Experiencing Melodrama, Imagining Audiences: Perspectives on the Representation of the Melodrama Spectator

This article considers representations of melodrama audiences by Louis-Léopold Boilly and Honoré Daumier and what they may or may not tell us about spectator response. It also looks at emotional response to melodrama as a form of active spectatorship.

Melodrama's Modern

Confronting the paradox of melodrama as an apparently outdated Victorian stage form now argued as the overarching modality of modern screen fiction, this essay rethinks the nature of melodrama's 'modern' as an aesthetic modality capable of channelling the social through individual protagonists. Devising staging and plotting that foregrounds emotional and moral consequences of actions, and drawing on musicalisation of performance and word to embody feeling, the melodramatic mode creates haptic connection with audiences, inviting empathy with the sensations and 'human interest' of other's experiences, while it discursively binds the social into the personal in the acculturated images, turns of speech, and cultural references through which its characters' emotions and actions are expressed. Arguing shifting criteria of verisimilitude under pressure of changing social conditions and emergence of new technologies, the essay shows how melodrama's personalisation of the social evolves in modern screen media through the resources of cinematography.

Pets, People, and the Enduring ‘Dogaturgy’ of Nineteenth-Century Dog Dramas

Dogs began playing new roles as emotional companions in Eurowestern households during the mid-1800s; by the 1880s, dogs were widely considered ‘family members’ in middle-class homes. The nineteenth-century ‘dog drama’, a type of melodrama, helps illuminate how, when, and why this attitudinal change occurred. The transatlantic appeal of dog dramas (such as René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's 1814 melodrama The Dog of Montargis) and performers who specialised in the genre (such as U.S. actor-entrepreneur Edwin Blanchard) suggest that sentimental stories about dogs appealed to working-class people as well. These plays reflected, and perhaps contributed to, changing views about dogs during the nineteenth century. The dog drama and its afterlives (in film, television, and social media) shed light on both the good intentions and troubling contradictions inherent in humans’ relationships with nonhuman animals, especially pets.

The Modern Weaver Lad: Melodrama and Dialect Literature

Nineteenth-century Lancastrians feared the death of regional dialects due to increased migration to manufacturing areas, the expansion of the railways, and compulsory state education. This fear fuelled the proliferation of dialect glossaries as well as dialect writing in the form of poems, songs, stories, and sketches. While scholars have written about these forms, the role of Lancashire dialect in theatrical contexts has been understudied. This article draws on recent studies in melodrama and performance sociolinguistics to examine Lancashire dialect writer Ben Brierley's domestic melodrama The Lancashire Weaver Lad. I argue that through its complex representation of ‘Lancashireness’ the play provided new ways for mid-Victorian Lancastrians to understand, construct, and perform modern Lancashire identities.

(Un)making a Monster: Melodrama, The Satirist, and the Cartoons of Samuel De Wilde

Our essay takes up the well-known satirical print, ‘The Monster Melo-Drame’, and re-attaches it to several contexts to bring forward its richness and ambiguity as an image. We begin by considering its artist (Samuel De Wilde), printer (Samuel Tipper), and publisher ( The Satirist), interpreting the print in its original publication and in dialogue with the essay that accompanied it in the January 1808 issue of the Satirist. The image, we argue, should not be read on its own but rather as the first of a trio of prints De Wilde made for that magazine. Taken together, the images show the Satirist engaging in a sustained campaign against London’s Theatres Royal, one in which melodrama is a subject but not a primary target. Part of our essay’s work is necessarily that of description: identifying figures, references, and tableaux as these prints comment on a rapidly changing theatrical scene between 1807 and 1809. Considered as a set, De Wilde’s prints constituted a fundamental part of the Satirist’s attacks on the Drury Lane Theatre management, particularly Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his son Thomas Sheridan, whom they represent as corrupt caretakers of that institution and of the national drama.