On Boxing Night 1858, the Royal Lyceum Theatre opened its Winter Season with ‘A NEW BURLESQUE! Written expressly for the Lyceum Company by Robert B. Brough, and entitled, from its subject, THE ILIAD; or, The Siege of Troy’. This ‘long-anticipated and much-talkedof ’ Christmas Extravaganza with its accompanying pantomime, Harlequin Toy Horse; or, the Cremorne Fête, had been postponed from Christmas Eve due to the complexities of its lavish staging, but was swiftly acclaimed as ‘a wonderful production’ and even ‘one of themost superbly-mounted pieces ever put on the stage’.

Robert Brough (1828–60) was a prolific and well-liked burlesque playwright. He was also a politically motivated journalist, poet and social activist who had started his working life as a clerk with only a basic school education. His burlesque of the Iliad is the ideal way into this case study of a whole group of Trojan War burlesques. Together, these show how script-oriented burlesques, ‘freely perverted from classical texts’, fit into the vibrant illegitimate theatrical culture seen so far through the prism of Astley's Amphitheatre. Both sorts of entertainments were part of the same overall performance culture in London – in fact, the Lyceum had hosted Philip Astley's circus between 1794 and 1809 after a fire at his Westminster premises – but the burlesques examined in here tend to centre around London's West End, on the other side of the River Thames from Astley's Amphitheatre, and only just down the road from Somerset House where, as we saw at the start of the first chapter, the Antiquaries would meet in 1873.