The research for this study was undertaken with assistance from the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, Jay Semel, Director; the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, and the University of Iowa Arts and Humanities Initiative. Early versions of this study were presented at the Third Biennial Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain at the Royal College of Music in London; the ‘Primal Scenes: Staging and Interpreting Verdi's Operas’ Conference at the University of California, Berkeley; and colloquia at Cambridge Univeristy and Oxford University. A short, introductory discussion of the phenomenon of nineteenth-century English operatic burlesque will appear as ‘Burlesques, Barriers, Borders, and Boundaries’, in Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries in Musical Drama, ed. Roberta M. Marvin and Downing A. Thomas, forthcoming; and a brief survey of parodies of Il trovatore and La traviata appeared as ‘Reflections of Art and Society: Adaptations of La traviata and Il trovatore for the Stages of Victorian London’, in ‘Verdi 2001’: Atti del convegno internazionale, ed. Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Marco Marica (Florence, 2002), 789–809. I wish to thank Joseph Kerman for his interest in my research on this topic and for arranging a partial performance of one of the burlesques of Il trovatore at the University of California, Berkeley.