Melodrama, Mask and Improvisation

“In a well-written drama, the story comes out of the characters. The characters in a well-written melodrama come out of the story.”

The Victorian stage melodrama featured six stock characters: the hero, the villain, the heroine, an aged parent, a sidekick and a servant of the aged parent engaged in a sensational plot featuring themes of love and murder. Often the good but not very clever hero is duped by a scheming villain, who has eyes on the damsel in distress until fate intervenes at the end to ensure the triumph of good over evil. English melodrama evolved from the tradition of populist drama established during the Middle Ages by mystery and morality plays, under influences from Italian commedia dell’arte as well as German Sturm und Drang drama and Parisian melodrama of the post-Revolutionary period.[12] A notable French melodramatist was Pixérécourt whose La Femme a deux maris was very popular.[13] The first English play to be called a melodrama or ‘melo drame’ was A Tale of Mystery (1802) by Thomas Holcroft. Thi s was an example of the Gothic genre, a previous theatrical example of which was The Castle Spectre (1797) by Matthew Gregory Lewis. Other Gothic melodramas include The Miller and his Men (1813) by Isaac Pocock, The Woodsman’s Hut (1814) by Samuel Arnold and The Broken Sword (1816) by William Dimond. Supplanting the Gothic, t he next popular sub-genre was the nautical melodrama, pioneered by Douglas Jerrold in his Black-E yed Susan (1829). Other nautical melodramas included Jerrold’s The M utiny at the Nore (1830) and The Red Rover (1829) by Edward Fitzball (Rowell 1953).