Burlesque began as literary mockery, not just striptease
Before American variety halls of the 1860s–1940s paired bawdy comedy with striptease, burlesque meant laughing at serious styles. The word came through French from Italian burla—joke or ridicule—and English used it for literature and theatre from the late seventeenth century.
Francesco Berni’s early-sixteenth-century Opere burlesche put the label in a title; for a while such verses were called poesie bernesca after him. Seventeenth-century Italy and France, then England, treated burlesque as grotesque imitation of the dignified or pathetic, and Shakespeare’s Pyramus and Thisbe scene is an early case. Critics later stretched the word back to Chaucer and the Graeco-Roman classics, while Miguel de Cervantes mocked medieval romance in works such as the 1615 Eight Comedies and Eight New Interludes.
High burlesque dresses a trivial subject in elevated style—Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is the usual example—while low burlesque does the reverse, as in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, which follows a Puritan knight in rough doggerel. Both relied on audiences who already knew the originals. Tom Stoppard’s 1974 Travesties still mines that literary vein in a full-length play.
Music borrowed the term from the early eighteenth century for pieces that collided serious and comic tones. German-language stages staged burlesque operettas by Johann Strauss II and Ziehrer, Stravinsky billed Petrushka in 1911 as a burlesque in four scenes, and Richard Strauss wrote his Burleske for piano and orchestra in 1890.
London theatres ran Victorian burlesque from the 1830s to the 1890s: rhyming parodies of Shakespeare and grand opera, thick with puns and actresses in tights playing male roles. Lydia Thompson’s British Blondes popularized the style in New York from 1868, where it absorbed minstrel-show structure. American variety burlesque then thrived from the 1860s to the 1940s, drifting gradually toward striptease; by 1932 the country had at least 150 strip principals, and comics such as Mae West, W. C. Fields, and Abbott and Costello started there.
Source: Burlesque
