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Blood, Thunder and Theory: The Arrival of English Melodrama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Simon Shepherd
Simon Shepherd
Affiliation:
Simon Shepherd is Professor of Drama, Goldsmiths College, London
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Extract

One of the surest ways of registering disapproval of a play or a performance is to dismiss it as ‘melodramatic’, thus invoking a whole network of mistaken dramatic values and improper practice. In arts reviews, classrooms and text books, ‘melodrama’ recurs as the ‘other’ of ‘proper’ realist drama. In English Drama: A Cultural History, we describe the critical history of melodrama as ‘The Unacceptable Face of Theatre's importance and seriousness. One of the most influential interventions came from Peter Brooks, whose Melodramatic Imagination propounds two arguments in favour of melodrama'scultural centrality: first, Brooks shows how Diderot and Rousseau anticipated the French form of melodrama, then he makes connections between melodramatic gesture or sign and the work of Saussure or Barthes. My aim here is to develop the case further by suggesting that, in the case of English melodrama, the practice of the form as it emerged was very far from being non-intellectual, out of control or stupid. Indeed the dramatists themselves were well conscious of what they were doing formally: not only intelligence but also self-reflection were there from the start.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Summer 1999 , pp. 145 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1999

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References

Notes

1. Shepherd, Simon and Womack, Peter, English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 219.Google Scholar

2. Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, reprinted 1985).Google Scholar

3. Dimond, William, The Hero of the North (London: Barker, 1803), preface.Google Scholar

4. The Thespian Dictionary (London: T. Hurst, 1802), sig.02r.

5. Biography of the British Stage (London: Sherwood Iones & Co., 1824), p. 61.

6. Thespian Dictionary, sig.02r.

7. James Boaden quoted in Wyndham, H. S., The Annals of Covent Garden Theatre from 1732 to 1897 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1906), volume 2, p. 332.Google Scholar

8. Caigniez, Louis-Charles, Le Jugement de Salomon: Mélo-drame en trois actes, mêlé de chants et de danse (Paris, 1802)Google Scholar. The title page simply bears the legend ‘Se vend au théâtre’. Performed at the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique, 1802.

9. Boaden, James, The Voice of Nature: A Play (London: James Ridgway, 1803)Google Scholar, performed Theatre Royal, Haymar-ket, 1802. I have given the full titles of Caigniez and Boaden's plays to show the movement between mélodrame and play, and that the mélo-drame is also mêlé.

10. Henry Harris quoted in Reynolds, F., The Life and Times of Frederic Reynolds (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), volume 2, p. 346.Google Scholar

11. Kelly, Michael, Reminiscences, edited by Fiske, R. (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 282.Google Scholar

12. Holcroft, Thomas, A Tale of Mystery (London: R. Phillips, 1802)Google Scholar, performed Covent Garden, 1802, pp. 21, 22.

13. For details of this play see Shepherd, , ‘Melodrama as Avant-garde’, Textual Practice, 10(3), 1996, pp. 507–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Cobb, James, The Wife of Two Husbands (London: G. & J. Robinson, 1803)Google Scholar, performed at Drury Lane, 1803, p. 1.

15. Holcroft, Thomas, Hugh Trevor, edited by Deane, Seamus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 292.Google Scholar

16. Castle, Terry, The Female Thermometer (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 125Google Scholar. Feeding directly into, and shaping, this ‘dispensation’ is the body of the work following on from Burke's account of the sublime; it achieves its canonically most famous manifestation immediately contemporary with Holcroft in Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805).

17. Colman, George Jr., The Iron Chest (London: Cadell and Davies, 1796), p. 62Google Scholar, performed at Drury Lane, 1796. In his ‘Advertisement to the Reader’ Colman says: ‘The Songs, Duets, and Choruses are intended merely as vehicles for musical effect;’, that the critics ‘pompously call'd them Lyrick Poetry’ was done in order, he says, to damn him further. This clearly is a very different attitude to the music in a play from that of Holcroft (as, too, is Cobb's, who subtitled his play a ‘Musical Drama’).

18. Holcroft, , Hugh Trevor, p. 293.Google Scholar

19. A Description of the Blind Boy (London: T. A. & R.Hughes, ]1807]), p. 28.

20. Holcroft, , Hugh Trevor, p. 248.Google Scholar

21. Kenney, James, Ella Rosenberg (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1807), p. 36.Google Scholar

22. Baker, , Reed, & Jones, , eds., Biographica Dramatica; or, a Companion to the Playhouse (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1812), volume 2, p. 191.Google Scholar

23. Ella Rosenberg (London: J. Scales, 1807), p. 23.

24. Considerations on the Past and Present State of the Stage (London: C. Chappie, 1809), p. 2.

25. Holcroft, , Hugh Trevor, p. 303.Google Scholar