Download Melodrama on and off the stage

MELODRAMA ON AND OFF THE STAGE
Jim Davis
Since so much has been written about melodrama over the last five decades, there may be a case for
arguing that there is nothing more to say for the moment. Among the most influential books of
recent years have been Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination, focussed on French
melodrama and its impact on French literature and using a methodology partially based in psychoanalytic theory; Martin Meisel’s Realizations, which links melodrama (and other genres) to the visual
arts and the nineteenth-century novel; Elaine Hadley’s Melodramatic Tactics, which demonstrates
how melodrama operates as an extra-theatrical force within nineteenth century culture and politics;
and Ben Singer’s study of melodrama and modernity and their impact on early cinema.1 There has
also been a considerable amount written about melodrama’s political impact (or lack of it) and
debates around the perhaps over-simplified binaries of subversion versus escapism, efficacy versus
containment.
In this chapter I want to argue for a more pluralistic view of melodrama and also to suggest
that there are still many avenues totally or partially unexplored. Traditionally melodrama has been
written about as a national phenomenon. Thus Frank Rahill’s early study The World of Melodrama is
carefully divided into sections on French, English and American melodrama, while Michael Booth
focuses solely on English melodrama and a number of other studies focus on American or Australian
melodrama.2 Yet overall, with some notable exceptions, there has been a reluctance to focus on
melodrama as a transnational phenomenon and to ask what it means, say, when East Lynne
suddenly becomes successful in North America and Australia or Uncle Tom’s Cabin is performed in
Britain. Boucicault’s melodramas were, of course, performed and even toured by him internationally
and, by the end of the nineteenth century, many other actor managers were very much alive to the
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potential attraction of good melodramas as vehicles for international touring. Even in discussions of
the origins of melodrama there is a case for further exploration of the interactions between French,
English and German drama and literature during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
Yet, before following through the notion of melodrama as a transnational phenomenon, it is
necessary to be a little clearer about what we mean by melodrama. There has been a tendency
among scholars to label as melodramas plays that were not labelled as such by their own authors or
by the theatres that staged them. Not all of the plays that we would define as melodrama today
were so regarded by their contemporaries. Many were labelled as dramas, nautical dramas,
dramatic romances, domestic dramas, temperance dramas or plays, but there is no evidence that
their authors or contemporary audiences regarded them as melodramas in any strictly generic sense
of the word, although many of these plays share melodramatic characteristics. Moreover, in so far as
melodrama as a genre is often defined through character stereotypes, moral absolutes and
conventional plot structures, we find that many so-called melodramas defy such simplistic
categorisation from John Walker’s The Factory Lad (1832; a domestic drama) to Leopold Lewis’s The
Bells (1871; a drama) and Paul Potter’s Trilby (1895; not categorised). Indeed, The Factory Lad raises
another problem. Performed for a week at the Surrey Theatre in the 1830s and revived briefly at the
Victoria Theatre a few years later, it is both atypical and even insignificant in its impact, but has
nevertheless been accorded a lot of arguably disproportionate space in critical discussions of the
genre.
Much of what we call melodrama is not really melodrama at all and there is a danger that it
has merely become an easy device through which to define and limit our responses to the wide,
diverse field of nineteenth-century drama. Equally, the failure by some critics to explain ways in
which spectacle and acting style and even the use of music were mandated by the increasing size of
theatres from the 1790s onwards can lead to dismissive comments about the drama of the period,
even while the impact of these changes on operatic or Shakespearean productions is readily
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accepted. The rhetorical language and visual appeal of nineteenth-century drama is not out of place
in theatres with audience capacity of 3,000 or more, while a scene such as William’s court martial in
Jerrold’s Black-Ey’d Susan, which takes a minute to read, actually lasted for ten minutes or more in
performance, as the original musical score for the play clearly indicates. Nineteenth-century dramas
need to be read carefully by contemporary critics, since the theatres and actors for which they were
written, and the musical scores, form the primary footnotes to our understanding of these plays in
performance.
The Evolution of Melodrama and the Supernatural
If, despite these provisos, we loosely define many nineteenth-century plays as characterised
generically by melodramatic features, we still have to confront a further issue. Melodrama evolved
and changed throughout the nineteenth century and, as a genre, demonstrates continual slippage
and refashioning and not only through the series of sub-genres that Booth or Rahill define in their
studies. If we take the treatment of the supernatural as an example, we might consider the last act
of Trilby, in which we learn that a character named Zouzou has passed a disgusting old man in the
street, reminiscent of the now deceased Svengali, carrying a portrait. He is quite shaken, for he
thinks he has seen Svengali’s ghost. Shortly afterwards a portrait is delivered to Trilby: unveiled, it
turns out to be a portrait of Svengali. Even from the grave, it seems, Svengali maintains his hypnotic
power over Trilby - the mesmerising power of the eyes in the portrait so overwhelms her that she
expires. Whether the power of suggestion is too great or the other worldly, quasi supernatural
implications of the ending bring closure, the play concludes with a moment worthy of an M. R.
James short story, one that hopefully sends shivers down the spines of its spectators. Yet, If we take
a step backwards from the late 1800s to the late 1700s we might find ourselves confronting another
spine-shivering moment in M. G. Lewis’s 1797 drama The Castle Spectre, considered by many to be a
Gothic harbinger of melodrama. Angela has just confronted Earl Osmond with the poniard with
which he killed her mother and caused him to faint. Now she must save her father, but a plaintive
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voice, with (supernatural) guitar accompaniment, sings to her, informing her that her father is on his
way, as folding doors unclose and the oratory is seen illuminated
In its centre stands a tall female figure [her deceased mother], her white and flowing
garments spotted with blood; her veil is thrown back and discovers a pale and melancholy
countenance; her eyes are lifted upwards, her arms extended towards heaven, and a large
wound appears upon her bosom.3
Angela sinks to her knees, then, as the spectre vanishes to an organ swell and full chorus of female
voices chanting ‘Jubilate’, enhanced by a blaze of light flashing through the oratory and the clang of
the doors closing, she falls motionless on the floor.
Reactions to the use of ghosts in late-eighteenth century drama were polarised between
those who saw it as blasphemous and those who saw it as inappropriate in a post-enlightenment
age. Subsequently, the use of the ghost in Lewis’s play spawned not only a debate about the
legitimacy of using the supernatural in the drama, but also a whole series of imitations in future
plays. As a result spectres of all shapes and sizes haunt nineteenth-century British drama, raising the
obvious question as to why ghost effects retained their popularity throughout the nineteenth
century and the need to move beyond the obvious answer, applicable to The Castle Spectre and
much else besides, that the growing demand for spectacle and new developments in stage
technology inevitably encouraged this sort of effect. In the light of this one might have expected the
Victorians to be more sceptical about ghosts than their predecessors, but the reverse turned out to
be the case. Despite scientific and technological progress and the impact of Darwinism, curiosity
about, fascination with, as well as investigation of, the supernatural became much more marked,
especially on account of the growing interest in spiritualism, mesmerism and the embedding of the
tradition, by Dickens, of the Christmas ghost story, as well as ongoing discussions of ghosts and the
supernatural in the journals Dickens edited.4
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New technologies enhanced the mechanical sophistication of the means by which the
appearance and sudden disappearance of supernatural beings could be effected on the stage from
the vampire trap devised for J. R. Planche’s 1820 romantic melodrama The Vampire to the Corsican
trap devised for Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers in 1852 and the first theatrical use of Pepper’s
Ghost (dependent on a sheet of plate glass and reflection) in Britannia melodramas in 1863,
sensationally superseding the earlier impact of the phantasmagoria displays of the supernatural at
the beginning of the century. These all appealed to the visual or ocular senses that are fundamental
to an apprehension of the supernatural and which, of course, place theatrical display in a different
category from the novel or short story, in which the appearance of ghosts and spectres may be
rendered far more ambivalent and uncertain. Once the spectre is made visible, then there is less
room for doubt. Thus the ambiguities of Dickens’ Christmas Stories are sacrificed in the many stage
dramatisations which give the ghosts a concrete form. Ambivalence makes way for spectacle.
Within the context of modernity the function of the supernatural in the Victorian theatre is
arguably more complex than merely providing an excuse for the presentation of special effects. The
ghost in the machine (to use the phrase anachronistically for the moment) becomes more
interesting than the mechanised ghost, which might anyway prove unreliable. Indeed, the use of
special supernatural effects materialised more in plays where the visions or hallucinations were
internal, perhaps most famously in Leopold Lewis’s The Bells in 1871, when Mathias sees a vision of
his murder, many years before, of a Polish Jew and later a vision of a court scene in which, through
the agency of a mesmerist, he is forced to reveal his long suppressed guilt. The possibility that
manifestations of the supernatural might, as it were, be in the mind’s eye or in those dream-like,
hallucinatory moments between sleeping and waking, had long been discussed by the Victorians and
even earlier. In effect, they were the result of physiological and psychological processes,
manufactured within the mind of the spectator. Now, as in the instance of The Bells or in the
uncanny power of Svengali’s portrait to mesmerise and kill Trilby by some form of auto-suggestion,
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the supernatural is internalised and we are confronted not so much by haunting but self-haunting.
We move into the realm of psychology: it is not mesmerism, but fear of mesmerism, that kills
Mathias; it is the hypnotic power of suggestion embodied in Svengali’s portrait, not Svengali’s ghost,
that kills Trilby.
Melodrama and Realism
As melodrama evolved, its use of the supernatural evolved too, emerging in more credible or
psychologically-driven manifestations. Increasingly, melodrama reflected everyday life. The
oppositional way in which the coming of naturalism and realism is often seen as a late-nineteenth
century antidote to popular drama fails to grasp that the various categories of drama generically
defined as melodrama were grounded in the real. This point is astutely made by Julia Swindells, who
argues that the fundamental interest of pre-Victorian drama and melodrama
is in this everyday world of ordinary people, not kings and queens, not the nobility (except
for their vices), but the lives and perspectives of factory workers, oppressed wives and
daughters, cottagers, farmers and farm labourer, domestic servants and other
representative of daily life in Britain.5
While one may argue for a wider social basis or bias in the drama of the Victorian period, the fact is
that melodrama, however heightened though spectacle, conventional plotting and character
stereotyping, works because it is rooted in the real, just as David Wilkie’s pictures of everyday life,
Augustus Egg’s narrative paintings or W. P. Frith’s representations of everyday spectacle also appeal
because they embody the familiar. Some, like William Bodham Donne, the Examiner of Plays from
1857-74, complained that an obsession with the everyday stifled the imagination6, a lament
articulated more graphically by Percy Fitzgerald writing in 1870, who noted that even in the theatre
we are no longer separated from the objects of everyday life, and ‘meet again the engine and train
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that set us down almost at the door; the interior of hotels counting-houses, shops, factories, the
steam-bats, waterfalls, bridges, and even fire-engines’.7
The real, as Swindells implies, goes deeper than the pictorial representations criticised by
Donne and Fitzgerald. A number of studies have demonstrated that melodrama was often rooted in
the everyday experience of its spectators and it was even a modus operandi of Victorian society
outside of the theatre. This is the persuasive case made by Elaine Hadley in Melodramatic Tactics,
arguing for a historicist view of melodrama rather than for an aesthetic or personalised discussion of
melodrama as genre. Particularly valuable is her comment on the limitations of Peter Brooks’s
influential study, The Melodramatic Imagination:
Brooks’s title articulates our fundamental differences, for in his attribution of melodrama to
the imagination—what amounts to a melodrama of consciousness—he locates melodrama
within the psyche of the individual. Thus, the rhetoric of melodrama becomes an
aestheticized form of psychological expression and its tropes a series of psychic pressure
points that move melodrama out of history and, occasionally, into pathology.8
For Hadleigh the melodramatic mode ‘erupts throughout nineteenth-century public life, often as ‘a
reactionary rejoinder to social change’.9 Hadley sees this mode as operative verbally and nonverbally, often theatrically reinforcing traditional values and social formations, to which stage
melodrama is a contributing factor. The melodramatic mode, in Hadley’s view, is not discursive, but
nevertheless contributed to the shaping of nineteenth-century society. Even if, in real life, the villain,
embodying ‘all the evils of modernising Victorian capitalism’, won in the end and rewrote
nineteenth-century history from his own perspective, the ‘melodramatic mode’ provides a multiple
and more variegated manifestation of the ‘conflict, struggle, unmanaged excess, insistent variety in
the historical record’.10
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Hadley provides a sophisticated approach to the relationship of melodrama with nineteenthcentury life, one that liberates us from too close an engagement with romantic individualism and
psychoanalytic theory as key elements of the genre and its applications. Ben Singer has also argued
for a recognition that melodrama is neither anti-realist nor confined to the superficially external
realism evoked by realistic scenery and objects, but that by the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries the sensation scenes of melodrama, reflecting the cultural and personal discontinuities of
modernity, contained a considerable degree of realism, insofar as the events portrayed ‘correlated,
even if only loosely, with certain qualities of corporeality, peril and vulnerability associated with
working-class life’.11 That melodrama is a means of coming of terms with modernity or certainly
provides ways of dealing with is complexities takes us in the direction of Jacky Bratton’s broader
notion of the ‘contending discourses’ of melodrama’.12 Melodrama, in her view, enabled its
spectators to negotiate change in a period of imperialism, industrial growth and socio-economic
instability, often through the use of contrast, humour and irony. Again the emphasis here is on
melodrama from a cultural materialist and historicist perspective, acknowledging the ambiguities
and complexities of its interaction with everyday life and experience.
Melodrama’s engagement with the quotidian is prevalent in many of the plays categorised
within the genre. Both Tom Taylor’s The Ticket of Leave Man (1863) and Colin Hazlewood’s The
Casual Ward (1866) have provoked essays specifically on their relationship to everyday life.13 The
latter play, based on James Greenwood’s sensational series of essays ‘A Night in a Workhouse’,
published in the Pall Mall Gazette14, was staged simultaneously at the Marylebone, Britannia and
Whitechapel Pavilion Theatres: the Marylebone production even featured one of the workhouse
inmates described in the Greenwood articles, ‘Old Daddy’, among its cast. Punch (17 March, 1866)
denounced this mania for realism as tasteless, while All the Year Round was equally condemnatory.15
Yet the depiction of the casual word on stage was praised in many reviews and the humiliating
experiences of new inmates, as described by Greenwood, were also incorporated into the script. At
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a time of chronic unemployment, an increase in sweated and casual labour, growing poverty and
economic instability, it is neither surprising that over 100,000 paupers sought relief from parish
charities in the metropolitan areas of London in the last week of April 1866 or that the play should
attract audiences in the predominantly working-class neighbourhoods to the west and the east of
London, when it was first staged. Hazlewood is among those dramatists who, however faithful to the
conventions of melodrama and the expectation of a happy ending, frequently demonstrate the
injustices and inequalities of working class life, as, for example, in The Work Girls of London (1864).16
Yet the happy ending of melodrama, with its seeming endorsement of a benevolent providence and
emphasis on ‘affect’, is one that, I believe, should be read with a certain degree of irony. The
exigencies of plotting should not be allowed to undermine the realism that is often a concomitant
aspect of melodrama, however benign its endings. Indeed, many melodramas do not end happily, as
we have already seen in the cases of The Bells and Trilby. John Walker’s The Factory Lad and Douglas
Jerrold’s Mutiny at the Nore (1830) both end bleakly, as does the perennially popular East Lynne.
The problems of distinguishing between melodrama and realism or between melodrama and
realist drama, from generic, formalist or even evolutionary perspectives, are eloquently explored by
Tom Postlewait. Although his discussion focuses primarily on American drama and its history
according to melodramatic conventions – ‘a primary conflict between good and bad drama, high and
low culture, innovative art and retrograde tradition, enlightened critique and false consciousness’ 17 , it can be applied more widely. Postlewait argues for a mutuality and overlapping between the two
forms, not an evolution from one to the other, and believes that so-called realistic drama will often
contain elements of the melodramatic just as melodrama will often contain much that is realistic.18
In pursuing rigid genre definitions or looking for an evolutionary history we are, in effect, ignoring
the complexity that melodrama offers and its close association with the real.
Finally, performance itself is what embodies and makes real the text. Melodramatic acting
has often been criticised as rhetorical, pictorial, exaggerated and untrue to life, but as James
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Naremore has usefully argued, all acting is rhetorical, even at its cinematically most restrained.19 The
large theatres in which nineteenth-century melodrama was often performed required strong
physical and vocal performances that were visible, audible, sensitive to pictorial effect and narrative
clarity, and heightened emotionally. Actors in melodrama also performed in precise co-ordination
with a musical score and, in some of the genre’s more sensational scenes, demonstrated
considerable athletic prowess. Arguably, despite the derision directed at melodrama by the many
burlesques of the form, the actors of melodrama enhanced its realism within the context of the
theatrical spaces in which they performed, the expectations of its audiences and its generic
conventions. In some instances, such as Henry Irving’s performance of Mathias in The Bells, a sense
of repression, the contrast between the inner and outer self and, as Gordon Craig reveals in his
discussion of Irving’s enactment of the role, the careful use of detail all demonstrate the possibility
that melodramatic acting can also be extremely subtle.20 Nineteenth-century actors made
melodrama work and made it credible; only in burlesque did actors parody or exaggerate
melodrama to the extent that it seemed patently unreal.
Transnational Melodrama
In this section I want to focus on some of the more frequently performed melodramas (albeit often
in different versions or adaptations taken from a common source) and the way in which they
impacted across the globe as part of the phenomenon of burgeoning cultural exchange
transnationally as the century progressed, communicating and enacting multiple versions of the
‘real’. My argument is not that melodrama per se should be disregarded as a product of national
cultures, perceptions, identities or as a factor that in turn shapes national cultures and identities, for
often the reverse is true. Rather I am interested in the exchange transnationally that reshapes
meaning but also purveys a common set of beliefs and ideologies to a wide range of global
spectators, often resulting in the modification of attitudes and values, but also their entrenchment.
While the advocacy of patriotism and imperialism, say, is clearly embedded in a number of British
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melodramas in the late-nineteenth century, I am equally interested in the way in which melodrama
operates both as a hegemonic and subterranean force in its transnational manifestations, whether in
its focus on spectacle, ethical clarity (what Brooks calls ‘moral legibility’) or over-simplification of
individual character traits.
A couple of short case studies, both based around dramatizations of well-known novels, will
demonstrate how meaning changes or is enhanced transnationally. H. Phillip Bolton comments:
It seems that the vast phenomenon of the dramatizations of famous novels would suggest
how the nineteenth century was an era of popular theatrical and letter-press protest against
perceived social injustices in the tyranny of one ethnic group over another, in slavery, in the
oppression of women, in the exploitation of children, and in the abuse of the lower social
orders.21
One significant source of adaptation was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the
significance of which in North America has been discussed by numerous critics such as Jeffrey D.
Mason, who sees in George Aiken’s well-known North American dramatization ‘a fundamental
tension between Stowe’s Christian vision and the ideology of mid-century melodrama’ and believes
it offers a confirmation of ‘the fundamental racism of American society’.22 Nevertheless, the focus,
even in the best of American stage adaptations, is somewhat different from that which becomes
explicit in a number of English stage versions. Recent monographs on abolitionist politics in
literature and popular culture in Victorian England by Audrey A. Fisch, which touches on British
reactions to the novel (and stage adaptations), and by Sarah Meer on ‘Uncle Tom mania’ provide
useful perspectives on what British dramatizations meant to British audiences.23 The first British
‘Uncle Tom’ adaptation was performed in England at the Adelphi Theatre in 1852, although the
Spectator considered that both its form and substance precluded the novel from anything like
adequate representation on stage and that it lost is emotional force in performance. Both The
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Spectator and The Times were also concerned, as conservative journals, about how the more
sensational elements of the novel might be treated in adaptations designed for British working class
audiences and the way in which these might be a catalyst for subverting the ‘mob’ and even
arousing it to action, drawing the ‘unwashed’ to theatres such as the Victoria and the Bower in
working class districts of south London. Built into this, suggests Fisch, was also a view that the use of
the novel for such low cultural purposes militated against the higher cultural aspirations of Victorian
society.24 For other British audiences and for less conservative members of the public the popularity
of Uncle Tom adaptations was enhanced by British support of the abolitionist movement and both
the novel and the many dramatisations unleashed a surfeit of what was called Uncle Tom mania,
manifested in the manufacture of a wide range of material objects, and (in some of the stage
productions) a conflating of Stowe’s representation of plantation life with that represented by
contemporary minstrel acts.
Sarah Meer suggests that ‘when Uncle Tom’s Cabin transferred to the London stage it
became a vehicle for popular British attitudes towards slavery as well as to the United States’.25
Cultural and political differences were very apparent in the British ‘Uncle Tom’ plays. Moreover, the
religious element was played down in Britain and was far less obtrusive than in many American
versions, whereas the threat of violent action or revolt by the slaves (here almost a surrogate for the
downtrodden English lower classes) was much enhanced in English adaptations, which were
generally much more uncompromising in their politics. Some British adaptations, suggests Meer,
condemned slavery outright and suggested ‘remedies that in the United States would have seemed
terrifying inflammatory. In England Stowe’s ‘Christian Slave’ threatened to become a
revolutionary.’26 English versions also tended to take far more liberties with the plot and narrative of
Stowe’s originals, many playing down or eliminating the character of Little Eva and the piety and
moral concerns at the heart of Stowe’s novel. In Meer’s opinion
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin made a useful case for British self-congratulation based on a peculiar
image of America that was refracted and distorted by the conventions of melodrama.27
It enabled a sense of moral superiority in regard to Britain’s seemingly more enlightened attitude
towards slavery and could also be seen as an incentive for revolt and rebellion.
In its British dramatizations Uncle Tom’s Cabin took on new meanings and cultural
imperatives, the issue of race being subsumed, to some extent, by that of class. But what happened
when a well-known and popular English novel was adapted for American audiences? Mrs Henry
Wood’s East Lynne was first adapted for a New York audience in 1862 and, as H. Phillip Bolton has
shown, became one of the most popular nineteenth-century melodramas in both the United States
and in Britain, dramatized constantly in new versions in the nineteenth century and well into the
twentieth century.28 After Uncle Tom’s Cabin, East Lynne was almost certainly the most performed
melodrama in North America, its popularity, according to Robert Liston, resting in ‘its mixture of high
flown morality and emotional titillation’.29 E. Ann Kaplan, in Motherhood and Representation: The
Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama, suggests that its popularity may also be due to its
emergence at the juncture where external threats to the family in the melodramatic genre are
beginning to be complicated and even subsumed by internal difficulties within the family unit itself.30
Whereas the perennial issue of class is unavoidable within the English context, Kaplan also draws
attention to the manifestly different ways dramatizations of East Lynne work in American society.31
She believes there was a great distance between ‘British class and gender relations, and the
specificity of the North American historical contexts in which the play was being seen’ and that it
was difficult to adapt a mid-nineteenth century British work, ‘dealing with the political discourses
specific to Britain, for American audiences in a very different historical and political context’. In her
view
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An attraction to the historic splendour and the traditions of England is combined with a
gleeful distaste for the unequal class structures in Europe that gibe with North America’s
self-professed adherence to a demonstrative, classless ideal.32
As a result, argues Kaplan, it loses the particular British context of class structures and hierarchy and
becomes, in North America, more of a family melodrama of the sort that was later played out in
American cinema, presenting what Nina Auerbach has called ‘a kaleidoscope of unstable domestic
identities’.33
We have already noted the anxiety generated in some quarters around how dramatizations
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin might be received in the theatres of east and south London. Even in the case of
East Lynne ideological interpretations shifted according to the venue where adaptations were
performed. Andrew Maunder has drawn attention to probably the first, if somewhat free,
adaptation of the novel performed at the Effingham Theatre in East London under the title Marriage
Bells. I have argued elsewhere that we should not conflate west end and east end attitudes to
specific melodramas and be open to variegated audience responses. Whereas for middle-class
audiences East Lynne (at least in dramatic form) may have been a moral tale about a runaway wife
who commits adultery and is duly punished for her sins, Maunder suggests that in Marriage Bells
‘laissez-faire capitalism is the real villain, more destructive and cruel than any seducer’. He considers
that this was a version with which the working class women of the 1860s could identify, because the
erring wife becomes a symbolic representative of the poor and dispossessed rather than a moral
exemplum of what happens to women who break with social expectations of correct matrimonial
behaviour, raising two fingers to ‘the callous straitjacket of bourgeois propriety and its mechanistic
spirit’.34
14
Yet another response to East Lynne, if somewhat more sardonic, is exemplified in some of
the critical reactions to the play in the Australian press. The Melbourne Punch (13 September, 1866,
p. 83) commented, shortly after the first Melbourne production of the play
During the last few days, the drapers have been doing an unusually brisk trade in ladies'
pocket-handkerchiefs—so brisk, indeed, that the price has slightly risen in consequence of
the special demand. The reason is said to be that the lachrymose influence of East Lynne,
which everybody is going to see at the Theatre Royal, imperatively requires that every lady
should take with her to the theatre at least a dozen of these articles. The manager is in
excellent spirits, and says this flood (of tears) is the tide in his affairs that is going to lead on
to fortune. So happy has it made him that, out of pure sympathy, he has taken to the study
of hydraulics.
A later review of a revival of East Lynne in the Melbourne Argus (13 December, 1880, p.6) refers to it
as ‘a lugubrious and lachrimoyant [sic] drama which enables the more impressionable of the
audience to indulge in the luxury of grief’. That East Lynne was a tear jerker wherever it was played
seems a reasonable assumption and a strand that would be interesting to follow up, if space
allowed, would be the shared visceral responses that the genre of melodrama quite probably
offered its international audiences.
When Joseph Jefferson, an American actor who spent several years in Australia playing in
melodrama and comedy, appeared in Tom Taylor’s The Ticket of Leave Man in Tasmania, he also
provided evidence of how an individual melodrama takes on specific connotations in different parts
of the world. The central role played by Jefferson was Bob Brierley, the ticket of leave man or
returned convict back in London from Australia, which he acted for the first time in Hobart:
At least one hundred ticket-of-leave men were in the pit on the first night of its production.
Before the curtain rose, I looked through it at this terrible audience…Men with low
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foreheads and small, peering, ferret-looking eyes, some with flat noses, and square, cruel
jaws, and sinister expressions – leering, low, and cunning – all wearing a sullen, dogged look,
as though they would tear the benches from the pit and gut the theater of its scenery if one
of their kind was held up to public scorn upon the stage. 35
The first act passed without incident, but
when I came upon the stage in the second act, revealing the emaciated features of a
returned convict, with sunken eyes and a closely shaved head, there was a painful stillness in
the house. The whole pit seemed to lean forward and strain their eager eyes upon the
scene; and as Bob Brierly revealed to his sweetheart the ‘secrets of the prison house’, there
were little murmurs of recognition and shakings of the head, as though they fully recognized
the local allusions that they so well remembered…This performance rendered me extremely
popular with some of the old ‘lags’ of Hobart Town; and I was often accosted on the street
by these worthies and told some touching tale of their early persecutions. In fact they quite
looked on me as an old ‘pal’.36
Even allowing for some degree of hyperbole in this account, Jefferson again demonstrates how
melodrama takes on specific local meanings or connotations in specific places.
Australia furnishes further example of the ways in which melodrama adapts transnationally.
The popularity of Boer War melodrama, much of which was derived from British sources, but
adapted to Australian characters and locations, is a case in point. Some plays were rewritten so that
the British were saved in the nick of time by Australian reinforcements, although this sub-genre soon
went into decline on the Australian stage as disillusionment with the war set in among the Australian
public.37 Richard Fotheringham’s study of Sport in Australian Drama demonstrates that nearly all the
major sporting dramas performed in Australia from 1867-1910 had previously been successful in
London. Consequently, he writes, ‘sporting drama in Australia was dominated by a relatively small
16
number of overseas plays, which established and developed the genre in directions determined by
overseas trends, but which were selected by Australian managers on the basis of their knowledge of
Australian conditions’. 38 Inevitably, responses in the two countries differed:
If the sporting plays were for English society a reactionary fantasy of a lost age of social
harmony, they were for most white Australians a dream of a remote utopian ‘home’ where
life expectations were very different from those experienced in the colonies.39
Plays like Boucicault’s horse-racing drama The Flying Scud, for instance, were popular in Australia
because Australian audiences could find multiple and perhaps different meanings in them that were
not specifically the same as those found by British audiences. However, and this is a significant point,
once we try to read melodrama as a transnational phenomenon:
[S]porting drams addressed not particular problems of English and American culture, but
problems of western industrialism which remained valid across nation boundaries. In
particular, the utopian world offered compensation for deeper social insecurities which
might be summed up as a perceived lack of stability in modern society and the sense that
this sprang from a lack of any correspondence between power and morality.40
Thus Fotheringham’s study shows how melodramas not only take on different cultural meanings in
different cultural locations, but may also indicate globally shared ideological concerns.
Melodrama is trans-temporal too and the same play can take on different meanings at
different periods and in different guises. Thus George Dibdin Pitt’s Sweeney Todd melodrama, an
adaptation of The String of Pearls, first performed at the Britannia Theatre in 1847, has undergone a
number of metamorphoses. The original script was never published, although it still exists in
manuscript. The 1847 version is located firmly within the Georgian period – in the early years of
George III’s reign – so that there is already a considerable gap between the historical setting of the
play and its first performance. Moreover, a key character in Dibdin Pitt’s play, a liberated black slave
17
called Hector, who is crucial to the plot’s resolution, disappears entirely from the first published
version of the play (Dicks’ Standard Plays 1883), and the satire on religious hypocrisy, partly
plagiarised from Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Hypocrite, is also less prominent than it is in Pitt’s original.
Pitt seems to have had radical sympathies41 and his melodrama arguably presents Sweeney as an
allegorical demonic figure, killing and devouring his prey just as the city, in the early years of the
Industrial Revolution, was equally cannibalistic as it swallowed up its new inhabitants. Yet, by the
second half of the twentieth century, through the agency of Christopher Bond’s adaptation at the
Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1973 and subsequently of Stephen Sondheim’s music theatre
adaptation (1979), Sweeney Todd had ceased to be an allegorical figure and had become a semitragic character, motivated by revenge and more sympathetically delineated. He is presented as a
victim of the class system and the temporal location of the play has shifted from the Georgian to the
mid-Victorian period. Just as East Lynne metamorphosed into a play about dysfunctional families so
Sweeney Todd has metamorphosed through time from a play featuring an arch unmotivated villain
presiding allegorically over the cannibalisation of individuals through industrial and urban growth
into a play about the victim of an injustice who takes extreme measures to effect his revenge on
society .42
***********
In this chapter I have argued against the dangers of over-defining melodrama as a genre, both
insofar as not everything we now think of as nineteenth-century melodrama was so defined by its
authors and also because as a genre it is continually evolving and regularly defying the conventions
by which we tend to define it. I have also argued for rethinking the progress of melodrama not only
in terms of national identities and their formation, but also as a series of journeys in which the plays
themselves not only propagated old values but also took on new meanings transnationally. Within
the scope of this chapter I have only been able to offer a few limited examples and hint at broader
possibilities, but I certainly hope for and look forward to more studies of the genre that recognise
18
and analyse its international reach and the implications of this for understanding shared and
distinctive transnational values and ideologies in the nineteenth century.
Melodrama is also a way of seeing, both on and off the stage. In everyday life it provides
narrative, ideology, allegory through which existence may be explained and even lived. As discussed
above, it is not the antithesis of realism, more a way of mediating reality. Through spectacle,
heightened gesture, the frozen moment captured in tableau it teaches its spectators how to look at
the world around them and even how to behave in that world. And, while it certainly contains ‘texts
of muteness’, it is also a highly articulate form, using language and rhetoric to express reality, not
always in the language of everyday life, but in ways that communicate the inherent reality of
emotion and intention. It teaches us how to speak, how to perform language. Indeed, melodrama is
a performance of everyday life, just as everyday life can be a performance of melodrama. As such it
provides rather than erases agency. It is empowering, enabling, providing a model of how its
spectators might interpret the world around them, but also suggesting how they might perform their
roles in that world. In many ways melodrama is the private made public, interiority made visible, a
sort of transcendent realism which takes us far beyond the limitations of verisimilitude and surface
appearance.
1
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the
Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975; Martin Meisel, Realizations:
Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1983); Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized
Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995);
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
19
2
Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (The Pennsylvania State University Press; 1967);
Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1985).
3
M. G. Lewis, The Castle Spectre (London: John Cumberland, n.d.), 55.
4
See Nicola Brown, Carolyn Burdett & Pamela Thurschwell, eds., The Victorian Supernatural
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
5
Julia Swindells, Glorious Causes: The Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789 to1833
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 174.
6
William Bodham Donne, Essays in the Drama (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1858), 206,
quoted in Michael R Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910 (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981), 2.
7
Quoted in Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910, 15.
8
Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-
1885, 9.
9
Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-
1885, 3.
10
Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-
1885, 225.
11
Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts, 53.
12
Jacky Bratton, ‘The Contending Discourses of Melodrama’, in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook,
Christine Gledhill, eds., Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: British Film Institute,
1994), 38-49 and J.S. Bratton, ‘Introduction’ and ‘British heroism and the structure of
melodrama’ in J. S. Bratton, Richard Allen Cave, Breandan Gregory, Heidi J. Holder and
20
Michael Pickering, Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790-1930
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 1-61.
13
David Mayer, ‘The Ticket-of-Leave Man in Context’, Essays in Theatre 6 (1987), 31-40; Jim
Davis, ‘A Night in the Workhouse, or The Poor Laws as Sensation Drama’, Essays in Theatre 7
(1989), 111-126.
14
Reprinted in Peter Keating, ed., Into Unknown England 1866-1913: Selections from the
Social Explorers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976).
15
All the year round, 3 March, 1866, 187-8.
16
See Jim Davis, ‘The Gospel of Rags: Melodrama at the Britannia 1863-74", New Theatre
Quarterly, VII: 28 (1991), 369-89.
17
Tom Postlewait, ‘From Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of American Drama’,
in Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds., Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a
Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 49.
18
Postlewait, ‘From Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of American Drama’, 54-56.
19
James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
20
Edward Gordon Craig, Henry Irving (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1930), 58-61.
21
H. Phillip Bolton, Women Writers dramatized: a calendar of performances from narrative
works published in English to 1900 (London: Mansell Publishing, 2000), xx.
22
Jeffrey D. Mason, ed. Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 125.
23
Audrey A. Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular
Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sarah Meer, Uncle
21
Tom Mania: Slavery Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens, Georgia:
University of Georgia Press, 2005).
24
Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and
Culture, 11-12.
25Meer,
Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s, 133.
26
Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s, 134.
27
Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s, 141.
28
Bolton, Women Writers dramatized: a calendar of performances from narrative works
published in English to 1900, 394-413.
29
Quoted in E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture
and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 2004), 93.
30
Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama,
96.
31
Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama,
96.
32
Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama,
96.
33
Nina Auerbach, ‘Before the Curtain’ in Kerry Powell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to
Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11.
34
Andrew Maunder, ‘”I will not live in poverty and neglect”: East Lynne on the East End
stage’ in Kimberley Harrison and Richard Fantina, eds., Victorian Sensations: Essays on a
Scandalous Genre (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006), 185.
22
35
Joseph Jefferson, “Rip Van Winkle”: The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson (London:
Reinhardt & Evans Ltd., 1949), p. 199.
36
Jefferson, “Rip Van Winkle”: The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson, 200.
37
See Jim Davis, ‘The Empire right or wrong: Boer War Melodrama on the Australian Stage,
1899-1901’, in Hays and Nicolopoulou, eds., Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a
Genre, 21-37.
38Richard
Fotheringham, Sport in Australian Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), p. 97.
39
Fotheringham, Sport in Australian Drama, 119.
40
Fotheringham, Sport in Australian Drama, 157.
41
Dwayne Brenna, ‘George Dibdin Pitt: Actor and Playwright’, Theatre Notebook LII:1
(1998), 33-6.
42
See Jim Davis, ‘The Cannibalisation of Sweeney Todd’ in Nineteenth Century Theatre and
Film (forthcoming) – this volume will also include Dibdin Pitt’s original version of the play,
edited by Sharon Weltman; see also Robert L. Mack, The Wonderful and Surprising History
of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend (London: Continuum, 2007).
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