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The Old Price Wars: Melodramatizing the Public Sphere in Early-Nineteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Elaine Hadley
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Abstract

Early English stage melodrama was one version of a melodramatic mode that pervaded the nineteenth century in response to the effects of a growing market culture, especially the classificatory procedures of government bureaucracies and the concomitant formation of a class society. By examining the relation between this genre and the rioters who initiated the “Old Price Wars” in Covent Garden Theatre in 1809, I show how melodrama resisted a class society by supporting more traditional status hierarchies. Melodrama represented the contemporary confrontation between these two distinctive forms of social organization as a family conflict that included the audience. By means of climactic moments of audience participation in its plot, melodrama elicited the spectators' recognition of their own familial ties and therefore facilitated a symbolic reunion that both reflected and encouraged the behaviors of the Old Price rioters, who materially resisted the introduction of market relations into the theater.

Type
2. Underwriting Performance: Appropriation, Legitimation, Exchange
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 3: Special Topic: On Poetry , May 1992 , pp. 524 - 537
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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