The Legacy of Victorian Melodrama
It’s a typical day on your school trip. You and your friends are bored waiting around for the bus to take you to your next activity when someone comes up with the idea to play dumb charades. The representative of the opposing team whispers the name of a movie in your ear. It’s Mughal-e-Azam. You decide to bring all your melodrama to the table, enacting the famous step from the song “Pyaar kiya toh darna kya”, hoping that your team is able to guess it. But have you ever wondered where these iconic melodramatic actions come from?
The word melodrama itself means “music drama” and has its origins in Greek. It emerged as a genre in France during the revolution, travelling to England in the 19th century where it gained tremendous popularity. The play that started it all was A Tale of Mystery by Thomas Holcroft, taking audiences by storm with its sensational scenes, high emotions, fast moving storyline, dance and music.
Music, in fact, was the biggest reason behind the genre’s fame. The Licensing Act of 1737 restricted the production of plays to two patent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Thus, non-patent theatres began to produce dramas with musical interludes to work around the restrictions. Furthermore, melodrama vastly targeted the growing working class, who were otherwise not permitted to enjoy classical theatre.
As more melodramatic works emerged, it began to establish certain conventions. For instance, stock characters like the villain, hero, heroine and clown became customary in every melodramatic play. Certain gestures also became codified, associating a movement with an emotion. Scholar François Delsarte created the melodramatic framework of acting, putting codified gestures in place. These gestures spread all over the world, as did melodrama, giving us iconic movements which all of us have committed to memory, with or without knowing it.
Perhaps that is why you were such an easily recognizable Anarkali, and your team is now in the lead.
Sources:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44111112
https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-story-of-theatre
Ishika Shah, UG ‘24