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22038 results in Cambridge Companions

Page 294 of 1102

  • 9 - Stagecraft, Spectacle, and Sensation

  • from II - Melodramatic Technique
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 126-146

  • Summary

    The sensation scene was a well known staple of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century melodramas: received with derision, admiration, and awe during its time as an emerging, dominant, enduring, and later, in the advent of the silent screen, ultimately waning form. From avalanches to train derailments, earthquakes to underwater battles, horse races to cave-ins, the everyday incidents and disasters of modern industrial life were ripe fodder for the so-called spectacular melodramatists of the period who repeatedly drew from real-life headlines as stimuli for spectacle and feats of mechanical ingenuity. The fate of the heroine was no longer only at the hands of the dramatist and hero but was just as much at the mercy of the stage carpenter, and with every new spectacle the pressure to not only outdo previous efforts but also to exceed them became an ever-increasing industry imperative and source of competition (between dramatists and theatres alike).  A visual and visceral encounter, the sensation scene offered audiences the opportunity to witness and bodily experience the thrill of a spectacle – in particular with relation to nature and machine.

  • 14 - Melodrama and the Realist Novel

  • from IV - Extensions of Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 209-223

  • Summary

    This essay argues for ‘melodramatic realism’, comparing it to novelistic realism in several respects. First considering the importance of probability for realism, the essay mounts a defense of the melodramatic happy ending, often taken to be improbable. An exploration of the typed characters of melodrama ends by revealing the ways that typification figures prominently in realist fiction, for purposes of representing a social whole. Both melodrama and the novel contribute to the development of categories of social analysis such as gender, class, nationality, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Finally the essay turns to describe melodramatic realism in detail: its focus on ordinary life; its journalistic reference to ‘real-life’ events; its physiognomic aesthetic of social recognition; its class-inflected forms of speech; its generation of sympathy through music; its pictorial dramaturgy, in particular its use of tableaux that both imitate the real world and emphasise the artifice of that representation; and its representation of psychological interiority. Taking melodramatic realism seriously would lead to revisions in nineteenth-century theatre history and the history of the novel.

  • 3 - Gothic Melodrama

  • from I - Histories of English Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 31-46

  • Summary

    This essay reads melodrama within the broader aesthetic of the Gothic, arguing that Gothic drama and melodrama share common origins and tactics. It begins with a cataloguing error in the Catalogue of the Larpent Plays at the Huntington Library (1939), which incorrectly ascribed to The Mountaineers the subtitle of “melodrama”; this misattribution becomes a way of linking the practices of early nineteenth-century melodramas like A Tale of Mystery (1802) to early Gothic dramas like The Count of Narbonne (1781). A key component of the argument regards the sonic environments of these dramatic traditions. Melodramas like Rugantino, Bravo of Venice (1805), Raymond and Agnes (1811), and The Miller and His Men (1813) are tied visually and sonically both to spectacular remakes of Shakespeare, and to popular Gothic dramas like The Castle Spectre (1797), Raymond and Agnes (1797), and Blue-beard (1798). The essay concludes by positing Gothic melodrama as a crucial bridge not only into Victorian Theater and later domestic melodramas, but also into early horror film.

  • 11 - Melodrama and Class

  • from III - Melodrama and Nineteenth-Century English Culture
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 163-175

  • Summary

    How did the class system shape nineteenth century melodrama?  Is it possible to define the politics of melodrama?   It has been clear from theatre history that the stage reflected British society at a moment of immense economic transformation.  This chapter provides a new approach by pointing to the complexities of melodrama with regard to class.  Popular plays such as Douglas Jerrold's The Rent Day (1832) highlighted social problems,  especially the existence of poverty.  The politics of melodrama, however, appealed both to the radical and the conservative. Melodrama was based on a world view that mixed populism and deference, two states of minds that should (in theory) be antithetical.  It was characterised by the continuity of essentially eighteenth-century ideas of social structure which determined its worldview.  Melodramas represented a longing for social consensus but frequently gave voice to the fears and anxieties of the working class. When modern audiences thrill to the modern musical Les Miserables (in its theatrical and film versions), they recognise how nineteenth century theatre can still say something about poverty and the injuries of class division.

  • 16 - Moving Picture Melodrama

  • from IV - Extensions of Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 245-261

  • Summary

    This chapter tracks the movement of melodrama as a rhetoric through the adaptation of new technological devices to the needs of enlarged and more effective effects on the big motion picture screen. From the Victorian stage to early silent era moving picture shorts, moving pictures are here considered a century apart. From Way Down East (D.W. Griffith, 1920) to Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014) popular moving pictures testify to the resilience of the cross-cutting editing technique that so spectacularly displays melodrama’s narrative requirement that suffering be met by action. The argument is that every cinematic technique is also a melodramatic device: the tracking or travelling shot, slow and fast motion, the zoom in and the cut to the close-up as well as the freeze frame, descendant of the tableau vivant. Further, moving picture melodramatic effects rely on a wide range of unlike signifiers each governed by different codes and conventions – the tableau vivant summary pose, the framed composition, the blue-tinted night sky, the insert cut away within the scene – a new mixed repertoire at the disposal of the earliest crossovers from the Victorian stage.

  • 7 - Melodramatic Music

  • from II - Melodramatic Technique
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 95-111

  • Summary

    The popular repertoire of the 19th-century English theatre may seem remote to us today, although it shouldn’t: the real-world plots, melodramatic entanglements, and abundant special effects resemble the cinema of the 20th century. Within this 120-year tradition, in which music proved essential for a variety of functions, the more imaginative actors, managers, and orchestra leaders strove to make the forms more dramatically compelling, using affective music to a greater or lesser degree in accordance with the melodramatic sub-genre. This essay examines music in the context of several plays that would have been known to any mid- to late-19th-century English playgoer: John Buckstone’s Luke the Labourer, Charles Selby’s The Mysterious Stranger, R. J. Raymond’s The Old Oak Tree, Tom Taylor’s The Serf, George Sims’s The Lights o’ London, and Robert Buchanan’s A Man’s Shadow. Thanks to the theatre collections that have preserved a variety of crucial documents such as music plots and orchestra parts, we are able to reconstruct the music that played so crucial a role in these plays alongside the larger-than-life style of acting and spectacular enhancements in scenic design and effects. 

  • 13 - Melodrama and Race

  • from III - Melodrama and Nineteenth-Century English Culture
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 192-206

  • Summary

    Melodrama’s heyday, in the mid nineteenth century, coincided with the ascent of racial theory. But scientific ideas of ‘race’ moved to the stage in complicated ways. They often coexisted there with older representations of identity and otherness, or merged with the grotesque conventions of blackface minstrelsy, which developed at about the same time. ‘Race’ on stage was inflected by stage traditions, including repertoire (ongoing performances of Shakespeare’s Othello or Southerne’s Oroonoko). It was also modified according to the conventions of genre, the capabilities of actors, or to suit specific writers, managers, theatres and audiences. In Boucicault’s The Octoroon, notions of ‘race’ supplied the crux of a dramatic situation; by contrast, Lemon and Taylor’s Slave Life emphasised theatrical illusion, implicitly questioning racial categories. Staging ‘race’ often meant white actors blacking up, but it also provided roles for Black performers, such Ira Aldridge and Joseph Jenkins. Their acting elicited hostility in some quarters, appreciation and sympathy in others; at times, audiences conflated the actors with the romantic parts they played.

  • 4 - Nautical Melodrama

  • from I - Histories of English Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 47-60

  • Summary

    This essay offers a critical appraisal of Victorian nautical melodrama, tracing its roots to the aquatic theatre of the early nineteenth century and marking its culmination in Gilbert and Sullivan parodies. It focuses on an often overlooked critical resource, the complex politics underpinning a popular and seemingly naive form of entertainment. Melodramas such as Black-Ey'd Susan, Mutiny at the Nore, My Poll and My Partner Joe, and H. M. S. Pinafore yield a wealth of information, and, occasionally, trenchant critique, on urgent issues of the time, including the Napoleonic wars, Atlantic slavery, imperial travel, and turbulent movements between and within the social classes. The British sailor, I argue, is a composite and sometimes self-contradictory figure: a scourge of the Napoleonic wars and a global consumer, Mutineer and underdog, common man and national icon.

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 1-10
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  • Summary

    The Introduction begins by defining the genre of stage melodrama. Gesturing toward its complex prehistory in Europe, the Introduction explains that this volume traces the evolution of the genre in the English nineteenth century. The volume opens with several essays on the early history of melodrama in England, considered through its earliest sub-genres. A second group of essays dwell on melodramatic technique (music, acting, spectacle), arguing that the affective rhythm of melodrama – absorption pierced by moments of shock or sentiment – was a particularly modern phenomenon. In the third section of the volume, the essays focus on melodrama’s formative role in various cultural discourses in the nineteenth century: race, class, gender, nation, empire. In the fourth section, the volume expands to consider melodrama’s role as it morphs into other discourses, genres, and media (such as film, television, the musical, the realist novel, and psychoanalysis). Overall, then, this volume represents the expansion of melodrama from a stage genre into many other modalities today. The Introduction closes with a short history of scholarship on melodrama over the last fifty years.

Page 294 of 1102