Melodrama

Melodrama, type of play popular all over Europe in the 19th century. The term derives from the use of incidental music in spoken dramas, which became customary in German theatres during the 18th century, and from the French mélodrame, a dumb show accompanied by music; its application to Gothic tales of horror and mystery, vice, and virtue triumphant stems from the early works of Goethe (Götz von Berlichingen, 1773) and Schiller (Die Räuber, 1782), and its most important authors on the Continent were Kotzebue and Pixérécourt. It was first introduced into England through translations of their plays, particularly those made by Thomas Holcroft, whose A Tale of Mystery (1802), based on Pixérécourt's Coelina; ou, L'Enfant de mystère (1800), was the first work in England to be labelled a melodrama. Gradually the music became less important, and the setting of the plays less Gothic. The Brigand (1829) by Planché was one of the last of the old-fashioned musical melodramas; the setting of Jerrold's Fifteen Years of a Drunkard's Life (1828) heralded an era of domestic melodrama, which ran concurrently with a vogue for plays based on real-life or legendary crimes—the anonymous Maria Marten; or, The Murder in the Red Barn, which became a classic of melodrama in the 1830s; Fitzball's Jonathan Bradford; or, The Murder at the Roadside Inn (1823); and Dibdin Pitt's Sweeney Todd; or, The Fiend of Fleet Street (1847).

The growth of a middle-class audience produced a new type of melodrama, notably at the Adelphi Theatre under Buckstone. While the rougher elements on the Surrey side enjoyed the horrors of real life borrowed from Les Bohémiens de Paris (1843), with its glimpses of the Paris or London underworld in slums and sewers, prosperous merchant families enjoyed the equally spectacular but less violent domestic tragedies of the elder Dumas, among them Pauline (1840), seen by Queen Victoria at the Princess's Theatre in 1851, and The Corsican Brothers (1852), the latter adapted by Boucicault. Among his other adaptations was one of Les Pauvres de Paris, which was first seen in Liverpool in 1864 as The Poor (or The Streets) of Liverpool. A new phenomenon at this time was the sudden success of the numerous dramatizations of popular novels by women writers— Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Mrs Henry Wood's East Lynne (1861), and Miss Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862). Few of the prolific dramatists of the time bothered to concoct their own plots, though the exercise of the copyright laws in the 1860s began to inhibit their wholesale piracy. None the less, all the melodramas staged by Irving at the Lyceum, from Leopold Lewis's The Bells in 1871 to Boucicault's The Corsican Brothers in 1880, originated on the Continent. Other actor-managers had their greatest successes with dramatizations of novels—Tree with Du Maurier's Trilby (1895), Alexander with Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1896), Martin-Harvey with Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, retitled The Only Way (1899), and Fred Terry with Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903). Some exceptions over the years were The Silver King (1882) by Henry Arthur Jones and Herman; The Sign of the Cross (1895) by Wilson Barrett; and the nautical melodramas popularized by William Terriss at the Adelphi. The turn of the century saw spectacular melodramas staged at Drury Lane, with shipwrecks, railway accidents, earthquakes, and horse-racing, and the joint productions of the Melville brothers with The Worst Woman in London (1899) and The Bad Girl of the Family (1909). Melodrama had come a long way from its original simplicity, which equated poverty with virtue and wealth with villainy. The day of true melodrama was over, and occasional revivals of such classic examples as Maria Marten, East Lynne, and The Streets of London have been played as comic caricatures, but melodramatic elements continue to flourish in the theatre as they have done since the time of Euripides.