“A bad Shakespeare burlesque,” Richard Schoch writes, “is bad in a way that has not been generally appreciated.” Schoch's study of Shakespearean burlesque is a celebration of the bad, a multifaceted examination of the ways that British (and American) theatrical burlesques of Shakespeare plays and performances stand in relation to the larger culture. Burlesque, Schoch explains, is both politically radical and conservative, both an attack on the pomposity of high culture and an attempt to rescue the essential Shakespeare from his own theatrical proponents. Burlesque attacks high culture in the form of low culture; but at the same time, Schoch observes, burlesque rejects “reductive oppositions between ‘high' and ‘low' culture.” In any event, the Shakespeare burlesque isunlike Shakespearean adaptation, or the transformations the script undergoes when it is performed in a theatrical aesthetic different from the one for which it was writtenarguably not Shakespeare: “while an adaptation is the play it adapts, a burlesque represents the play it burlesques.” Schoch is able to stand outside of the script and the performance itself, and to situate the burlesque in the larger culture, because, he explains, “it is impossible to stay inside such a script because, in fact, it has no inside; the burlesque is always outside itself.”