The Acting of Melodrama
- The Acting of Melodrama
Michael R. Booth
Associate Professor of English at Royal Military College, Kingston; editor of 31 Stories (1960), and author of Eighteenth-Century Tragedy (1964)
NOTES
1. The chief studies of English melodrama are contained in Ernest Reynolds, Early Victorian Drama (London, 1936); M. W. Disher, Blood and Thunder (London, 1949) and Melodrama (London, 1954); George Rowell, The Victorian Theatre (London, 1956); and Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, rev. ed., Ill and IV (Cambridge 1955, 1959).
2. The best modern study of nineteenth-century acting is Alan Downer, “Players and Painted Stage; Nineteenth Century Acting,” PMLA, LXI (June, 1946), 522–76. Downer devotes only a page to melodramatic acting. The chapter in E. B. Watson, Sheridan to Robertson (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), entitled “Acting of Melodrama” is concerned mainly with Charles Kean and Fechter, who were really outside the main stream of melodramatic acting.
3. “The Theatrical Young Gentleman,” Sketches by Boz (London, 1903), 432.
4. Our Recent Actors (London, 1888), I, 8–9.
5. Walt Whitman, writing of American tragic acting generally, objects to the portrayal of the passions “by all kinds of unnatural jerks, swings, screwings of the nerves of the face, rolling of the eyes, and so on.” The Brooklyn Eagle, Dec. 26, 1846, quoted in The American Theatre, ed. Montrose Moses and John Brown (New York, 1934), 70.
6. Letters from a Theatrical Scene-Painter (London, 1880), 34.
7. Ibid., 86.
8. Ibid., 18.
9. Ibid., 86.
10. “The Amusements of the People,” Household Words (Apr. 13, 1850).
11. Ibid. (Mar. 30, 1850).
12. On the Stage (London, 1883), I, 209.
13. Erle, Letters, 107.
14. H. J. Smith, “The Melodrama,” Atlantic Monthly XCIX (Mar., 1907), 321.
15. Erle, Letters, 49.
16. Ibid., 108.
17. Ibid., 73.
18. Nicholas Nickleby (London, 1901), 535.
19. On the Stage (London, 1928), 61.
20. Erle, Letters, 83–4. “Rushes into his arms” is a common stage direction.
21. Nicholas Nickleby, 321.
22. Showman (New York, 1937), 18–9. This seems to have been a traditional method of dying on the stage. In The Prompter, Jan. 13, 1735, Aaron Hill complains of dying actors falling “like a Chimney in a high Wind.” The Thespian Preceptor (London, 1811), 48, advises actors to die with “violent distortion, groaning, gasping for breath, stretching the body, raising it, and then letting it fall.” Dying in a chair is “very unnatural, and has little or no effect.”
23. Sketches by Boz, 432.
24. As late as 1928, one writer was urging that “the villain must have a cold, clear, acid voice. A vein of sneerery must run through that voice.” Even when the stage is out of sight, “you must be able to tell that a villain is speaking.” Bart Kennedy, Footlights (London, 1928), 107.
25. Robert Courtneidge, I Was an Actor Once (London, 1930), 243.
26. W. J. Lawrence, Old Theatre Days and Ways (London, 1935), 129.
27. Arliss, On the Stage, 87.
28. An Actor’s Life (London, 1902), 302–303. It was Anderson, however, who, when asked to return to the stage as Antony, “took lodgings at Margate and tried his voice upon the sands. When he found that he was audible at Ramsgate, he came back and played the part.” Herman Merivale, Bar, Stage, and Platform (London, 1902), 56. Ramsgate is four miles across land from Margate.
29. An Actor’s Life, 302.
30. George Vandenhoff, Dramatic Reminiscences (London, 1860), 115–6.
31. One Man in his Time, ed. Maud and Otis Skinner (Philadelphia, 1938), 175.
32. History of the London Stage (London, 1904), 355.
33. John Hill, The Actor (London, 1750), 141. This view was held over a century later: “It is an accepted dogma in dramatic art, that whatever is presented on the stage must necessarily be measurably enlarged and exaggerated.…In consequence of the actor’s belief in this theory, he is apt to represent all shades and degrees of passion through the medium of exaggerated tone, stride, and gesture.” “Among the Comedians,” Atlantic Monthly, XIX (June, 1867), 751.
34. The Prompter, Jan. 20, 1735.
35. A General View of the Stage (London, 1759), 109.
36. The...
