in Law (1986) and in English Philology (2013) and an MA degree in Modern Languages and Literatures from the UIB and Bangor University (2014). She developed her career as a lawyer in Ernst & Young (former EY partner 2001-2007). She is a member of the research group Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Literatures at the UIB. She conducts her research on Victorian and postcolonial literatures and their intersections with their legislative context and classical reception, encompassing feminist jurisprudence criticism, cultural studies and postcolonialism. She has participated in several conferences and published articles in specialised journals.