‘It envelops’: elementality and form in nineteenth-century Scottish melodrama

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article addresses the apparent paradox between the critical emphasis on melodrama’s mobility across place, time and media, and its founding in material, embodied formal components: the combination of music, drama, and theatre in the nineteenth century. This article finds that an early melodrama, Isaac Pocock’s 1818 stage adaptation of Walter Scott’s Rob Roy, used elemental qualities to establish its melodramatic form. Drawing on theories of the elements and of theatre by Timothy Morton and Matthew Wagner, and on contemporary geological writing by James Hutton, the first section formulates the historical and theoretical relationships that exist between the theatre, geology and the elements. The second and third sections examine how the formal characteristics of Pocock’s play – set, song and characterisation – enact the elements’ strange enveloping movements. The play’s elemental form, I discover, facilitates the mediation of its characters and concepts beyond its own borders, into wider popular culture. But, at other moments, the play insists on marking the contours of its own aesthetic and material bounds. I argue that this dramaturgy, that trembles between elementality and human embodiment, sustains melodrama’s transmediality, transtemporality, and its endurance over time.