Myth and popular culture: Brough’s Victorian Burlesque Medea as a heterotopic cultural space

ABSTRACT While Victorian classical burlesque has been traditionally dismissed as low culture for both, its insouciant treatment of classical mythology and its inability to raise serious social issues, this article focuses on Robert Brough’s Medea to demonstrate that his burlesque and its performance constitutes a fascinating example of a product of popular culture that discusses Victorian socio-political matters. Based on Brough’s political mindset, this paper reads his classical burlesque using a heterotopic perspective to analyse its potential to discuss Victorian paradigms of class, gender and racial divisions, even if it did it using music, puns, anachronisms and vulgar jokes.