Melodrama

Introduction

In its strictest sense, melodrama refers to a genre that developed in France shortly before 1800 and became extremely popular, soon making its way to England in its original form. The form then broadened to include similarities to conventional drama, including a reliance on spectacle, the plot's resolution in a just manner, and heroic characters and villains in conflict.

“Melodrama” comes from the French mélodrame, derived from melos, the Greek word for song. Drame referred to minor forms that conformed to neither the neoclassical definition of comedy nor tragedy. As the name implies, music was used structurally. Songs and dances were built into a melodrama's original score, carefully rehearsed, and kept the orchestra busy throughout the play. Characters were provided with entrance music that clearly indicated their personality, and the orchestra supported the mood at all important points. In early melodrama, music and acting style were inseparable, and long sequences of silent action to musical accompaniment were frequent. Melodramatic acting was thus influenced by the music the orchestra provided. The music dictated much of the timing the actor used and sometimes gave the play a sense of being choreographed rather than acted in the usual sense. The initial identification of melodrama as a minor form was important because it allowed melodrama to develop outside the monopolies of licensed companies in France and, later, in England.

Early Character Types

Early melodramatic characters often were not completely developed, serving instead as vehicles for the quick development of suspense and spectacle on which the plays relied. For example, the heroine typically epitomized goodness, her physical beauty reflecting her purity of heart. She was honest, loyal, respectful of her parents, and above pettiness of any kind. Unless she was married, she was chaste, and if married she was faithful to her husband.

she was chaste, and if married she was faithful to her husband.

Less consistent than the heroine, the hero was at times as pure and noble as she, but at other times, he was easily duped or possessed weaknesses that the villain could exploit. He might be outwitted, but he was unlikely to lose to the villain in a fair fight. Even though historically audiences expected to see the hero rescue the heroine, in serious melodrama, it was sometimes the heroine’s unflinching faithfulness that saved him from his own weakness. Later in the melodrama’s history, charming, roguish characters emerged as heroes. The highwayman, the frontier roughneck, and the city firefighter all took turns in this role.

The villain was at the center of the melodramatic action. He disrupted harmony and plotted real danger to the heroine and hero. Audiences saw no need for him to justify his actions. Other reasons might be given, but greed, lust, or simple malice was usually sufficient. The villain of early melodrama was eloquent, well-dressed, and cultured. In the United States, he was often of European aristocratic descent (or claimed to be).

The heroine’s father was often included. Through him the villain was apt to try to gain control of the heroine. The father could be gullible or vain enough to be swayed by the villain’s smooth talk, but it was equally likely that there was something in his past that the villain might threaten to expose.

was equally likely that there was something in his past that the villain might threaten to expose.

A comic servant or companion was frequently used as a device. Typically, this comic servant or companion instantly saw through the villain, put the situation in perspective, and made light of the high standards of conduct by which other characters feel inconveniently bound.

Structure

The melodrama is generally presented in three acts, although there can be as few as two and as many as five. In the first act, a happy domestic situation is introduced. The heroine's or hero's virtue is quickly established, principal characters are introduced, and exposition is provided. There is frequently a love interest between hero and heroine. The villain arrives on the scene proposing that he marry the heroine, but the playwright finds a way to assure the audience that his love will be rejected. Despite the villain’s confidence, his plans are thwarted, and he leaves vowing revenge.

In the second act, the villain lays out his plans and begins to carry out the plot. The heroine, hero, or both are brought near destruction. In the third act, the situation is resolved in favor of the heroine or hero. Fortunes lost to the villain’s manipulations are restored, and the villain is no longer a threat, having been unmasked and turned over to the authorities or killed by a trap he had intended for someone else.

Early Appeal

The initial appeal of the melodrama came neither through characterization nor plot but rather from the satisfaction the audience gained in seeing good ultimately rewarded and the guilty finally punished. This formula is familiar to modern audiences in forums and continues to appear in many genres. That the heroine was able to escape the villain's machinations unscathed reinforced for audiences the notion that justice ultimately prevails.

The second source of appeal emerged with the advent of stage technology in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Melodramas relied on visual spectacle and supernatural phenomena, and new technological developments such as lighting, revolving stages, elevators, cutaway flats, and moving scenery were elaborate, expensive, and well-advertised. At least one spectacular effect was a virtual requirement of any melodrama.

Evolution of the Genre

Classic melodrama emerged in France around 1790. Several plays may be argued to be the first melodrama. However, the first master of the form is firmly established: French playwright Guilbert de Pixérécourt is credited with making melodrama popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and became a significant force in theatrical history. Pixérécourt’s first produced melodrama was Victor: Ou, L’Enfant de la forêt (Victor, or the child of the forest) in 1798. His first great success followed three years later with Cœlina: Ou, L’Enfant du mystère (pr. 1800; The Tale of Mystery, 1802). Other successes quickly followed. Pixérécourt is credited with the authorship of more than one hundred plays, most of which are melodramas. He remained the most popular author of this form until he died in 1844. Most of his successes were adapted for presentation in England and the United States by others. After Pixérécourt, Victor Ducange, Louis Charles Caigniez, and Adolphe Dennery were the most noteworthy French playwrights of the genre.

Melodrama debuted in England in 1802 with A Tale of Mystery, a play adapted by Thomas Holcroft. As traditional comedy and tragedy waned in popularity, British theaters turned increasingly to other forms to support themselves financially. Melodramas were offered as afterpieces to ensure the success of more revered offerings, including the work of William Shakespeare, or were combined with other forms of popular entertainment to make up an entire evening. Melodramas provided the greatest revenue of any type of drama during this period and may be credited with saving the patent houses from bankruptcy while keeping several other companies prosperous.

Several specialized melodramas joined the French imports. “Aquatic” melodrama used theatrical machinery to create impressive water effects, including cataracts, lakes, rapids, and oceans, into which characters were placed for thrilling climaxes. The first spectacles may have been The Siege of Gibraltar by Charles Dibdin, presented at Covent Garden in 1802. The play's climax was the destruction of a fleet of scale models, which burned and sank.

Crime melodramas were the staple at the Royal Victoria and the Royal Coburg theaters in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The plays presented were bloody to the extreme, with mutilation and murder as staples. Some plays, such as George Dibdin-Pitt’s Sweeney Todd tale The String of Pearls: The Fiend of Fleet Street (pr. 1847), were fictional, but others were dramatizations of sensational crimes. When actual crimes were used, authors felt no obligation to confine themselves to the facts when alteration made for a more satisfying story. Melodramas with social themes appeared in the 1830s, beginning with Douglas Jerrold’s The Rent Day (pr. 1832) and G. F. Taylor’s The Factory Strike (pr. 1838).

In the nineteenth century, Dion Boucicault was the first melodramatist to rival Pixérécourt’s skill or popularity. He divided his time between the United States and England, achieving a series of solid hits on both sides of the Atlantic. He achieved a notable first success with his adaptation of The Corsican Brothers (pr. 1852). His next resounding hit was The Poor of New York (pr. 1857), a social drama based on a French original, which he adapted for London as The Poor of Liverpool and The Streets of London (pr. 1864). He went on to write The Octoroon: Or, Life in Louisiana (pr. 1859, 1861), which dealt with the issue of slavery, and The Long Strike (wr. 1866), in which an innocent man is saved from false conviction by a telegraph message sent and received in the nick of time. With The Colleen Bawn (pr. 1860), Boucicault began his work with Irish plays, going on to create Arrah-na-Pogue: Or, The Wicklow Wedding (pr. 1864) and The Shaughraun (pr. 1874). Boucicault was probably the most popular author of the 1850s and 1860s. After that, his popularity waned, but he continued to write until his death.

American Melodrama

As melodrama moved to the United States, it followed the pattern established in England. The earliest melodramas were English imports, many of them in turn adapted from French originals. Yet, original dramas relying on uniquely American themes began to appear in the 1820s. The frontier roughneck stock character first appeared in an 1827 production number, “The Hunter of Kentucky,” by Noah Ludlow. Always ready for a fight, inclined to brag and drink, but with homespun morality, the native hero had a long history that continued to evolve: Future incarnations had the hero making his way across the country as a hapless bumpkin, a lovable Irishman, or a big-city firefighter.

Temperance melodramas appeared in 1844 with The Drunkard: Or, The Fallen Saved by William H. Smith but were presented and later published anonymously. Ten Nights in a Barroom (1858) by William Pratt followed. Both owe their formula to Fifteen Years of a Drunkard’s Life (1828) by Douglas Jerrold. Alcohol was presented as a genuine evil in these pieces, making them attractive propaganda for the growing temperance movement and assuring continual production until Prohibition in the 1920s. Despite several attempts to break a drinking habit encouraged by the villain, the hero slides into increasing addiction while his domestic situation deteriorates. He is eventually saved by the love of his family, who refuse to give up on him.

When the Indigenous American was presented in American plays in the 1820s, it tended to be as the “noble savage” envisioned by author James Fenimore Cooper. The melodrama acquired a new vision of the Indigenous American in 1838 with the staging of The Jibbenainosay. Based on a novel by , Nick of the Woods: Or, The Jibbenainosay, A Tale of Kentucky (1837), the play depicts an ordinarily quiet man who kills any Indigneous American he can catch, usually just as one is about to commit some atrocity. While popularizing a new image of Indigenous Americans, the Nick plays laid the foundation for many plots involving settlers and evil Indigenous peoples.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin deserves special note among melodramas. It was adapted for the stage in several versions, but the most popular was by George L. Aiken in 1852. Its plot followed classic melodramatic themes and gained international popularity. It ran continually, gaining prominence until the 1880s when it declined, although it continued to be performed regularly until the Great Depression of the 1930s. With its sympathetic heroine and her child, an evil, unrepentant villain, and visual spectacle, it had all the elements on which melodrama’s success had been built. It was not unusual to find simultaneous productions in large cities. Some estimates make Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most frequently performed play in American history.

Legacy

With its naïve sense of justice, superficial stock characters, and contrived resolutions, melodrama lost its appeal as theatrical tastes moved toward realism in the early twentieth century. Classical melodrama is viable in the twenty-first century only as a historical offering or perhaps in a spoofed form, betraying the sincerity with which it was originally presented.

Nonetheless, melodrama has exerted a lasting impact on theater. Because melodrama heavily used the orchestra to deliver music written especially for this medium, it can be argued that the subsequent and thoughtful matching of musical material to emotional moments in musicals, films, and television shows derives from melodrama and supports the careful creation of underscoring in these artistic media.

Melodrama’s influence also continues to be felt in the use of spectacle. Each melodrama contained at least one scene in which some elaborate stage effect was used. Among these were fire, collapsing buildings, running water, and avalanches. Merely suggestive at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the spectacle scene was impressive in its elaborateness and believability by the end of the century. Melodrama can be credited with spurring the inventiveness of set designers and set builders and with confirming the value of carefully created visual effects achieved at considerable expense.

In the twenty-first century, many local theaters have begun specializing in producing and performing melodramas for modern audiences. For example, Great American Melodrama in California regularly performs melodramas and similar vaudeville productions for audiences who enjoy theatrical throwbacks. Often, these performances encourage audience participation. Although not explicitly staging melodramas, musical theater and opera continue to use elements of the genre in the twenty-first century. 

Bibliography

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Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976.

Disher, M. Willson. Melodrama: Plots That Thrilled. New York: Macmillan, 1954.

Donat, Misha. “There Is Nothing Wrong With Melodrama.” Creative Screenwriting, 11 Nov. 2019, www.creativescreenwriting.com/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-melodrama. Accessed 25 July 2024.

“The Great American Melodrama.” The Great American Melodrama, americanmelodrama.com/about-us/#what-we-do. Accessed 25 July 2024.

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