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22147 results in Cambridge Companions

Page 299 of 1108

  • 2 - Early English 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 13-30

  • Summary

    This chapter offers a brief account of English melodrama’s origins and development through 1840. It describes melodrama’s cosmopolitan roots, traces the successive development of its foundational sub-genres, and draws attention to its progressive growth and expansion as a genre, rhetoric, and poetics of culture.

  • 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.

Page 299 of 1108