Melodrama

James L. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138283831
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351630535
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1973, this book explores the genre of melodrama. After discussing the defining characteristics of melodrama, the book examines the dramatic structures of the two major and contrasting emotions presented in melodrama: triumph and defeat. It concludes with a reflection on the ways in which elements of melodrama have appeared in protest theatre.

1

The Nature of Melodrama

What is melodrama? In 1913 William Gillette confessed that even when he questioned ‘really intellectual people’ none of them ‘appeared to be certain’. The situation has not changed. Ask a musician, or a literary scholar, or even that convenient abstraction the man in the street. You will get three very different answers.

The first melodrama, the musician points out, was Pygmalion, a brief scène lyrique with libretto by Jean Jacques Rousseau. The plot is simplicity itself: Pygmalion chips away at his statue of Galathée, the marble comes to life, breathes a few words (mostly ‘moi’) and sinks into the arms of her astonished creator as the curtain falls. The novelty lies in Rousseau’s method of linking words with music. He thought French too harsh a language to be sung and for Pygmalion devised instead a kind of musical leap-frog:

un genre de drame, dans lequel les paroles et la musique, au lieu de marcher ensemble, se font entendre successivement, et ou la phrase parlee est en quelque sorte annoncee et preparee par la phrase musicale. [a type of drama in which words and music, instead of going together, are heard alternately, and where the spoken phrase is, as it were, announced and prepared by the musical phrase.]

(Observations sur l’Alceste de M. Gluck, 1774, Oeuvres complètes, Paris, 1836–37, III. 563)

Thus while Pygmalion broods in silence, music expresses his dejection; when he speaks, it stops; he takes up the chisel, and it starts again. The idea caught on. Pygmalion was performed at Lyons in 1770, at Weimar in 1772 and took Paris by storm in 1775. Goethe praised it, and Georg Benda paid it the compliment of imitation in his Ariadne auf Naxos (1774). So did Florian, whose Héro et Léandre (1785) shows the heroine anxiously monologuing at Sestos while a storm lashes the Hellespont and Leandre is glimpsed sinking beneath the waves. Meanwhile, Benda carried the experiment further in his Medea (1775), with dialogue spoken not in between but over the music. It became necessary to distinguish such works from opera proper, and the term to hand was mélodrame. The word derives from the Greek melos (music), and with this root meaning of music-drama was a common eighteenth-century synonym for opera – a meaning which the Italian melodramma retains today. Rousseau still thought of mélodrame as opera in 1774, for he declared in the Observations that Pygmalion had created a new genre mid-way between simple declamation and ‘le veritable mélodrame’. But by 1785 Florian was writing of his Hero as a ‘mélodrame’, and Benda’s Ariadne was so entitled when it appeared in Paris in 1781. By the turn of the century the semantic shift was complete, and melodrama meant what for the musician it means today: ‘a play, or a passage in a play, or a poem, in which the spoken voice is used against a musical background’ (Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 9th edition, 1955, p. 624). Curiously enough, Rousseau’s invention and Benda’s extension of it can still be heard today. Mozart’s opera Zaïde has two melodramas embedded in it, and Beethoven uses one in the grave-digging scene of Fidelio and another at the end of Egmont. Weber, Schumann and Bizet have all written melodramas; so has Poulenc whose La Voix humaine presents a modern Ariadne desperately calling up her lover on the telephone.

Meanwhile, Rousseau’s mélodrame had been swallowed whole by that voracious python the Boulevard du Temple, where since 1670 fit-up booths had entertained the Parisian mob with tumblers, jugglers, stiltwalkers, rope-dancers, puppeteers, magicians, infant prodigies, freaks and animals, harlequinades, fairy-tales adapted from Perrault and spectacular musical pantomimes on mythical, historic or contemporary themes, performed in dumbshow with explanatory placards to aid the understanding. Fragments of dialogue, transforming pantomime into pantomime dialoguée, crept into Ribié’s La Prise de Mitylène, performed under Arnould-Mussot at his magnificent Théâtre de l’Ambigu–Comique. Here in 1785 was staged Florian’s Galathée, a bastard mélodrame with dialogue in rhymed couplets, elaborate pantomime, a ‘ballet général’ and musical numbers set to popular operatic airs cribbed from Sedaine’s music-drama Richard Coeur-de–Lion. 1792 brought a version of Schiller’s Die Räuber, and 1800 Cœlina ou l’Enfant du mystère, with which Guilbert de Pixerécourt established overnight the pattern of popular melodrama for the next hundred years.

Almost everything in Cœlina was borrowed, and not only from the romance of the same title by Ducray–Duminil which provided Pixerécourt with his first two acts. The rugged mountain scenery of Act Three, complete with distant peaks, foaming river, ‘practical’ bridge and rustic millhouse, was first built for Schiller. Boulevard pantomime provides the action-packed but almost wordless finale, and a mute old man who ‘talks’ by means of dumbshow. The singing miller and clodhopping peasantry appear by courtesy of Sedaine’s music-drama, which also siphons off the ‘comic relief’ into separate characters remote from the main action. But the greatest debt is to the drame, that genre of serious prose tragicomedy which derives its sentimentality from Cumberland and its bourgeois didacticism from the horrible homilies of George Lillo. For excitement and suspense, Cœlina relies heavily on such well-worn devices as long-lost children, lying letters, tell-tale scars, secret marriages, murders frustrated arid plots overheard – all of them readily available in Cumberland’s comedies, where Pixerécourt could also have discovered his dramatis personae. Augusta Aubrey, Cumberland’s much-harassed heroine in The Fashionable Lover is, like Cœlina, a wretched orphan driven from the sheltering roof, robbed of her fortune by a villainous uncle and pestered by unwanted attentions (‘resistance is in vain; if you refuse my favours, Madam, you shall feel my force’). Both plays have a handsome and courageous hero, a comic servant who befriends innocence in distress and a mysterious stranger, later revealed as the heroine’s long-lost father (‘Gracious Providence, this is too much!’). Such providential platitudes, and a liberal garnish of moral maxims, are another common element, but the two dramatists differ on questions of practical justice. Cumberland’s rake Lord Abberville, like many a villain of the drame, is allowed to escape punishment by a timely reformation at the final curtain (‘I have been lost in error’). Pixerécourt has no truck with such sentimental palliatives. His Truguelin is arrested and sent for trial, after suffering agonies of conscience in the electric atmosphere of an Alpine thunderstorm:

Il parcourt le théâtre comme un insensé. Où fuir? où porter ma honte et mes remords? …. Il me semble que tout, dans la nature, se réunit pour m’accuser. Ces mots terribles retentissent sans cesse a mon oreille: point de repos pour l’assassin! vengeance! vengeance! [He wanders about the stage like a madman. Whither shall I fly? where shall I take my shame and my remorse?…. I feel as though everything in nature conspires to accuse me. Those terrible words resound unceasingly in my ear: no rest for the murderer! vengeance! vengeance!]

Pixerécourt blended his ingredients shrewdly. Cœlina was a great theatrical success. It ran for 387 performances on the Boulevard, was translated into Dutch, German and English, and in 1802 appeared at Covent Garden as A Tale of Mystery. This adaptation, by Thomas Holcroft, calls for extensive background music to heighten entrances, indicate character and underline the mood of a scene. The first act alone asks for ‘soft music’, ‘sweet and cheerful music’, ‘confused music’, ‘threatening music’, ‘music to express discontent and alarm’, ‘music of doubt and terror’ and much more besides. Pixerécourt published Cœlina in 1800 as a ‘drame en trois actes, en prose, et à grand spectacle’ [‘spectacular prose drama in three acts’].

Holcroft published A Tale of Mystery in 1802 as a ‘melo-drame’ Thousands of melodramas appeared on the English stage during the nineteenth century; gradually their musical element dwindled into insignificance, and eventually it disappeared altogether. But the name remained, and melodrama thus came to mean what the Oxford English Dictionary understands by the term: ‘a dramatic piece characterized by sensational incident and violent appeals to the emotions, but with a happy ending’. This cool definition has been conveniently expanded by Frank Rahill in The World of Melodrama (Pennsylvania, 1967):

Melodrama is a form of dramatic composition in prose partaking of the nature of tragedy, comedy, pantomime, and spectacle, and intended for a popular audience. Primarily concerned with situation and plot, it calls upon mimed action extensively and employs a more or less fixed complement of stock characters, the most important of which are a suffering heroine or hero, a persecuting villain, and a benevolent comic. It is conventionally moral and humanitarian in point of view and sentimental and optimistic in temper, concluding its fable happily with virtue rewarded after many trials and vice punished. Characteristically it offers elaborate scenic accessories and miscellaneous divertissements and introduces music freely, typically to underscore dramatic effect. (p. xiv)

Behind this formulation, which might be a point-for–point summary of A Tale of Mystery, lie all the tawdry splendours of the Victorian melodrama. Here they are, touting for custom in the staccato phrases of some contemporary playbills:

THRILLING INCIDENTS! STARTLING SITUATIONS. ROBBERY AT THE MANSION! THE RAILWAY MURDER. THE PERILS OF THE STEAM SAW MILL. False Denunciation! Arrest of the innocent! TERRIFIC LONG SWORD COMBAT! Julian Overpowered by the Pirates. NOVELTY UNPRECEDENTED! Terrific and Powerful Effects, LAKE OF TRANSPARENT ROLLING FIRE! THE SKELETON MONK! AFFLICTION AND REMORSE! The Suffering Wife, The dissipated Husband, and the Sick Child. Luke and the Seducer! TERRIBLE DEGRADATION OF AGNES! LADY HATTON LEADS A LIFE OF PIETY. ‘ARCHIBALD, will you not bless me before I die?’ ‘Give me back my Husband.’ WONDERFUL DENOUEMENT! The Rescue of Emma Deane. THE DEFENCE OF THE CONSULATE. ‘You may take my life—But you cannot take from me my Victoria Cross.’ TRIUMPH OF THE BRITISH FLAG OVER SLAVERY. The Real Murderer Discovered. CORNERED! THE LIBERTINE DESTROYED. DEATH BY POISON. JUDGMENT OVERTAKES THE GUILTY! The execution. The Death Struggle! DESTRUCTION OF THE MURDERER BY THE FANGS OF THE FAITHFUL DOG. HOME SWEET HOME.

The plays so described range from My Poll and My Partner Joe (1835) to The Great World of London (1898). Under their influence melodrama has joined the long list of once-precise words hopelessly debased by popular misuse. No longer does it suggest the dramatic genre invented by Pixerécourt. It is a term which the man in the street loosely applies to any machine-made entertainment dealing in vulgar extravagance, implausible motivation, meretricious sensation and spurious pathos. Even William Archer used it in this sense in The Old Drama and the New (1923), when he exalted the modern drama of Archer, Pinero and Shaw by debasing what he called ‘the general ruck of Elizabethan melodramas’ (p. 100). These apparently include The Revenger’s Tragedy – a ‘monstrous melodrama’ (p. 74) – and The Duchess of Malfi – a sequence of ‘crude and arbitrary horrors which would be hooted or laughed off the stage if a melodramatist of today dared to offer them to his public’ (p. 61). In short, melodrama has in popular use become a blanket term of abuse and contempt. It is probably the dirtiest word a drama critic dare print.

Surprisingly, modern scholars not attempting denigration have often echoed Archer’s descriptions, and even applied them more widely. Handbooks of dramatic terms list as melodramas works by such tragic dramatists as Aeschylus and Euripides, Shakespeare, Tourneur and Webster, Otway, Lillo, Schiller, Gorky, Ibsen, Synge, O’Neill and Arthur Miller. What possible meaning can be attached to melodrama in such a context? Can any real similarities exist between plays as diverse as The Persians, Medea, Richard III, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, The Orphan, The London Merchant, Die Räuber, The Lower Depths, An Enemy of the People, Riders to the Sea, The Iceman Cometh and Death of a Salesman?And what can such plays have in common with East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret, Black-ey’d Susan and The Bells? I believe it is possible to show that these exciting Victorian dramas share with many Greek, Elizabethan and modern ‘tragedies’ a fundamentally melodramatic view of life, which conditions their organic form and dictates the emotional responses of an audience.

In Tragedy and Melodrama (Seattle, 1968), Robert Bechtold Heilman argues persuasively that tragic man is essentially ‘divided’ and melodramatic man essentially ‘whole’. Antigone cannot bury her brother without offending civil law, Orestes and Hamlet cannot avenge their fathers’ deaths without committing murder, Macbeth cannot gain the crown without violating moral sanctions which he respects. In tragedy therefore, ‘no villain need be’; in Meredith’s fine phrase man is ‘betrayed by what is false within’. In melodrama man remains undivided, free from the agony of choosing between conflicting imperatives and desires. He greets every situation with an unwavering single impulse which absorbs his whole personality. If there is danger he is courageous, if there is political corruption he exposes it, untroubled by cowardice, weakness or doubt, self-interest or thought of self-preservation. By itself, such ‘wholeness’ is morally uncommitted: Shelley’s Count Cenci is as totally devoted to evil as Ibsen’s Dr Stockmann is to good. Both are debarred from that growth in personal awareness brought about by the anagnorisis or discovery of tragedy: the evil man who is wholly evil is prevented by his wholeness from the self-understanding that might curb his villainy, and the wholly good man who looks inward has nothing to contemplate but his own virtuous perfection. It follows that the undivided protagonist of melodrama has only external pressures to fight against: an evil man, a social group, a hostile ideology, a natural force, an accident or chance, an obdurate fate or a malign deity. It is this total dependence upon external adversaries which finally separates melodrama from all other serious dramatic forms. Oedipus Rex and The Persians both deal in human suffering, but Oedipus’ agonies are brought about by his own hubris while the Persians are helpless victims of a vast military disaster. Sophocles wrote tragedy and Aeschylus melodrama. Or, from the seventeenth century, compare Phedre and The Duchess of Malfi. Racine’s heroine is destroyed by her own divided passions; Webster’s duchess – despite her social and perhaps moral peccadilloes – by the machinations of her evil brothers. Racine wrote tragedy and Webster melodrama. One play deals with self-knowledge, the other with self-preservation; one is concerned with restructuring relations with the universe, the other with restructuring relations with other people or events or things.

Characteristically, melodrama presses its own extreme conflicts to extreme conclusions. Only three are possible, for when an undivided protagonist opposes a hostile world – whether in real life or on the stage – the result must be stalemate, victory or defeat. Thus in the real-life conflict of man against nature, Crow-hurst withdraws from the struggle between his one-man catamaran and the cruel sea, Hillary plants a Union Jack on the summit of Everest, and Captain Scott perishes in the blizzards of Antarctica. So in the theatre, where the eternal stalemate of Sartre’s Huis clos is rare, an avalanche crushes Ibsen’s Brand but not the indestructible heroine of Boucicault’s Pauvrette, strong tides rob Maurya of all her sons in Synge’s Riders to the Sea but the fight to save a life threatened by natural accidents is always successful in The Doctors, evil men strangle Webster’s duchess but Cœlina lives to see Trugeulin arrested, far-fetched coincidence brings about the unlucky deaths of Romeo and Juliet but saves from execution at the yardarm William the sailor hero of Black-ey’d Susan. The essential point is that resolutions of triumph or defeat indicate not different dramatic structures but simply alternative formulations of the same conflict, opposite extremes of the same melodramatic spectrum.

Such clear-cut endings offer an audience emotional pleasures equally clear-cut and extreme. Sailor Will...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• 1 THE NATURE OF MELODRAMA
• 2 TRIUMPH
• 3 DEFEAT
• 4 PROTEST
• BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX OF PROPER NAMES
• INDEX OF TITLES