Travestie of the drama and things dramatic has naturally played a large part in the history of English stage burlesque. Side by side with the producers and interpreters of tragedy, melodrama, and plays of sentiment, have been the possessors of the humorous spirit, who--whether as writers or as actors--have been quick to see the points in which works of serious plan and treatment have been open to the shafts of ridicule and raillery. As we have seen, most of the earliest efforts in English stage burlesque were directed against the extravagant tragedies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As time went on, and the limits of the serious drama became more extended, so did the limits of burlesque expand, and, from the days of John Poole downwards, the large variety of serious dramatic production has co-existed with a corresponding variety in the subject and style of the travesties submitted to the public. Among those travesties a prominent place has been taken by the pieces devoted to the burlesque of Shakespeare--not because they have been particularly numerous, for they have not been so--nor because they have been uniformly successful, for the earlier specimens were singularly weak--but because of the general daring of the attempts, and because also of the genuine sense of fun exhibited by such baiters of "the Bard" as Gilbert a'Beckett, Francis Talfourd, Stirling Coyne, William Brough, Andrew Halliday (Duff), F. C. Burnand, H. J. Byron, and W. S. Gilbert. The business of burlesquing Shakespeare has never, so far as I can see, been taken up in a wholesale or an intentionally irreverent spirit. The seventeenth and eighteenth-century satirists left "the Bard" severely alone, and it was not until 1810 that the first formal travestie of Shakespeare--Poole's "Hamlet Travestie"--saw the light.[36] The author then made all due apology for his temerity, at the same time pointing out the absurdity of the idea that any amount or kind of burlesque could possibly sully the fame of the dramatist. Two years later, in the course of his preface to the fourth edition of his work, Poole ironically congratulated "those who, on its first appearance, were apprehensive for the reputation of Shakespeare," upon the fact "that, notwithstanding Three Editions already before the public, he is neither expelled from our libraries, nor banished from our stage." [36] It was performed at Covent Garden in 1813, with Mathews as Hamlet, Blanchard as the King, Liston as Ophelia, and Mrs. Liston as the Queen. It was revived in 1874 on one occasion with Mr. Odell as Hamlet, and shortly afterwards with Mr. Leonard Boyne as the Prince, both actors indulging in an imitation of Mr. Irving's performance.