Adaptable Near and Far: C. H. Hazlewood’s Double Adaptations

Abstract

Stage personnel faced complex and conflicting demands in the nineteenth century to curate and cater to appetites for theatre with perceived local relevance and increasingly mobile and diverse audiences. This article argues that the formulaic melodramas written for less reputable London theatres allowed for just such local identification as well as for coming and going, as playwrights produced dramas which simultaneously traded on their knowledge of managerial preferences and theatrical companies while retaining an inclusive ambiguity in their scripts by avoiding specific political affiliation and curating moments of metatheatrical humour that appealed to audiences’ general knowledge of stage conventions, rather than specific local contexts or affiliations. Focusing on two very different dramatisations of Charles Reade’s novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend, both written by C. H. Hazlewood, this article analyses how the playwright addressed the tastes and capabilities of a network of professionals with whom he was personally connected, while maintaining an essential ambiguity that made these dramas portable across an international dramatic circuit.