Gothic Melodrama

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13576141/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939PRE.3D iii [1–22] 30.6.2018 8:37PM THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO ENGLISH MELODRAMA EDITED BY CAROLYN WILLIAMS Rutgers University C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13576141/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939PRE.3D iv [1–22] 30.6.2018 8:37PM University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107095939 doi: 10.1017/9781316155875 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in <country> by <printer> A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-107-09593-9 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-47959-3 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13576141/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939PRE.3D vii [1–22] 30.6.2018 8:37PM CONTENTS List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgements A Note on Citations of Plays Chronology 1 Introduction carolyn williams part i page x xi xvi xvii xviii 1 histories of english melodrama Early English Melodrama matthew buckley 13 3 Gothic Melodrama michael gamer 31 4 Nautical Melodrama ankhi mukherjee 47 5 Domestic Melodrama christine gledhill 61 6 Theatres and Their Audiences jim davis 78 2 part ii 7 Melodramatic Music michael v. pisani melodramatic technique 95 vii C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13576141/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939PRE.3D viii [1–22] 30.6.2018 8:37PM contents 8 Melodramatic Acting george taylor 112 9 Stagecraft, Spectacle, and Sensation hayley jayne bradley 126 part iii melodrama and nineteenth-century english culture 10 Melodrama and Gender katherine newey 149 11 Melodrama and Class rohan mcwilliam 163 12 Melodrama and Empire marty gould 176 13 Melodrama and Race sarah meer 192 part iv extensions of melodrama 14 Melodrama and the Realist Novel carolyn williams 209 15 Melodrama in Early Film david mayer 224 16 Moving Picture Melodrama jane m. gaines 245 17 Melodrama and the Modern Musical sharon aronofsky weltman 262 18 Psychoanalysis and Melodrama peter brooks 277 viii C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13576141/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939PRE.3D ix [1–22] 30.6.2018 8:37PM c o n t e n ts 19 Metamodern Melodrama and Contemporary Mass Culture juliet john Guide to Further Reading 289 305 ix C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 31 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM 3 M I C H A E L G AME R Gothic Melodrama Cataloguing ‘Melodrama’ On 6 July 1793 George Colman the Younger, successful playwright and manager of the Haymarket Theatre, announced ‘a Musical Drama’ entitled ‘The Mountaineers . . . in preparation’.1 At the end of that month, he submitted the play’s manuscript to the Licenser of Plays for authorization. Now housed in the Huntington Library, it is catalogued as ‘The Mountaineers, Melodrama’ – though, surprisingly, the word ‘melodrama’ occurs nowhere in its pages.2 Instead, Colman’s title page declares it ‘A Play in Three Acts’, likely to emphasize its similarity to two earlier hits, The Battle of Hexham; A Play (1789) and The Surrender of Calais; A Play, in Three Acts (1791). Looking over the manuscript in the late 1930s, Larpent cataloguer Dougald Macmillan likely chose the label ‘melodrama’ because he found Colman’s play characteristic of the genre.3 What is strange is that he apparently did so only for The Mountaineers, sticking closely to the title pages of other plays. Had The Mountaineers possessed no subtitle, the interpolation would be more understandable. As it is, the substitution of ‘Melodrama’ for ‘Play’ is provocative, carrying within it an implicit argument concerning melodrama’s historical and geographical origins. Among other things, it reminds us that conferring genre can be as accidental as it is retrospective – that had Colman persisted with ‘musical drama’, for example, commentaries would likely have been different. At the very least, it invites a re-examination of melodrama’s roots in English theatre, particularly the Gothic drama of the 1790s. Within this account, The Mountaineers comprises a useful point of reference because it embodies long-standing divisions over the function and propriety of music in theatrical performance. Such divisions are captured, for example, in Colman’s decision to advertise his drama ultimately as a ‘play’ rather than as a ‘musical drama’.4 They are epitomized, moreover, in the play’s reception and early critical history. Elizabeth Inchbald, for example, chose to reprint The Mountaineers in her collection of standard English plays, The British Theatre (1808). She did so, however, not to praise the play as a whole but rather to extol ‘the extraordinary talents of one performer’, John Philip Kemble, whose performance as Octavian had captured the public imagination. Betrayed by the parents of his fiancé, Floranthe, and believing himself to have 31 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 32 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM michael gamer killed his rival, Octavian has retreated to a remote cave, inconsolable in remorse and sustained by the kindness of the nearby Goatherds. There he meets the fleeing Agnes and Sadi, and on learning their plight guides them over the mountain to shelter. In the play, this act of kindness eventually leads to his discovery that he is not a murderer: that his rival, in fact, has recovered from his wounds and married another woman. Reunited with Floranthe, Octavian manages in the ensuing action to rescue Bulcazin and convince him to sanction yet another union, between Bulcazin’s daughter Zorayda and Virolet. What Inchbald chooses to remember, however, is not the final happiness of the couples but Colman’s portrayals of Octavian’s despair: –– “He is as a rock, “Oppos’d to the rude sea that beats against it; “Worn by the waves, yet still o’ertopping them “In sullen majesty.” (3:2)5 Anticipating figures like Walter Scott’s Marmion and Lord Byron’s Manfred, such lines epitomize the dramatic tradition we now term ‘Gothic’. Driven nearly to madness by guilt, Octavian is characterized by what he believes to be unforgivable deeds and by his own passions, which, like the sea beating on a rock, have permanently marked him while leaving the features of his younger self still visible. In this he recalls the title characters of John Home’s Douglas: A Tragedy (1757) and Robert Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne: A Tragedy (1781), themselves drawn from earlier Renaissance tragic figures. The Mountaineers, however, is anything but a tragedy. Its primary plotlines involve three pairs of lovers, all of whom are ultimately successful. Its closing scene is resolutely happy and ends with a Grand Finale sung by the Goatherds. As with later melodramas, its primary vehicle is suspense heightened by music, which either sets or accompanies key scenes. Its mixture of comedy and tragedy arises in part from its source materials, two discrete stories from Don Quixote brought together by Colman’s denouement and choral ending. Noting these two strands, Inchbald singled out Colman’s Octavian for praise. At the same time, she called her readers’ attention to his reliance on music to sustain his story and characters: The other characters, where this sublime one is not concerned, have music to uphold them – which tempts a parody on one of the most beautiful and nervous passages of the play: ‘Providence has slubber’d them in haste, ‘They are some of her unmeaning compositions ‘She manufactures, when she makes a gross. 32 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 33 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM Gothic Melodrama ‘She’ll form a million such – and all alike – ‘Then turn them forth, asham’d of her own work, ‘And give them songs.’6 In Colman’s original text, the final line of this passage reads ‘And set no mark upon them’. Inchbald’s substitution of ‘And give them songs’ draws on this missing line even as she points to Colman’s strategy of musically supplementing otherwise unoriginal characters. Octavian, after all, sings no songs. Music’s presence for Inchbald thus signals deficiency, functioning as a crutch to support figures otherwise undistinguished or generic. The same could be said – and for two centuries, has been said – about Gothic melodrama. As this essay shows, Gothic was the first language of melodrama, and many of melodrama’s roots can be found in the music and sonic effects of late eighteenth-century Gothic plays. While not sharing Inchbald’s views on the corrosive effects of music on the stage, my account of Gothic melodrama here explores music’s function first within the vogue for the Gothic at the end of the eighteenth century. This combination of sonic experience and supernatural effect brought a radical new dimension to a London stage already in transition. From here the essay moves into the early nineteenth century, to a range of musical dramas that revelled in conspiracy, the supernatural, and the darker side of human motivation and consciousness. Gothic Origins: The Supernatural Onstage Gothic’s intimacy with the stage goes back at least to Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) and The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (1768) often open accounts of the rise of Gothic fiction and drama, respectively.7 At first privately printed because of its incestuous subject matter, Walpole’s tragedy was eventually published in 1781 because of a threatened piracy. While its publication raised eyebrows, it was the success in that same year of The Count of Narbonne, Robert Jephson’s adaptation of Otranto, that placed Gothic fiction firmly on the stage for the next half-century. Performed twenty-one times at Covent Garden Theatre during its initial run, The Count of Narbonne proved the hit of the 1781–2 theatrical season and, like The Mountaineers, was reprinted in 1808 as part of Inchbald’s collection of standard plays. It also brought about renewed interest in Walpole’s original Gothic story, which saw a new edition after being fourteen years out of print. The suggestion here is one less of adaptation than symbiosis. Walpole’s Gothic novel may have given rise to Jephson’s Gothic play, but the adaptation in turn renewed its original, so much so that since 1781 The Castle of Otranto has never been out of print. 33 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 34 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM michael gamer Still, The Count of Narbonne can hardly be called a full endorsement of Gothic aesthetics, let alone melodramatic ones. Focusing on the fall of Manfred’s house to the superior claims of Theodore, Jephson’s play eschewed the supernatural scenes and machinery of its original. His blank-verse adaptation features no hermit skeletons, no giant limbs in armor, no ghosts walking out of paintings. Gone also are Walpole’s humorous touches and moments of absurd pathos. The action instead centres on the Count’s attempts to retain power in the face of irresistible fate and powerful rivals. It is a striking departure from a source text, corroborating The Count of Narbonne’s pretensions to that reputedly highest and most pure of theatrical genres, tragedy.8 It also suggests a strong taboo against representing the supernatural on stage, one memorably captured in Robert Lloyd’s poem ‘The Actor’ (1760), which succinctly captures a critical consensus that continued to grow in the second half of the eighteenth century: But in stage-customs what offends me most Is the slip-door, and slowly-rising ghost. Tell me, nor count the question too severe, Why need the dismal powder’d forms appear?9 Echoed in publications like The Drury Lane Journal (1752) and The Dramatic Censor (1770),10 such remonstrations were directed not just at new plays like The Count of Narbonne but also at high-profile productions of older plays in the repertory. Most famous among these is the April 1794 production of Macbeth, which omitted – to considerable critical approbation – representing Banquo’s ghost on stage. In his role as theatre manager, Kemble had chosen this production to dedicate the newly renovated Drury Lane to Shakespeare’s memory. With an audience capacity of over 3,600 people, the theatre was the largest in Europe, its interior designed to resemble a Gothic cathedral.11 The demand for spectacle to fill such a space was formidable and unprecedented: while Kemble may have withheld Banquo’s ghost as a nod to critics, this did not stop him from adding other Gothic effects conducive to Drury Lane’s new architectural style and cavernous size. Among these were new sets, costumes, and music, including Matthew Locke’s popular vocal arrangements for the play, reset to an original score by W. H. Ware. Judging from accounts of the play, the results were mixed. While producing a grand spectacle, James Boaden recalled, ‘the noble firmness and compactness of the action were dreadfully broken and attenuated by the vast crowds of witches and spirits that filled the stage, and thundered in the ear a music of dire potency. The auxiliary injured the principal, and Matthew Locke became the rival of his master.’ His description at once foregrounds 34 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 35 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM Gothic Melodrama the critical difficulty of reconstructing any dramatic spectacle while also carrying a hint of allegory. In Boaden’s chaotic recollection, melody and song threaten in their ‘dire potency’ to overwhelm the English stage, upsetting dramatic hierarchies and producing unwholesome rivalries between ‘auxiliaries’ and ‘master[s]’. Kemble’s predicament was one faced by every theatre manager, that of filling the house. And now that house required fuller casts and more spectacular productions to people its vast stage. Still, as Scott’s description suggests, the greater challenges arguably were aural. Kemble’s additions to Macbeth may have had a strong visual component, but their primary effect was sonic. ‘Mere speech, however masterly’, Boaden noted, ‘is weak upon the ear after the noise (call it harmony if you will) of a full orchestra, and perhaps fifty voices, with difficulty kept together in tolerable time and tune.’12 This spectacle of fifty singing, dancing witches nicely captures the increasingly musical nature of the times, as blank-verse tragedy is transformed by movement and song into something else. For Boaden, the changes are prophetic and a denigration: Shakespeare supplanted by ‘noise’, individual performance by ‘vast crowds’, and ‘mere speech’ by a full orchestra and an unruly, even disorderly, chorus. Written retrospectively and published in 1830, Boaden’s criticisms are at least somewhat disingenuous. Arguably no dramatist of the eighteenth century more thoroughly cultivated the vogue for supernatural stage effect than he did. Kemble’s decision to bar the ghost of Banquo, in fact, likely found part of its inspiration in Boaden’s own success with Fontainville Forest (1794), an adaptation of Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest that premiered at Covent Garden in the same weeks as Kemble’s Macbeth at Drury Lane.13 Boaden’s play had proven both popular and controversial thanks to his introduction of a ghost – a decision that went against Radcliffe’s standard practice of supplying rational explanations for apparently supernatural events. In The Romance of the Forest’s original scene, Adeline awakens from a nightmare, hears what is identified at novel’s end as the voice of a servant, and faints. She derives her ‘supernatural’ experience from her own imagination and heightened emotional state. The Adeline of Fontainville Forest, meanwhile, is visited by an actual spectre, in this case that of the same murdered Cavalier who has previously haunted her dreams. Her fainting dramatically closes the third act. Where Jephson had removed most of Walpole’s marvels in The Count of Narbonne, Boaden chose, in the words of his own epilogue, not ‘to give up the ghost’,14 providing neither empirical nor psychological extenuations for his stage spectre. 35 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 36 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM michael gamer To create supernatural effects, Boaden took elaborate technical measures. Abandoning Covent Garden’s stage armour, he instead dressed the pantomime actor John Follet in a close-fitting costume that resembled armour but made no noise. The aim was to emphasize sublime effect and Shakespearean precedent by backlighting Follet behind a blue gauze screen. The result strongly resembled the lofty figure of Henry Fuseli’s painting Hamlet and the Ghost, then on display at Thomas Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Follet’s gigantic steps and expressive gestures had delighted audiences, who watched electrified as Adeline swooned. Predictably, the scene proved unpopular with reviewers, who vocally protested against it as a supernatural imposition.15 Given their negative response to Boaden’s coup de théâtre, Kemble’s decision to bar the ghost of Banquo – in what otherwise promised the most elaborate and spectacular Macbeth of the century – seems a prudential move, smacking of marketing savvy and inter-theatrical rivalry. His decision invited Boaden, in turn, to emphasize the rivalry between the plays both on and off the stage. Tellingly, the title page of the print version of Fontainville Forest prominently features an epigraph from Act 3, scene 4 of Macbeth: ‘It will have blood: they say, blood will have blood. / Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak.’ Sonic Innovations When cultural historians talk about the vogue for staging Gothic in the 1790s, they usually emphasize its penchant for visual effect: elaborate sets, scenes of violence, and striking tableaux.16 These all are important to the genre. As the accounts of Inchbald and Boaden remind us, however, such scenes also produced powerful aural effects through original music and choral arrangements. It is for this reason that he emphasizes not the sights of Macbeth but its sounds. Even the silent ghost scene in Fontainville Forest was designed to produce a sonic effect – in this case, among the audience: [Follet’s] figure . . . thus drest, and faintly visible behind the gauze or crape spread before the scene, the whisper of the house, as he was about to enter, – the breathless silence, while he floated along like a shadow, – proved to me, that I had achieved the great desideratum; and the often-renewed plaudits, when the curtain fell, told me that the audience had enjoyed That sacred terror, that severe delight, for which alone it is excusable to overpass the ordinary limits of nature.17 Ever the showman, Boaden inserts a palpable, supernatural silence into a play otherwise filled with music to produce that most melodramatic of audience effects: hushed suspense succeeded by gasps of terror and wonder. 36 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 37 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM Gothic Melodrama Even that most celebrated reviver of traditional comedy, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, mixed spectacle with spoken word, music, scene, and sound to great effect. The early years of Sheridan’s career witnessed the triumph of The Duenna (1775), a comic opera premiering in the same year as The Rivals and considered by Byron as the best of the age. A quarter-century later, Sheridan would come out of dramatic retirement to stage Pizarro (1799), an adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru written ostensibly to address the Drury Lane company’s increasing financial woes. Presenting, in Daniel O’Quinn’s words, ‘an innovative integration of tragedy, spectacle and music’, Pizarro was a huge hit, featuring elaborate costumes, an original score, and timely politics.18 Premiering amidst French invasion scares and in the aftermath of the naval mutiny at Spithead, it deeply resonated with contemporary English audiences, who identified with Kemble’s performance as Rolla, the Incan prince who must face an invading foe void of scruple. It also caused genuine controversy and discussion among reviewers, who, fascinated by its wartime allegory, were uncertain whether Sheridan’s generic hybrid constituted an aesthetic triumph or a threat to dramaturgical legitimacy. Part of what provoked such critical uncertainty was what we might call Pizarro’s questionable origins and associates. Like Inchbald’s Lover’s Vows (1798) a year earlier, Pizarro was a German-Austrian importation refitted for London audiences. Its composer, moreover, was Michael Kelly, the Irish tenor most famous – or notorious – for providing soundscapes for London theatres’ increasingly supernatural offerings. In the previous eighteen months, Kelly had written the music for what are arguably the two most important Gothic plays of the eighteenth century: Blue-Beard and The Castle Spectre. These remarkable productions premiered at Drury Lane within weeks of one another during the winter months of the 1797–8 season. Both are remembered today for their spectacular sets and visual effects, and for the consternation they caused among dramatic reviewers, who saw in them heralds of the imminent decline of the British stage. What we are prone to forget – though audiences never did – is their music, which sought to arrest attention and intensify experience. For The Castle Spectre’s celebrated ghost scene – in which a Gothic oratory opens to reveal the ghost of Angela’s mother, who advances first to bless and then to warn her daughter before retreating back to the oratory, which shuts again on her – Kelly wrote equally evocative music. Heralding the ghost’s appearance is a guitar playing a lullaby, accompanied by an unseen woman’s voice. This is succeeded by a dreary, slow march adapted from a chaconne of Niccolò Jomelli that builds as she advances, blesses, and retreats. A full ‘Jubilate’ chorus closes both the doors of the oratory and the scene. Kelly’s composition proved so popular 37 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 38 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM michael gamer that he eventually published it as a separate piece: a rare instance of incidental music claiming notice equal to a play’s overture and songs.19 Blue-Beard, meanwhile, was famous for two scenes: its opening, which featured a huge, animated panorama showing the advance of Abomelique’s party; and its final scene in the dreaded ‘Blue Chamber’, with its moving skeleton and bleeding walls. For both, Kelly provided powerful music to heighten suspense and affective impact, making them feel newly urgent to audiences of the national theatres. It is for this reason that Jeffrey Cox calls melodrama a genre ‘built for speed . . . a new deployment of existing theatrical practices that created a different kind of theatrical experience, a different relationship between the audience and the “reality” it watches on stage’.20 Genre Crossings Neither comedy nor tragedy, pantomime nor farce, melodrama’s newness stemmed from its tendency to consume other genres into itself. Gothic melodramas were especially adept at these acts of conspicuous dramatic consumption, avidly borrowing from a myriad of sources to create highly wrought scenes of action and suspense.21 Writing to William Wordsworth in January of 1798 after having read Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre, Samuel Coleridge called these scenes ‘situations’: The merit of the Castle Spectre consists wholly in its situations. These are all borrowed, and absolutely pantomimical; . . . the play is a mere patchwork of plagiarisms – but they are very well worked up, & for stage effect make an excellent whole. There is a pretty little Ballad-song introduced – and Lewis, I think, has great & particular excellence in these compositions. . . . This play struck me with utter hopelessness – it would be easy to produce these situations, but not in a play so forcibly.22 Coleridge’s account nicely captures the impact of Gothic melodrama, its ability to thrill audiences and confound readers by transforming familiar materials into new and powerful experiences. Reading The Castle Spectre in the privacy of his own study, Coleridge discovers little of the magic supposedly thrilling London audiences. Instead, he finds only ‘plagiarisms’: ‘situations’ both ‘borrowed’ and ‘pantomimical’ that must move beyond the printed word to achieve their effect. What causes him to throw up his hands in mock despair, however, is the ‘patchwork’ nature of this new genre: what The St James’s Chronicle termed its ‘mingled nature, Operatic, Comical and Tragical’,23 and the Monthly Review simply presented as an unsolvable conundrum: 38 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 39 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM Gothic Melodrama After having to read this – What do you call it? – a drama, it seems, it must be, we cannot but regret that an author, whose talents seem designed for better things, should condescend to make us stare at Groves, and Suits of Armor, and Pedestals with Names, . . . and, in short, whatever presented itself to his imagination.24 The review nicely captures a problem facing anyone trying to make sense of a new cultural form at its beginnings. Where audience members in the 1820s would recognize Lewis’s play as a classic of that established genre, Gothic melodrama, the Monthly reviewer can only see a monstrous, heterogeneous mess: an assemblage of props produced by a playwright’s overactive imagination. What, then, finally made a Gothic play a ‘melodrama’? We can begin to answer this question by surveying adaptations of another work by Lewis, The Monk (1796), which between 1797 and 1820 was transformed into a range of genres, from ballad and chapbook to ‘ballet pantomime’, ‘drama with music’, and melodrama.25 Taken as a whole, these provide an illuminating snapshot of theatrical culture and of the early nineteenth-century culture industry more generally. The first, Raymond and Agnes; or, The Castle of Lindenberg (1797), was labelled by its author Charles Farley as ‘A New Grand Ballet Pantomime of Action’. Here, the subtitles are telling. Dissatisfied with calling his play either a ballet or a pantomime, Farley chooses a hybrid, which he then bolsters with adjectives to foreground his play’s novelty and the ‘action’ of Lewis’s original. In Lewis’s novel, the story of Don Raymond de las Cisternas stands as an inset story within the main tale of the monk Ambrosio and his seduction into vice. In it, Raymond sets off on his travels under an assumed name to hide his illustrious parentage. While in Germany he meets and rescues Agnes from a gang of banditti who infest the forests there, and is invited by her grateful aunt and uncle, the Baroness and Baron of Lindenberg, for a lengthy visit. He and Agnes fall in love, but when Raymond seeks to tell the Baroness of their passion, the Baroness misunderstands his intentions and declares her own love for him. When informed of her mistake, she swears revenge on Raymond, banishes him from the house, and informs Agnes that she must take the veil. Without alternative, Agnes resolves to elope with Raymond. Taking advantage of the Baron and Baroness’s superstition and a local legend, she disguises herself as the Bleeding Nun, a ghost appearing at the Castle of Lindenberg every fifth year on the fifth day of the fifth month. Her plan proceeds perfectly, except that the real Bleeding Nun appears first and goes off with the awaiting Raymond, who, mistaking her for Agnes on her first appearance, swears 39 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 40 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM michael gamer eternal love to her. Appearing five minutes later and finding no Raymond, Agnes returns to her chambers and a few days later is sent to a convent in Madrid. Raymond, meanwhile, is haunted nightly by the Bleeding Nun until he manages, with the help of the Wandering Jew, to exorcise her spirit and bury her remains. He then proceeds to Madrid to find the now cloistered Agnes, at which the point his story rejoins the main thread of the novel. To extract the subplot of Don Raymond from Lewis’s romance, Farley was forced to supply an altered ending. In it, the Bleeding Nun does not haunt Raymond; instead, she abjures him to protect Agnes even as Agnes is seized by the banditti again and is borne to a nearby cavern. In the climactic scene, Raymond surprises the banditti, kills their leader Baptiste, and rescues Agnes. The epilogue then accompanies the happy couple and a protecting band of Muleteers over the mountains to Spain where Raymond presents Agnes to his father, who blesses their marriage accompanied by a ‘Glee of Muleteers’ and a Fandango: Strike the Lute’s enchanting Wires! Every chord the dance inspires! In the brisk Fandango meeting And with smiles each other greeting The Castinet shall time our Measure And the night dissolve in pleasure. (1:16)26 Borrowing from a range of plays including The Mountaineers and Schiller’s The Robbers, Farley’s Raymond and Agnes provided a model for later adaptations of Lewis’s romance, most of which focused on the story of Don Raymond at the expense of that of Ambrosio.27 Equally suggestive, however, are those aspects of the Raymond and Agnes story not adapted by Farley or his successors. The grisly comedy of dame Cunegonda’s kidnapping in The Monk, for example, is nowhere to be found in the later adaptations, nor are the more gently comic scenes of Theodore learning Spanish or writing poetry. Gone also is Lewis’s narrative frame, in which Raymond must inform the hotheaded Lorenzo of Agnes’s pregnancy while preserving their friendship. What remains constant across decades of adaptations are the scenes of greatest suspense, always accompanied by a compelling score. The most successful of these, W. H. Grosette’s Raymond and Agnes, or the Bleeding Nun of Lindenberg; an Interesting Melodrama, premiered in June of 1811 at the Theatre Royal Norwich before transferring to the Theatre Royal Haymarket that September. It enjoyed later revivals at Covent Garden and the English Opera, and a printed version appeared around 1820. The differences between the original Norwich manuscript and the eventual print publication show a play, as it moved across four theatres, continually 40 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 41 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM Gothic Melodrama streamlining its suspense and action at the expense of comic interludes and character development. Thus, the manuscript features several scenes of exposition not present in the later version, including repartees on Cunegonda’s vanity, extended dialogues between Baptiste and his fellow robbers, and two concluding scenes at the house of Don Felix, where Raymond presents Agnes to his father and their marriage is celebrated. Five songs regulate the pace of the action, and incidental music is reserved for entrances, exits, scenes of pantomimic action, and tableaux. The manuscript’s stage directions for the two scenes with the Bleeding Nun are exemplary of its sonic ways and means: raymond. hark – [The Clock strikes One – soft Musick heard. The Spectre comes from the Castle crosses the Stage and Exits – Raymond following in extasy supposing it Agnes – Re-Enter Theodore – musick ceases.] (2:5) After Theodore shares his ghostly fears and makes a hasty exit, the scene then changes to: [A Dreary Wood very Dark. Enter the Spectre followed by Raymond still supposing it Agnes. When she gets on the trap he attempts to Embrace her. She Vanishes–leaving the following “Protect the Child of the Murder’d Agnes.” Musick ceases.] (2:6) Three London productions later, much has accelerated. The early scenes of back-story are gone, as are the exchanges developing Baptiste’s character. The two separate scenes with the Bleeding Nun, meanwhile, appear in the print version as one, without Theodore’s comic monologue, in a single extended sequence to focus dramatic action and supernatural effect. Similar logic governs the printed play’s ending. Where Grosette’s original manuscript had culminated with a pantomimed marriage ceremony in which ‘the Space behind the Alter breaks away and discovers the Spirit of the Bleeding Nun blessing the Nuptials of her Child’,28 the later version deletes these final scenes altogether, ending instead with the climactic battle: Music. – Enter RAYMOND, THEODORE, and MARGUERETTE, rushing in hastily, L. – RAYMOND saves AGNES, and attacks ROBERT, who falls wounded – THEODORE darts furiously on CLAUDE, and overcomes him – JAQUES is shot by MARGUERETTE – RAYMOND and AGNES embrace, R. – a loud crash is heard – the back of the cavern falls to pieces, and discovers the BLEEDING NUN, in a blue ethereal flame, invoking a blessing on them – she slowly ascends, still blessing them – tableau, and curtain. 41 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 42 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM michael gamer THE BLEEDING NUN. RAYMOND. MARGUERETTE. AGNES. JAQUES. ROBERT. THEODORE. CLAUDE. R. CURTAIN. L. (2:7) In a frenzy of sword thrusts and gunshots yielding to a final tableau, Grosette’s revised ending rejects that most traditional of comic endings, marriage. The closing embrace of Raymond and Agnes may forecast their happy end, but the dramatic focus sits squarely with resolving suspense and overcoming danger so that antagonists, as they are overcome, are fixed into an orderly tableau as the curtain falls. This tendency to streamline action over successive performances is probably inevitable in any chain of adaptation: with each new revival, extraneous material becomes less necessary, as audiences become familiar with a play. Still, with Gothic melodrama this appears especially the case – in part because its coups de théâtre, whether scenes of supernatural visitation or suspense, function as a kind of portable property. Comparing early and late versions of this play, we witness Gothic melodrama acquiring its key conventions, trying first one device and then another in search of what will thrill and satisfy audiences. Thus, we find Grosette’s scene in the robbers’ cave appearing in only slightly altered form in Isaac Pocock’s The Miller and His Men (1813). Both turn on a hero infiltrating a lair of banditti to rescue an abducted woman. With The Miller and His Men, Pocock introduced two innovations: that of ending his play with the climatic battle, and ending that scene with a final explosion: grindoff. For that threat, be this your recompence! lothair. And this my triumph! (music.) [Lothair . . . throws himself before Claudine, and receives Grindoff’s attack, the robber is wounded, and staggers back, sounds his bugle, and the Mill is crowded with banditti. Lothair, having caught Claudine in his arms, and previously thrown back the bridge upon his release from Grindoff, hurries across it, and as he is on it, cries, “Now, Ravina, now, fire the train.” Ravina instantly sets fire to the fuze, the flash of which is seen to run down the side of the rock into the gully . . . and the explosion immediately takes place. Kelmar rushing forward, catches Claudine in his arms, and the whole form a group as the curtain descends.] (2:5). 42 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 43 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM Gothic Melodrama Arguably the most popular melodrama of the Regency, The Miller and His Men drew its fame from its signature combination of suspense, action, and technical innovation. Audiences returned night after night to see Grindoff vanquished and his lair destroyed. Similarities to Raymond and Agnes or other plays were rendered inconsequential by Pocock’s pyrotechnics. Their influence is made clearest in later versions of Grosette’s Raymond and Agnes, which jettison the closing marriage scenes and end in similarly cataclysmic fashion: ‘the back of the cavern falls to pieces, and discovers the BLEEDING NUN, in a blue ethereal flame’. These instances of sustained borrowing become more comprehensible when we recall the closed nature of Regency theatrical culture – which, even as it drew large audiences, relied on a fairly small group of writers, composers, producers, and leading actors to produce new melodramas at London’s legitimate theatres. The character of Grindoff in The Miller and His Men, for example, was played by the same Charles Farley who adapted The Monk into Raymond and Agnes and starred as Francisco in Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery (1802), the first play in English to call itself a ‘melo-drame’. A Tale of Mystery’s composer, John Busby, also produced music for Matthew Lewis’s Rugantino; or, The Bravo of Venice (1805), a play directed by Farley. Put another way, it is significant that John Philip Kemble, facing mounting losses from several unrenumerative productions of Shakespeare at Covent Garden during the 1811–12 season, looked to established names rather than new ones to reverse his fortunes. First reviving Blue-Beard with the added novelty of live horses performing to Kelly’s music, he next drew Lewis out of retirement to compose Timour the Tartar: A Grand Romantic Melodrama (1811), also featuring performing horses and with Farley in the starring role. This tendency for Gothic melodramas to be staged by a fairly small group of playwrights and producers is even true of the final play this essay invokes, Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein (1823). Penned by Richard Brinsley Peake, it delighted Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley; became a standard play in nineteenth-century repertories; and fostered no fewer than three further adaptations, including James Whale’s 1931 film. Peake may have been part of the new generation of playwrights expanding Gothic melodrama into London’s minor theatres, but his roots were those of the dramatic establishment. His father serving as treasurer of Drury Lane Theatre, he wrote across a range of dramatic forms. Presumption – called in manuscript ‘Frankenstein: A Melo-Dramatic Opera’ – remains his best-remembered work: in part because it so uncannily anticipates later film versions of Frankenstein, and in part because it shows Gothic 43 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 44 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM michael gamer melodrama in such fully matured form. Drawing on three decades of innovation in supernatural representation, it is one of the earliest plays to take advantage of new lighting technologies, darkening parts of the stage in key scenes to render Frankenstein’s creation (represented in playbills simply as ‘––‘) more spectral. In portraying the creation as unable to speak, however, Peake looked most pointedly to the example of Thomas Holcroft, whose Deaf and Dumb (1801) and A Tale of Mystery portrayed sympathetic characters as expressive as they were mute; Presumption’s most affecting scenes occur in dumb show.29 Played by the great pantomime actor Thomas Potter Cooke, the creation’s combination of pathos and near-acrobatic physicality creates electrifying scenes, such as this one, which ends Act 2: music. – Agatha recovers. – The Demon hangs over them, with fondness. Felix and Frankenstein suddenly enter. frank. Misery! The Demon! felix. What horrid monster is this? – Agatha, my father is in danger? The Demon retreats. music. – Felix discharges his gun and wounds the Demon, who writhes under the wound. – In desperation he pulls a burning branch from the fire – rushes at them – beholds Frankenstein – in agony of feeling dashes through the portico. Safie Enters to Agatha. – Hurried Music. FINALE. Tell us – tell us – what form was there? (With anxious fear enquiring) Saw you its Eye – the hideous glare Terrific dread inspiring! The Demon is seen climbing the outside of the Portico. He bursts through the thatch with burning brand. The fiend of Sin With ghastly grin! Behold the Cottage firing! The Demon hangs to the Rafters, setting light to the thatch and Rafters, with malignant joy – as parts of the building fall – groups of gypsies appear on the bridge, and through the burning apertures – who join in the Chorus. (2:5) Encompassing some three decades of theatrical innovation and generic experimentation, the scene captures what Gothic melodrama became in the 1820s and beyond. It combines choral exposition and thrilling action, 44 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 45 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM Gothic Melodrama pantomime and score, metaphysical allegory and quasi-supernatural spectacle. Above all, it is strikingly efficient, presenting in a single sequence a sympathetic being goaded into a vengeance that extends to the very fabric of human relations. As such, it provides a crucial bridge into Victorian theater and later domestic melodramas, not to mention the origins of the modern horror film. Notes 1. Morning Herald, 4463 (6 July 1793): 1; Morning Chronicle, 7516 (6 July 1793): 1. 2. Colman’s play is Huntington Library Manuscript LA989. 3. Dougald Macmillan, Catalogue of the Larpent Plays in the Huntington Library (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1939), 164. 4. ‘Play’ appears in advertisements beginning in the second week of July of 1793. 5. George Colman, The Mountaineers, quoted in Inchbald, ‘Remarks on The Mountaineers’, The British Theatre, vol. 21 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 4. 6. Inchbald, ‘Remarks on The Mountaineers’, vol. 21, 4–5. 7. See Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1947), reprinted in its entirety as part of Frederick Frank’s compendious The Origins of the Modern Study of Gothic Drama (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006). 8. Walpole and Jephson engaged in an extended discussion on tragedy in February of 1775; see Correspondence of Horace Walpole, vol. 41, 296–7. 9. Robert Lloyd, ‘The Actor’ (1760), in Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper, ed. Alexander Chalmers, vol. 15 (London: J. Johnson, 1810), 78. 10. See Drury Lane Journal (London: Publick Register Office, 1752), quoted in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, vol. 3 (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 463; and ‘ Macbeth’, The Dramatic Censor, vol. 1 (London: J. Bell, 1770), 79. For a contrasting view, see The Thespian Magazine, 3 (April 1794): 174–5. 11. See Thespian Magazine, 3 (1794): 127–8; and European Magazine, 25 (1794): 236. 12. James Boaden, The Life of Mrs. Jordan, vol. 1 (London: E. Bull, 1831), 260. 13. For a full account of this production, see Francesca Saggini, The Gothic Novel and the Stage: Romantic Appropriations (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015), 75–84, 127–9, and 154–75. 14. James Boaden, Fontainville Forest: A Play (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1794), 69. 15. See Analytical Review, 19 (1794): 187; Monthly Review, 2nd Series, 14 (1794): 352; Thespian Magazine, 3 (1794): 127–8; and European Magazine, 25 (1794): 236. 16. Here, see especially Paula Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Jacky Bratton, ‘Romantic Melodrama’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730–1830, eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115–27. 45 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/13569731/WORKINGFOLDER/WILLM/9781107095939C03.3D 46 [31–46] 30.6.2018 11:18AM michael gamer 17. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 115–19. 18. Daniel O’Quinn, ‘Pizarro’s Spectacular Dialectics: Sheridan’s Bridge to the Cosmopolitical Future’, in Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context, eds. Jack E. DeRochi and Daniel J. Ennis (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 191–233 (192). 19. The Favorite Movement, performed . . . during the appearance of the Ghost in the Drama of the Castle Spectre (London: Lavenu, [1798]). 20. Jeffrey N. Cox, Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 46. 21. On the explosion of melodramatic forms in the early nineteenth century, see Diego Saglia, ‘The Gothic Stage’, in Romantic Gothic, eds. Angela Wright and Dale Townsend (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 80. 22. Samuel Coleridge to William Wordsworth, 28 January 1798, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 378. 23. St. James Chronicle; or, British Evening-Post, 6240 (16–19 December 1797): 4. 24. Monthly Review, 26 (May 1798): 96. 25. See Francesca Saggini, The Gothic Novel and the Stage: Romantic Appropriations (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015), 9 and 279n121. 26. The British Library copy (shelf mark 161.i.50) of Airs, Glees, and Chorusses in a New Grand Ballet Pantomime of Action, called Raymond and Agnes (London: T. N. Longman, 1797) is imperfect, and so contains additional pages of manuscript appended to it. The quotation is from page 15 of that text. 27. The most notable exception is James Boaden’s Aurelio and Miranda (Drury Lane, 1798), which failed after six nights. 28. H. W. Grosette, Raymond and Agnes; or, The Bleeding Nun, Huntington Library MS LA1597, Act 2, scene 7, page 53. 29. See Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965), 71; and Peter Brooks, ‘The Text of Muteness’, New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, 5 (1974): 549–64. 46