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22147 results in Cambridge Companions

Page 300 of 1108

  • 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.

  • 19 - Metamodern Melodrama and Contemporary Mass Culture

  • 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 289-304

  • Summary

    Cultural theory has been heavily influenced in the postmodern era by the idea that an incredulity towards meta-narratives shapes experience and that sceptical cultural consumers are aware of this. Melodrama offers an alternative conceptual frame for understanding global structures of feeling in a mass media age. This paper argues that the relationship between the melodramatic worldview and the postmodern is dialectical rather than oppositional. The mutually constitutive relationship between absolute and relative ideologies has tended to evade even those theorists of ‘post-postmodernism’ who have sought to reinstate the importance of belief into prevailing intellectual narratives of scepticism or suspicion. Drawing on Vermeulen and van den Akker's concept of ‘metamodernism’, this paper identifies a contemporary form of melodrama that we could label ‘metamodern’ – a term which indicates a dual sensibility which incorporates both scepticism and belief. Focusing on reality TV and sports broadcasting, this paper argues that melodrama is the modern form of the utopic, rooted in the belief system of myth, yet born in response to what Peter Brooks calls ‘the void’ of the modern world.

  • 5 - Domestic 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 61-77

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that ‘domestic melodrama’ is constituted historically in an oscillating dynamic between the ordinary everydayness of domestication and the extraordinary personal extremities and spectacular actions associated with melodrama. What holds these contraries together is a new emphasis on ‘the interesting’, which, intermeshing sensational situations with appeals to shared socio-emotional experiences, produced a pathos that elicited audience empathy. Central to this aesthetic was the new social role of the family as personal site of social cohesion, which replaced the ties of earlier hierarchical and paternalist social organisation under pressure of industrial capitalism and individualism. The chapter explores the interaction between such broad ‘structures of feeling’ and the nightmarish extremities of melodramatic plotting, musicalised rhetoric, and visual staging. It concludes by arguing that, under pressure from middle-class theatrical reform, domestic melodrama provided characters, situations, dramaturgical devices, and reflexive tropes that paved the way not only for popular film and television drama, but for the achievements of twentieth-century drama tout court.

  • 10 - Melodrama and Gender

  • 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 149-162

  • Summary

    Genre and gender intersect in nineteenth-century melodrama, and melodrama became an important vehicle for thinking about gender in the period. This chapter argues that melodrama is, in all the media of its expression (drama, fiction, and latterly, film) about gender, and reveals the contradictions of gender ideology through heightened modes of performance. The chapter explores the representation of gender roles and social constructions of femininity and masculinity, in well-known domestic and nautical melodramas by Douglas Jerrold and John Thomas Haines. It then goes on to examine the career of Mrs Denvil, a playwright for several East End theatres in the 1840s. Mrs Denvil is an example of the mixed economy of the theatre industry in the first half of the nineteenth century, which was part familial and part commercial. Her work as an adapter of the cheap novels known as ‘penny dreadfuls’ was satirised in Punch, but appreciated in the theatres which staged her work. She is an example of the ways in which women writers of melodrama and sensation put female feeling, action, and agency at the centre of melodramatic texts in theatre, the novel, and (later) in film.

  • 15 - Melodrama in Early Film

  • 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 224-244

  • Summary

    The makers of early movies quickly discovered a market for narrative film and adaptations of popular Victorian and Edwardian stage melodramas. Film studios of various sizes, from 1901-1928 (the ‘silent era’), worked their way through the theatrical repertoire with continuing success proving that the taste for these dramas remained alive. Even as modern cinema technology emerged, filmmakers were still resorting to theatrical artifice. The author’s intent is to offer the reader a loose chronology of the practices of turning stage melodramas into popular enduring motion pictures and their variants (such as serials). The author charts the evolution of the music hall dramatic sketch into a film feature and thence to screen melodrama. These surviving films not only permit viewing a range of 19th century theatrical melodramas but also allow scrutiny of the theatre’s means, resources, and methods. From Edison and Porter, through Selig and Biograph (with Griffith), Pathé with Capellani, Collins with Metro, Tourneur with the Shuberts, Gillette with Essanay, Nielsen with Gad, Martin-Harvey with Wilcox, the melodramas unfold. The essay indicates how these films might be readily accessed.

Page 300 of 1108