The Corsican Brothers: A Dramatic Romance, Princess Theatre, Feb. 1852

Melodrama is a paradoxical and plastic dramatic genre, demonstrating both adaptability and formal restriction. Anthea Trodd has called it a ‘fascinating, repelling, elusive genre’. Recent critical opinion has recovered the form for more serious study; it is no longer dismissed as poor quality theatre characterised by bad acting. Brooks has emphasised its links to the rise of psychoanalysis, a dramatic linking of physical gesture and expression to inner conflict. In Boucicault's Corsican Brothers, we see an early Victorian exploration of the split self, or doppelganger, a play that predicts the more famous Victorian doubles of Dickens and Collins. The play also explores popular contemporary mysteries of the inner mind, such as the interest in telepathy and clairvoyance. The first melodrama is said to be Thomas Holcroft's Tale of Mystery, Covent Garden Theatre, 1802, which firmly locates the origins of the form in Gothic drama.

Othere recent critics have suggested melodrama's political side, as a democratic, popular form that emerged after the French revolution, and ‘made central the powerless and the inarticulate’. Figures like the British Tar (the sailor), soldier, working man, and Irish peasant, are regular characters in the early melodramas. But, like the Gothic romance, it can also be seen as a conservative form: it changes little and yet has many varieties.

Moreso than Naturalist drama, whose traditions we are still working within, the melodrama is a highly alien form for the modern audience and reader. It requires a different kind of stage sense: the acting is mannered, stylised, and based upon a repertoire of movements and gestures. Exaggeration in character was partly required to overcome the problems of working in a candle and gas-lit space. But this was not the sole component. Victorian melodrama expresses an interest in inner conflict, a development from the earlier varieties, and adapting the popular interest in, for example, 'Newgate' fiction (on which Oliver Twist [1837] was based). Melodrama began to depict powerful figures in turmoil: good and evil extremes. From the 1850s, the central dramatic personality replaced the earlier attention to spectacular stage effects such as fire, flood, shipwreck, storm, and explosion - theatrical spectacle to overpower man. Henry Irving’s version of Bill Sikes in 1868 created an introspective, self-tormented protagonist who would continue to be a model through the rest of the nineteenth century.

Nevertheless, melodrama did retain its concern for the artificial stage spectacular. Its plays contain several stock devices, such as the tableau, mid-scene pictures, several stock characters, and a highly self-evident structure. Like Hollywood films (film studies have been interested in the form), melodramas enjoy special effects, dynamic narratives, extremes of action and violence, but also involve music to heighten dramatic moments (music, as George Taylor has noted, provided a backdrop to the acting and had to be spoken over, as well, it enabled the play to build towards a visual and audio climax; the 'Ghost Melody' written for The Corsican Brothers, was subsequently a best-seller of sheet music).

Critics have considered the tableau as a literary failure; it is static, they sugest, and shows the limits of imagination (it leaves you with a visual register of the tensions of a scene, but fails to explore these). Boucicault, like others, was interested in the build-up of a scene towards to a tableau or picture. His early experience of the stage was in this form. His tableaux occur not just at the end of scenes or acts but also during. The dynamics of a relationship or conflict resolve themselves into a static moment - a woman pointing at a door and an old man cowering in a corner - frozen action. Wilkie Collins' play, The Frozen Deep, gives us almost a symbol of this melodramatic moment (like The Corsican Brothers, this play also had two simultaneous first acts); the stage cannot get further with the moment, and it is left for the audience to decipher or consider. We might place this form alongside the dramatic monologue of Robert Browning (developed at the same time, and, indeed, Browning had written several poetical dramas for the stage). Time is suspended and the audience / reader is abandoned to consider the moment and its ambivalence. Action doesn’t flow out of moments of conflict or confrontation, but moves towards the moment which is then stilled. The melodrama is a drama of end points. We can again contrast this with Naturalism, which, like its fictional counterpart, is interested in continuing processes, or evolution. Melodrama places characters in extreme situations; it offers a visual register and does not use speech quite so much.

The end point, however, might be considered as a moment of visual moral conflict. As G.H. Lewes remarked (see below), the ending of The Corsican Brothers, the haunting image of the avenger killing his brother's killer in an act of pure retribution, was both dramatically satisfying and morally shocking. The formal properties of the melodrama could contain and control the dynamic of violence that threatened Victorian moral sensibility, but it also foregrounded the artificiality of that containing. The form itself is duplicitous, and the theatrical doubling in The Corsican Brothers is a structural and dramatic representation of that duplicity.