Travesty

In literary contexts, a travesty is a type of parody or humorous distortion, in particular one that treats a serious subject comically. In theatrical contexts, travesty denotes the practice of performers playing [Page 775]roles of the opposite sex, a tradition that often lends itself to exaggeration and comedy. In popular parlance, the term is also used to describe a deplorable version of something, most commonly found in the phrase a travesty of justice, or in a shorthand version, as in “The election process was a travesty”; in this last sense, the term does not denote something intentionally comic.

The term in English is originally derived from the French past participle travesti, descended from Italian trans (“across, to the opposite”) and vesti, the past participle of vestire (“to dress”). Accordingly, in its earliest incarnations, the word denoted a disguise or cross-dressing, sometimes designating a person disguised in clothes of the same sex, at other times a person wearing clothes of the opposite sex, particularly a man in women’s clothes, and by extension dressed ridiculously or for the sake of parody. This meaning of disguise or impersonation has been expanded in various contexts. In modern France, a travesti is a transvestite; in Latin America, a travesti is a genetically born male who assumes the gender identity of a woman.

In theatrical contexts, travesti or travesty has come to denote the practice of actors playing the roles of the opposite sex, often described by the pseudo-French phrase en travesti. These roles have not invariably been comic, although the possibilities of comedy have been exploited in appropriate situations, such as the tradition of men playing comic older women in ballet and pantomime. These roles are traditionally performed in extravagant fashion so that the difference between the gender of the performer and that of the role is ludicrously exaggerated.

In literature, the travesty form was inaugurated by the Italian writer Giovanni Battista Lalli, whose L’Eneide travestita (1633) parodied Virgil’s Aeneid. Lalli inspired the French man of letters Paul Scarron, who published his own Virgilian burlesque, Virgile travesti, between 1648 and 1653. Scarron in turn influenced the English writer Charles Cotton, who penned the immensely popular Scarronides; or, Virgile Travestie, A Mock Poem on the First and Fourth Books of Virgil’s Aeneis in English Burlesque (1664–1665). Cotton’s poem began “I sing the Man (read it who list, / A Trojan true as ever pist) …” and continued in the same vein for hundreds of couplets, with the earthy lampoon made sweeter by the fact that the Aeneid was still a foundation of every learned person’s education. Cotton’s burlesque ignited a fashion for Virgilian travesties in English, and Scarronides was followed by Maronides, or Virgil Travesty (1672) by John Phillips, nephew and sometime collaborator of Milton, and by a host of other examples. The texts utilized a familiarity with Virgil as part of their humor, but that humor was typically also directed at contemporary mores; the texts were thus half mockery of Virgil and half social satire. The apogee of the mock-heroic genre was Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, published in three versions beginning in 1728. The Dunciad was a full-length parody of the Aeneid, a cultural and political satire about the crowning of the king of Dulness [sic]. By Pope’s time, the mock-heroic was a self-explanatory and well-established genre, and the term travesty had dropped out of titles. The Dunciad, like Pope’s other mock-epic masterpiece The Rape of the Lock, had outgrown its generic beginnings and is more self-sufficient as a text than its progenitors, though it still employs the contrast between the lofty subject matter of its model and its own preposterous narrative for comic effect.

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