Rejected Addresses
[1] A later humorous tactic, in place of a connected narrative in the mock-epic manner, was to apply poems in the style of varied authors to a single deflationary subject.
[2] In that case the poets Colley Cibber, Ambrose Philips, James Thomson, Edward Young, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift were used as the focus for its series of good-natured parodic variations.
For his "Inscription for the apartment in Chepstow Castle, where Henry Martin the regicide was imprisoned thirty years" was substituted the Newgate Prison cell of a drunken "Elizabeth Brownrigg the Prentice-cide" (I).
But when the brothers James and Horace Smith heard of the result of the competition, they planned a volume of parodies of writers of the day, to be published as supposed failed entries and issued to coincide with the theatre’s opening.
Also deplored are the "too profuse" heroic narrative of Robert Southey and the "stale romance" of Walter Scott, the latter deflated in the Rejected Addresses by the mock-heroic trick of substituting the plebeian names of Clutterbuck, Muggins and Higginbottom for the protagonists.
Included in the new work's "mawkish mélange of decasyllabic dullness", the Monthly Review identified victims already parodied by the Smith brothers such as Fitzgerald and Dr Busby, and heartily seconded the committee's original decision to reject them.
[15] In the same year, William Stanley's farce, The Rejected Addresses: Or, The Triumph of the Ale-king, was published, professing in the preface that it "owes its existence to The Theatrum Poetarum".
Among the farcical targets are the opening lines of Fitzgerald's entry in the original Rejected Addresses, and Nancy Drew's nursery narrative, with Wordsworth's supposed authorship disguised under the name of Mr Winandermere.
Among the poetical works featured are "Old Cumberland Pedlar" by W. W., "Carmen Triumphale" by R. S., "The Childe's Pilgrimage" by Lord B., "The Dream: a psychological curiosity" by S. T. C. and "The Battle of Brentford Green" by Sir W. S.[19]
