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Melodrama and Tragedy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2021

Alan Reynolds Thompson
Alan Reynolds Thompson*
Affiliation:
University of California
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Extract

Clear distinctions between the genres, relatively unimportant in an historical study of the drama, are, or ought to be, of vital importance in a more absolute criticism. But though the term “tragedy” is loosely applied to some of the crudest as well as some of the greatest productions of the stage, and though for the last hundred and twenty-five years the term “melodrama” has been in current use, no critic has made more than a casual attempt properly to distinguish them. Indeed, such is the power of tradition that ill-formed and sensational productions of the Elizabethans or of the Restoration, because they were styled tragedies by their authors or contemporaries, continue to bear that proud title along with Lear and (Edipus tke King. It would seem obvious that a term so stretched as to include within its limits Hoffman and Hamlet, Lust's Dominion, Tke Revenge and Othello, will not serve for purposes of strict definition.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 1928 , pp. 810 - 835
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1928

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References

page 811 note 1 It will be observed that for brevity's sake I simply accept the “contrast” theory. My argument, however, merely requires recognition of the spectator's relative detachment from the action.

page 812 note 2 Tt. in Barrett H. Clark, European Theories of Urn Drama, Cincinnati 1918 p. 397

page 813 note 3 The Psychology of Insanity, Bernard Hart, H.D., Cambridge, Eng., pp. 158 ff.

page 813 note 4 Dramatic Technique, George P. Baker, Boston, 1919, p. 46.

page 814 note 5 A Short History of Greek Literature, W. C. Wright, New York, 1907, p. 207.

page 815 note 6 The Development of the Drama, New York, 1906, p. 75.

page 816 note 7 About the Theatre, London, 1886.

page 816 note 8 Dramatic Technique, p. 20.

page 817 note 9 In Jonathan Bradford; or, The Murder at the Road-side Inn.

page 817 note 10 Rousseau and Romanticism, Boston, 1919, pp. 4-5.

page 818 note 11 Drama ami Life, London, 1907, p. 116. This is also Lessing's point in Homburgiscke Dramalurrie, No. 48.

page 819 note 12 C. E. Whitmore, Cambridge and London, 1915.

page 819 note 13 Ibid., p. 356.

page 820 note 14 Drome Ancien Drame Uoderne, Paris, 1903, Avant-Propos, p. 5.

page 820 note 15 Ibid.

page 821 note 16 Ibid.

page 821 note 17 Cf. Dixon, op. cit., Ch. V; AlUrdyce Nicoll, An Introduction to Dramatic Theory, London, 1923, pp. 86-87.

page 821 note 18 Ludwig Lewisohn, article from The Nation, reprinted in The Drama and the Slate, New York, 1922.

page 824 note 19 Melodrame em Tragedie? A Propos du Dtdale, Revue del Deux Mondes, 50e Période, T. 19, Jan. IS, 1904; also In VarUUs LitUraires. Cf. alto Thorndike, Tragedy, pp. 3-4; Clayton Hamilton, Melodramas and Farces, Forum, VoL XXI, 1909, p. 24.

page 825 note 20 A New Defense ef Melodrama, in Studies in Statecraft, New York, 1914, pp. 210-211.

page 825 note 21 Cf. Bradley, In Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 15: “Now this operation of accident it a fact, and a prominent fact, of human life. To exclude it wholly from tragedy therefore, would be, we may say, to fail in truth. And beside*, it is not merely a fact. That men may start a course of events but can neither calculate nor control it, is a tragic fact.... Any large admission of chance into the tragic sequence would certainly weaken, and might destroy, the sense of the causal connection of character, deed, and catastrophe. And Shakespeare really uses it very sparingly.”

page 825 note 22 Cf. infra, note 37.

page 826 note 23 Tragedy, Ch. I.

page 826 note 24 S. H. Butcher, Aristetle's Theory ef Poetry and Fine Art, London, 1895, p. 237.

page 828 note 25 An Introduction tt Dramatic Thorny, London, 1923, p. 127.

page 828 note 26 Op. cit., p. 239.

page 828 note 27 Ibid, p. 243.

page 829 note 28 Ibid., p. 246.

page 829 note 29 Op.cit., p.23.

page 829 note 30 Boston, 1922.

page 830 note 31 W. M. Dixon, op. cit., p. 194.

page 830 note 32 The Tatler, No. 181, June 6, 1710.

page 831 note 33 A. Nicoll, cp. cit., pp. 72-73.

page 831 note 34 Cf. Butcher, op. cit., p. 289, who argues that the martyr is unsuitable for tragedy because his moral victory drowns fear and awe in admiration; and Leasing, Dramaturgic, No. 2, who argues similarly against a tragedy representing Christian martyrs. But the difficulty with such a character, for example, as the heroine of Massinger and Dealer's Virgin Martyr is not that she is a martyr but that she is totally unbelievable as a human being, so that we cannot identify ourselves with her misfortunes. Antigone, for a modem if not for a Greek audience, is s martyr in Batcher's sense, and is none the leas a tragic heroine. No moral victory can drown our sense of pity and waste at a violent death of one whom we can admire and love.

page 831 note 35 Dr. Clarence V. Boyer, The Villain at Bare in Baabclkan Tragedy, London and New York, 1914.

page 832 note 38 Op. cit., p. 302.

page 832 note 37 A Criticism ef Stmt Attempts te Rationalise Tragedy, Lucius W. Elder, U. of Perm, dissertation, undated, whose thesis te (p. 3): “There is an unknowable element, in the universe which passes over into the corresponding conception of tragedy as as element not amenable to human will; and that, therefore, it is something which cannot be completely rationalized.”

page 832 note 38 Dixon, op cit., p. 302. In less emotional language the modem psychologist sscribes the value cf tragedy to its release of “sublimations” and “suppressions.” “The joy which is so strangely the heart of the experience is not an indication that ‘all's right with the world’ or that ‘somewhere, somehow, there is Justice’; it is an indication that all is right here and now in the nervous system,” I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, p. 246.

page 833 note 39 “Poetics, VIII, Butcher's translation.

page 834 note 40 C.E. Whitmore, “Tke Nature of Tragedy,” PMLA, XXXIV (1919), 346.

page 835 note 41 “The dramatist who serves his apprenticeship in melodrama... follows the course of the development of the art he pursues,” Robert P. Utter, Low Trapdy, University of California Chronicle, Jan., 1928. An excerpt from a witty and suggestive article.