Barrymore's Gun: Gender and Genre Potential in The Blood Red Knight (1810)

Abstract

This article closely examines William Barrymore's equestrian melodrama The Blood Red Knight; or, The Fatal Bridge (1810). While the play uses a vague medievalist setting, such associative conventions to the medieval romance are upended when the play's heroine shoots and kills the villain during the knight's mounted battle. While contemporary reviewers and theatre historians today have been largely fascinated by the use of live horses on stage, the gunshot makes The Blood Red Knight an outlier worthy of further study. I argue that the firing of Barrymore's gun creates a moment of disruptive potentiality where melodrama's complex and ambivalent politics are negotiated before the audience witnessing the play's concluding spectacle. In this largely overlooked moment, histories of gender and violence as well as romantic convention are disrupted, demonstrating the radical potential available to melodrama during its early stages of development.