Early Melodrama Research Articles

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

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.

‘New light’: gas and the elementary affect of early melodrama

ABSTRACT The development of coal-fired gas took off very rapidly between 1802 and 1818, used for the illumination of streets and buildings in Britain and Ireland but especially in the metropolis of London. These changes coincided with the emergence of melodrama as a new theatrical sensation, beginning with Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery in 1802. At the same time, playgoers were being exposed to a variety of innovations and experiments in visuality such as the phantasmagoria, the panorama, and the ‘aquatic theatre’ of Sadler’s Wells that tested categories of the ‘real’. The London theatres were not only a venue for the marketing of gaslight as a technology but were themselves transformed into palaces of light, both within the auditorium and on stage. Melodrama’s protean qualities as an art form were thus closely bound up with the application of fossil capitalism, for which melodrama acts as a structure of feeling, an elementary affect.

The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820

The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820

Pimmalione: Rousseau and the Melodramatisation of Italian Opera

AbstractThis article traces the Italian reception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Horace Coignet’sPygmalion(1770), ultimately arguing that the influence of early melodrama (and not the better-remembered Viennese reform) was behind the emergence of a style of speech-like singing and gestural mirroring in Italian opera in the decades immediately around 1800. Rousseauian melodrama was one of a few related projects subsuming the spoken word within the domain of music during the 1770s and 1780s; another was Joshua Steele’sProsodia rationalis, which proposed a system of modified music notation in order to preserve and transmit the spoken word. This article suggests (contra most recent historians of melodrama) that such projects were inflected by a kind of twilight classicism, in which the revived object was made to show signs of decay. The revivalist strain in the first melodrama was particularly important for its Italian reception. Rousseau’s ideal of an ancient, onomatopoeic language collapsing meaning and medium was naturalised into the rhetoric of Italian opera reform during the 1770s and 1780s by the Jesuit theorists Antonio Eximeno and Stefano Arteaga. By way of a coda, this article traces the emergence of a ‘melodramatic’ style of Italian opera, first in all-sung adaptations ofPygmalion, thence into Venetian opera of the 1790s more broadly, and finally into Donizetti’s techniques of gestural mirroring and what was called the ‘canto filosofico’ of Bellini’s early operas.

Darkness Visible: The Early Melodrama of British Imperialism and the Commodification of History in Sheridan’s Pizarro

Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro opened at Drury Lane in late May 1799 and proved to be one of the most popular dramas of the Romantic period. Situating Pizarro in the contexts of theatrical history and the history of British imperialism, this essay argues that Sheridan’s final play functioned more as an incipient melodrama than as a tragedy. Sheridan’s generic experimentation reflected a cultural transformation taking place within London’s theatres: the incorporation of melodramatic theatrics, a reliance upon spectacle, and the utilization of the theatre as a performance space in which political identities, human suffering, and historical events were negotiated and transformed into commodities. As a proto-melodrama, Pizarro staged complex, even oppositional ideological positions and produced a new form of theatricality that could map the conflicting, disparate, and inconsistent relationships that Britain maintained with its colonies.

Sensations of Celebrity:Jack Sheppardand the Mass Audience

Literary scholarship has recently begun to recognize the intimate relations between melodrama and modernity. Almost negligent critical dismissal of melodrama, a commonplace of literary scholarship of the last two centuries, has been replaced in recent decades by a strong consensus that this most dominant and ubiquitous form of nineteenthcentury drama played a significant role in shaping, articulating, and contesting changes in social and political relations, as well as in reshaping popular consciousness on the individual level. Most recently, melodramatic form has been interrogated for its formative contribution to modernity’s unique modes of perceptual apprehension: sensations of suspense and of continual change, the thrill—and the threat—of shock, and the more complex formations of urban spectatorship and the cinematic gaze have all been productively linked to melodramatic pre-formations. In the recent work of Tom Gunning, Elaine Hadley, Vanessa Schwartz, Ben Singer, and other scholars, melodrama, as much as the feuilleton or the detective story, has emerged as an exemplary literary mode of Benjaminian modernity. However, a closer look at much of this work reveals two very different, and in fact discontinuous, constructions of melodrama. On the one hand, a strong body of recent scholarship has explored early melodrama’s relationship to what might be described as political modernity. Focusing primarily upon the century’s opening three decades, such work investigates the manner in which melodrama articulates the anxieties and emergent class relations of the postrevolutionary world. Derived largely from Peter Brooks’s foundational study of the “melodramatic imagination,” such scholarship conceives of modernity in terms of the historical relation—articulated in the decades after 1789—between radical institutional upheavals (such as

The Brontës in Other People's Childhoods

AbstractAlthough the childhood lives and works of the Brontes have been extensively researched, less attention has been paid to the Bronte child figures (both the writers and their fictional characters) as presented for later child readers. This paper traces the history of these figures from the early melodrama versions of 'Jane Eyre' to recent feminist versions of Emily Bronte.

Early Melodrama in America: The Voice of Nature (1803)

Early Melodrama in America: The Voice of Nature (1803)