Romantic Melodrama is five-year research project funded by The British Academy and sponsored by Queen Mary University of London. It has received essential and generous support from the Penn Libraries, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania. The duration of the British Academy grant is four years, and will run through the summer of 2024, after which the project will continue until its completion.
Beginning with the 18 March 1793 premiere of Edward Jerningham’s Margaret of Anjou at the Haymarket Theatre, it aims to document every staging of melodrama in the Britain before the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843. These first fifty years of performance witnessed melodrama’s astonishing popularity and rapid innovations, as theatres large and small, metropolitan and provincial, adapted it to their own purposes.
Taking its cues from early responses, where audiences experienced melodrama’s powerful stage effects and highly wrought scenes of suspense as a sort of augmented reality, the project explores how the form’s techniques (such as continuous music, extensive pantomime, and immersive soundscapes) created a new theatre of sensation that heightened the affective experience of audiences. At the same time, the research tracks how these same techniques impacted writers working in other printed genres and media. Our aim is to present melodrama——and theatrical performance more generally——as an exemplary and revealing form in Romantic-period culture.
This is a beta site for the project. This database currently contains 1,430 records and will be continually updated over the course of the project. We project a repository of over 5,000 records at its completion.