Emerging in the 1790s from the boulevards of revolutionary France, from late-eighteenth-century European experimental theatre, and from Gothic drama in Britain, melodrama is at once central to Romanticism and a creature of it. Its origins and popular ascent, its trafficking in speed and sensation, coincide with the years of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath. As Jeffrey Cox has argued, melodrama’s penchant for providing thrilling resolutions to stories of danger and doom cannot be fully understood outside of Romanticism’s dominant context of nearly continuous and total war. Even Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery (1802), an adaptation of Pixérécourt’s Coelina and the first ‘melo drame’ so-called in English, was only made possible when the brief Peace of Amiens (1802-3) allowed Holcroft to slip across the Channel to Paris, where he cribbed the Coelina’s music, staging, and book during a week of intensive viewing. The hit of the 1802-3 season, A Tale of Mystery inspired further plays. Thus far, our research has uncovered 49 plays calling themselves some variant of ‘melodrama’ or ‘melodramatic’ staged between 1803 and 1812. Unlike the formulaic and highly conventional versions of popular melodrama of later decades, these early performances were heterogeneous and varied, drawing for their stories and styles on a range of dramaturgies including pantomime, opera, and ballet. What they all shared was what Samuel Coleridge called ‘situations’: scenes of tension and suspense aided by movement and music expressive of plot. Audiences found the experience utterly new: a theatre of sensation providing a kind of heightened realism, in which the senses and the heart could be entirely engaged.
This combination of sensation and affective experience, accompanied by a continuous, expressive score, quickly became dominant not just in self-proclaimed melodramas but also in other theatrical genres. Between 1813 and 1823, the number of melodramas nearly tripled as longstanding theatrical genres like comedy, burlesque, and opera were refitted to this newly popular, all-consuming mode. A cartoon originally published in December of 1807 – of a many-headed monster trampling the plays of elder dramatists as theatre shareholders suckle at its teats – was quickly redubbed ‘The Monster Melodrama’ in the January 1808 issue of The Satirist. This chimerical creature, reassembled from the dismembered limbs of older theatrical forms, embodies melodrama’s monstrous hybridity, which arises from its willingness to combine an unsettling range of aesthetic practices. Writing of Matthew Lewis’s new melodrama, Timour the Tartar (1811), a reviewer for The Dramatic Censor signing his name ‘Oliver Old Times’ complains of being ‘kept broad awake’ during the performance ‘by the bray of kettle drums, the galloping of horses, and the clangour of the trumpets’. Horrified by this ‘phenomenon of bad taste’, he concludes ‘We are becoming a warlike people, Mr. Editor … and what before [we] would have turned from in disgust, [we] now contemplate with pleasure’. What such accounts make clear is that melodrama was indeed a ‘phenomenon’, its combination of sound, score, and special effects reflecting romanticism’s changing acoustic world and affective sensibilities.