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Excerpt from A Study of Melodrama in England From 1800 to 1840: A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy One of the manifestations of the Romantic Movement in England was the rise and great popularity of melodrama. Because of the paucity of literary attainments that accompanied melodrama, this type of play has been uniformly neglected or else passed over with slight comments. Although it is true that few melodramas deserve mention if style and high dramatic qualities are to be considered, nevertheless, inasmuch as the form has contributed largely to the art of the theatre, the neglect is hard to explain. This investigation of the dramatic and theatrical history of England between the years 1764 and 1840 has been made, therefore, in an attempt to supply some information about an almost unknown group of plays and playwrights. The great variety of forms that melodrama assumed and the great number of methods employed in its manufacture, the many devices that were employed, consciously or unconsciously, to disguise it, have rendered the discovery of entirely satisfactory criteria for its determination, difficult. That difficulty is constantly emphasized by the great number of definitions that have been constructed to designate it. If these difficulties have not been altogether overcome in this study, it is because no one clear cut standard of melodrama existed in the period under consideration, as no single type of melodrama exists today. Throughout the investigation, it was deemed wise to give weight to the statements of the men whose business it was to handle plays and players in the last decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth centuries. If Elliston, Colman, Jerrold, Boaden, or Macready looked upon a certain type of play as a melodrama, surely his judgment reflects the standard of his day as the declarations of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. William Archer, or Mr. Owen Davis reflect the standard of ours. A further explanation seems necessary in this foreword. Both the spelling of the word melodrama and the form which the word designated changed often in a few decades. What was true in England was equally true in France whence the English word was borrowed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Throughout the nineteenth century, people heard more music in the theatre—accompanying popular dramas such as Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Corsican Brothers, The Three Musketeers, as well as historical romances by Shakespeare and Schiller—than they did in almost any other area of their lives. But unlike film music, theatrical music has received very little attention from scholars and so it has been largely lost to us. In this groundbreaking study, Michael V. Pisani goes in search of these abandoned sounds. Mining old manuscripts and newspapers, he finds that starting in the 1790s, theatrical managers in Britain and the United States began to rely on music to play an interpretive role in melodramatic productions. During the nineteenth century, instrumental music—in addition to song—was a common feature in the production of stage plays. The music played by instrumental ensembles not only enlivened performances but also served other important functions. Many actors and actresses found that accompanimental music helped them sustain the emotional pitch of a monologue or dialogue sequence. Music also helped audiences to identify the motivations of characters. Playwrights used music to hold together the hybrid elements of melodrama, heighten the build toward sensation, and dignify the tragic pathos of villains and other characters. Music also aided manager-directors by providing cues for lighting and other stage effects. Moreover, in a century of seismic social and economic changes, music could provide a moral compass in an uncertain moral universe. Featuring dozens of musical examples and images of the old theatres, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre charts the progress of the genre from its earliest use in the eighteenth century to the elaborate stage productions of the very early twentieth century.
In this groundbreaking investigation into the nature and meanings of melodrama in American culture between 1880 and 1920, Ben Singer offers a challenging new reevaluation of early American cinema and the era that spawned it. Singer looks back to the sensational or "blood and thunder" melodramas (e.g., The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, etc.) and uncovers a fundamentally modern cultural expression, one reflecting spectacular transformations in the sensory environment of the metropolis, in the experience of capitalism, in the popular imagination of gender, and in the exploitation of the thrill in popular amusement. Written with verve and panache, and illustrated with 100 striking photos and drawings, Singer's study provides an invaluable historical and conceptual map both of melodrama as a genre on stage and screen and of modernity as a pivotal idea in social theory.
This pathbreaking work analyzes melodrama as not merely a theatrical genre but as a behavioral paradigm of the nineteenth century, manifest in the theater, in literature, and in society. It shows how the melodramatic mode reaffirmed the familial, hierarchical, and public grounds for ethical behavior and identity that characterized models of social exchange and organization.
David Grimsted's Melodrama Unveiled explores early American drama to try to understand why such severely limited plays were so popular for so long. Concerned with both the plays and the dramatic settings that gave them life, Grimsted offers us rich descriptions of the interaction of performers, audiences, critics, managers, and stage mechanics. Because these plays had to appeal immediately and directly to diverse audiences, they provide dramatic clues to the least common denominator of social values and concerns. In considering both the context and content of popular culture, Grimsted's book suggests how theater reflected the rapidly changing society of antebellum America.