ABSTRACT
The Rejected Addresses, or the New Theatrum Poetarum (1812) was the most successful parodic collection of the Romantic period, reaching its eighteenth edition in 1833. The volume’s twenty one addresses, spanning prose and poetry, attend to authors both dead and living (from Dr Johnson to Lord Byron), these different voices all concerning themselves with the same story: the destruction of the Drury Lane Theatre by fire and its subsequent rebuilding. In August 1812, to quote from the preface to the first edition of the Rejected Addresses, the newspapers carried advertisements seeking ‘an Address to be spoken upon the opening of the Theatre, which will take place on the 10th of October next’. Over a hundred encomia were entered, all of which were rejected (with Byron eventually providing an address for the inauguration). The Rejected Addresses masquerades as a selection of unsuccessful entries, penned by many of the most notable literary figures of the day. It offers a variant on the not uncommon parodic device, found in such works as the Probationary Odes, of a number of authors supposedly addressing a single issue. The methodology is a long-established one, dating back at least as far as Isaac Hawkins Browne’s A Pipe of Tobacco, in Imitation of Six Several Authors (1736). Indeed, Byron thought the Addresses’ imitations ‘not at all inferior to the famous ones of Hawkins Browne’. 1
