To Be Melodrama or Not To Be Melodrama

David Christopher
Dr. Anthony Vickery
THEA 503 - Melodrama
12 April 2010
"I am determined to prove a villain"
-Richard III - Act 1, Scene 1-

To Be Shakespeare Or Not To be Shakespeare: That Is The Melodramatic Question

Melodramatic characteristics have been present in western drama since the time of the ancient Greeks. Stage melodrama as a singular genre, however, would not reach its maturity in England until the nineteenth century, preceded by progenitors such as John Philip Kemble, and brought to its height by masters such as Charles Kean and Henry Irving some fifty years later. Between the two eras lies the masterful bard. A prominent aspect of Shakespeare’s ‘whole work of art’ is deep characterization which is in direct contrast to the morally simplified characters of melodrama, even though his works provided fertile material from which actor/managers of the nineteenth century could harvest melodramatic material. Shakespeare incorporates melodramatic elements in a larger artistic whole which enabled Kemble, Kean and Irving to edit his plots and character speeches to meet the needs of eighteenth and nineteenth century melodramatic tastes.
One of the defining characteristics of Shakespeare’s drama was the seamless integration of plot and subplot to strengthen a larger thematic vision. Leo Kirschbaum, in his book Character and Characterization in Shakespeare describes the unity of all elements of Shakespeare’s artwork including theme, image, thought, plot, passage, scene, and act in an “overall design” (Kirschbaum 2). Similarly, Harold Child, in The Shakespearian Productions of John Philip Kemble, refers to "a Shakespeare play as an artistic whole, a work of art with a form of its own" (Child 6/7). In Men and letters; essays in characterization and criticism, Horace Scudder claims that beyond the youthful pleasures of Shakespeare's stories and their movement are the more esoteric attractions of characterization in which speeches of deep introspection build together in a complex interaction that reveals “the literary art" (Scudder 225). The complexity of Shakespeare’s integrated plots was complemented by characters with deep and often ambiguous subtext.
Perhaps the single most definitive characteristic of Shakespeare’s revered drama is the depth of his characters. In Romantic Actors and Bardolatry: Performing Shakespeare from Garrick to Kean, Celestine Woo refers to "the concomitant prestige of Shakespeare and his characters" (Woo 122). Even in his own time, his characterization was much deeper than his contemporaries, who, according to Marshall in his introduction to Kemble’s Henry VIII, demonstrated a penchant for more melodramatic staging conventions. He suggests that John Fletcher (probably most famous for Rule a Wife and Have a Wife) and Philip Massinger (definitely most famous for A New Way to Pay Old Debts) often sacrificed a rational characterization to considerations of more dramatic appeal such as spectacle or sudden plot reversals. (Marshall 163 – Vol. 8). Elizabethan England housed a population with "a significant Catholic minority" (Kaplan 242) in an era of severe tension between followers of Catholicism and Protestantism. The Merchant of Venice is problematized by the fact that English theatre-goers were ostensibly expected to sympathize with the Catholic Christians of Venice. Venice was a recognizable locus of power that defied the dictates of Papal Rome and the choice of Venice as a setting by Shakespeare may have mitigated an anti-Catholic sentiment by a Protestant audience. Both Protestants and Catholics became participants in a mutual “discourse of religious toleration” (Kaplan 243) beyond the political sanctions imposed by a monarchy that vacillated in its religious loyalties. Artistic articulations of this discourse may have prompted theatre-goers of either denomination to unite under the umbrella of Christianity against a common Jewish enemy who, in the play, is also highly sympathetic. Shakespeare’s characters were all complicated by his ability to see both sides of their subtextual motives, a direct contrast with melodramatic characters that are solely good or evil.
More than one critic systemically place Shakespeare in opposition to melodrama. In his often hilarious elitist rhetoric, in Shakespeare in the London Theatre 1855-58, Theodor Fontane sheds ingenuous light on common audiences and the popularity of melodrama. He refers to Sadler’s Wells as “a people's theatre, rather like the Surrey” (Fontane 59). Fontane revered Shakespeare’s drama in both Germany and England and he viewed the audience at Sadler’s Wells in condescending social terms because they “would just as soon watch a French melodrama as Hamlet" (Fontane 59). Discussing gothic melodrama in the introduction to The Hour of One, Stephen Wischhusen reiterates that “spectacle” and “action” were of the greatest attraction and that even Shakespearean “dialogue” was not popular (Wischhusen 11). He shares a telling anecdote.
Ducrow, the great equestrian actor said once during rehearsals, 'Cut the cackle and
let's get to the 'orses.' The fact that he was talking about his own particular
version of Hamlet makes little difference and his attitude was echoed by most of
the popular theatres of the day" (Wischhusen 11).
Scudder describes Shakespeare as a lofty pursuit for higher minds, particularly in the exploration of “the solutions to the great problems of human life” (Scudder 227). Here is where Shakespeare diverts from melodrama. In the structure of melodrama, the solution is articulated well enough - moral superiority will triumph - but the problem is always over-simplified to mere good against evil. That is to say that "definite expressions" of real "problems" are never realized (Scudder 227).
The depth of Shakespeare’s engaging characters is in direct contrast with the solely heroic or evil of melodramatic characters. In the introduction to The Magistrate and Other Nineteenth-Century Plays Michael Booth concisely articulates the character archetypes of melodrama as they had been defined in the earliest stages of the identified genre: “hero, heroine, villain, good old man and woman, comic man and woman, and eccentric” (Booth xii). In addition to character delineations, Booth also catalogues the larger accoutrements of mise-en-scene and plot, which made extensive use of coincidence, in a world where simple virtue is always rewarded against the fall of villainy. While the downfall of villainy occurs in Shakespearean tragedy, it is not the effect of a mere stereotype which inevitably privileges virtue. Shakespeare's villains are complex and ambiguous, often sympathetic. Moreover, the downfall of the villain usually brings with it the downfall of any identifiable hero, or heroine as well. Certainly there is no reward of their virtue, if it even remains intact by the close of the play. In each of Shakespeare’s plays, melodramatic characterization is present, but deployed in complex ways. My purpose is not to disparage the qualities of melodrama. Quite to the contrary, I must admit that it is these very qualities that have drawn me to it, its emotional appeal having worked its magic on my psyche to its perfect purpose. Regardless of any qualitative judgment, mine or other, it is merely a fact that these are the actual characteristics of the genre, for better or for worse.
Melodrama is frequently described as the offspring of tragedy, supplanting the tragic ending with a ‘happy’ one. The most pervasive aspects of melodrama date back as far as the ancient Greeks. In his compelling essay on Television Melodrama, David Thorburn refers to the binary of good against evil as an integral part of drama “since the time of Euripides" (Thorburn 603). Peter Brooks’ foundational work defines the genre in a less critically pejorative light than it had been in nearly fifty years, in which he claims that “stage melodrama represents "a popular form of the tragic, exploiting similar emotions"” (Thorburn 603). Melodrama may well have supplanted tragedy as a popular form of theatre in an era when less sophisticated working-class audiences demanded more in the way of escapism than social introspection. The nineteenth century was a time of audience diversification. Members from all levels of a new social strata became patrons and in response melodrama introduced characters that reflected and championed ostensibly lower-class heroes in a wide range of dramatic scenarios including those that were “tragic or potentially tragic” (Booth x). Indeed, Booth goes so far as to suggest that John Walker’s 1832 play, The Factory Lad, “is closer to tragedy than melodrama” (Booth xiv). The narrative fails to present anything that is particularly unrealistic to the working class audience experiencing the same economic vicissitudes as the characters. The ending is more ambiguous and unresolved than it is ‘happy’. Happy endings were fondly desired, if not commercially necessary. Nineteenth century, playwrights “usually avoided a tragic termination to […] domestic agonies” but that what he refers to as dramatic “raw material” was tantamount to the suffering depicted in tragedy. Like many others, Booth defines melodrama as an inevitable evolution from tragedy, but with more distinct moral lines and a happy ending.
Closer examination, however, reveals that this foregone conclusion may be inaccurate. All of Shakespeare's comedies include an internal strife for the hero / heroine, as well as many of the other characteristics Booth lists, and maintain a happy ending. In Much Ado About Nothing, for example, the villainous Don John is irrationally dedicated to effecting the downfall of Hero and Claudius. In the end, they unite and he is vanquished. Therefore, melodrama is structurally aligned more closely with Shakespeare's comedies than his tragedies. The most problematic of these is The Merchant of Venice. The polarization of Shylock and Antonio is clear melodramatic Manichaeism, but the sympathy Shakespeare affords Shylock complicates both the humour, and the notion of a happy ending. From the perspective of Bassanio and his peers, the narrative ends quite happily. However, the perspective of Shylock paints a deep tragedy.
Nevertheless, tragedy holds more closely to the character delineations of melodrama in which usually one hero and heroine, linked romantically, are opposed to a single and singularly evil villain. Strong examples include Hamlet, Othello, and to a lesser degree, Richard III. In the simplicity of Manichaeistic opposition, tragedy is a progenitor of melodrama, apparently different only in the exchange of a tragic ending with a 'happy' one, in which only the villain is killed, if even he.
As early as 1681, Poet Laureate Nahum Tate had altered King Lear to include a happy ending. Amongst other alterations, Tate also penned a more tangible romance between Cordelia and Edgar to replace the less sentimental and often absent union with France. The inversion of Lear as a tragedy to incorporate a happy ending was as heretical to Shakespeare as it was puritanical to Tate’s own sensibilities. Nevertheless, it was widely used and is perhaps the boldest trend towards melodramatic modification in history, even though it pre-dates the golden age substantially. Child reports that in the earliest stages of the melodramatic age John Philip Kemble originally used the version of Lear edited by David Garrick. By 1809, however, after the rise of melodramatic popularity had begun, Kemble revised his version to one of more popular appeal, visibly influenced by Tate’s version, particularly including the romance between Cordelia and Edgar that he had instituted (Child 9). Surprisingly, at the popular height of the melodramatic genre, Kean chose to restore the tragic ending. Even though Tate’s footprint remains painfully visible in Kean’s version, his run of the show opened and closed in the same season in 1858 after only thirty-two performances (Cole 256). His run of Hamlet (at the Princess Theatre alone) lasted almost a decade, from 1850 until 1859 (Spencer - introduction to Kean’s Hamlet). The unTated Lear was so unpopular that even with generous attendance from the royal family (who apparently viewed it four times), in 1858 Kean suffered unrecovered losses of £4000, a sum close to 500000 current USD (Hunter - introduction to Kean’s Lear). Irving’s use of Tate’s Lear, then, might be considered an acceptance of what had become a standard and saleable version to audiences accustomed to the less emotionally cumbersome happy ending. Tate’s version is an outright alteration, not a mere cut, and is an example as rare as it is obvious. In other plays, the three actor/managers made more subtle edits in a contradictory attempt to accommodate rising melodramatic tastes and maintain the integrity of Shakespeare.
John Philip Kemble was a savvy actor/manager participating in the popularity of proto-melodrama. Although his popularity historically predates the golden age of melodrama, he so closely predates the genre that his versions of Shakespeare’s plays would certainly have been edited to accommodate rising melodramatic tastes. In fact, Woo historically places his career squarely within the earliest stages of British melodrama. "In 1798, Kemble played the lead in Mathew Lewis's The Castle Spectre, a splendidly successful melodrama that was the hottest ticket of the season" (Woo 61). In terms of his Shakespearean performances, however, Child claims that Kemble would never have generated revenues if he chose not to accommodate popular tastes (Child 19). In order to achieve this goal, Woo describes his acting and his editing as "reductive interpretations” characterized by a “simplicity of conception” (Woo 60). She also refers to his use of what she calls “stage tricks” that effectively impregnated his performances with substantial emotional impact (Woo 59). All of Woo's observations have the unifying tenor of moving away from Shakespeare’s text in favour of other modes of presentation. Kemble openly rejected theatrical conventions that gave precedence to social interactions of the audience and interrupted performances. Woo argues that Kemble systemically abrogated audience tastes while Fontane refers to his acquiescence to commercial considerations. The form of melodrama that would quickly emerge as popular and the increased simplicity of character that Kemble deployed give credibility to the latter perspective.
Kemble’s commercial considerations prompted him to anticipate melodramatic tastes and to edit Shakespeare’s plays accordingly. One of the most popular plays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. As a tragedy it is weak and as a history it is gratuitous. In the introduction to Shakespeare’s texts published by Marshal and Kemble, Marshall sees the fall of Wolsey as a lesser venture by Shakespeare in comparison to his other works. He describes the action of the narrative as linear but constructed in disconnected episodes that are not integrated by careful characterization as they are in Lear or Hamlet (Shattuck 163 – Vol. 8). He sees this lack of character depth as “incredible” (that is to say as an aberration for Shakespeare). According to Marshall it would seem that Henry VIII is already melodramatic in the simplicity of its characters, but, as it is both a tragic and historical play, it is difficult to edify melodrama within it. Nevertheless, Kemble managed to create a version that actually plays like three simplistic mini-plots, all of which have melodramatic Manichaeism, rather than as a single unified story.
Kemble presents the first act with an evil Wolsey against the innocent Buckingham. Much of the first scene is eliminated, removing much of the historical intrigue and distilling the scene to an expository, if not cursory look at Wolsey’s involvement in the French/English conflict. He is painted as a “butcher’s cur” that is “venomed-mouthed” and “revengeful” (Shattuck - Vol. 8). Any text that provides subtext for Wolsey’s evil is excised. For example, in I.i, Shakespeare’s original version includes Norfolk’s ambiguously sympathetic description of him, which aligns him too closely with the will of heaven. “The force of his own merit makes his way - / A gift that heaven gives for him” (Craig). Furthermore, to separate the King from ill-doing, and reserve him for a later mini-plot, Buckingham’s speech “I’ll to the King” (Craig) in which he intimates the King’s mercy will save him is eliminated. Both heaven and the King are exonerated from Wolsey’s evil with the removal of Abergavenny’s “The will of heaven be done and the King’s pleasure / By me obeyed” (Craig). The heroism of Buckingham is further complicated when Henry describes his concerns against Buckingham. “When these so noble benefits shall prove / Not well disposed, the mind growing once corrupt, / They turn to vicious forms, ten times more ugly / Than ever they were fair” (Craig). Kemble removes the speech. The pathetic farewell speeches of Buckingham in II.i remain, and by the end of the scene, he is dead. The first mini-melodrama is over, and the plot moves in a different direction.
The second act highlights Henry’s love scheme and divorce plans. Hailing back to earlier melodramatic literature, the entire feel of Henry, his desire to divorce and take on a new young bride, apparently for lust, is entirely reminiscent of Manfred in Horace Walpole’s 1764 gothic classic, The Castle of Otranto. Kemble paints Anne as a naïve innocent. Her recognition of Katharine’s plight is heavily edited in II.iii. Kemble leaves intact her statement that “tis better to be lowly born / And range with humble livers” completing her simple country girl caricature, congruent with the impoverished heroines of melodrama (Shattuck). Kemble removes many of Anne’s lines that intimate a coy participation with Henry’s seduction. More importantly, in order to maintain Anne’s heroic simplicity, the entire coronation scene in Act IV is eliminated. No ambiguous avarice or rise to aristocratic power could possibly be so lavishly celebrated with such pomp and circumstance without compromising the character that Kemble tries to paint. That would be a little too much history, and not enough melodrama.
In a reversal from the earlier acts, Wolsey becomes tragically sympathetic. Wolsey’s speeches of humility to Henry are maintained in III.ii. However, beginning with “Mine own ends”, the rest of his speech is removed, thus divorcing his fall from any notion of selfish motives. Kemble maintains the scheming of Wolsey to thwart the King’s divorce and marriage, but edits it to appear as sympathy for the mistreated Katharine more than for personal avarice. Unlike Kean, Kemble maintains the pivotal speech in Act IV by Griffith extolling Wolsey’s virtues, thereby solidifying the tragedy of Wolsey against an evil Henry, but assigns it to Cromwell, having the extra effect of aligning Wolsey (Cromwell is closely associated with him, Griffith is not) with sympathy for Katharine. By the end of Act IV, Wolsey has been redeemed as the tragic champion of Katharine, Henry has been reduced to a salacious opportunist, Katharine to a tragically rejected loyal wife, and Anne to a beautiful but simple melodramatic heroine, unaware of her own appeal and void of responsibility for Katharine’s dismissal and death. One almost expects Buckingham to return to life and rescue Anne from Henry, sending him to his death and allowing Katharine the silent pride of widowhood. However, history cannot be altered so much as to allow a distinctly melodramatic outcome, and Kemble expertly weaves the emotional climaxes of melodrama, with its feminine pathos and innocence, and masculine evil, into the history of Shakespeare’s narrative.
The third episode overlaps substantially with the second. The fourth and fifth acts become celebratory: the happy unity of Anne and Henry resulting in the Christening of Elizabeth and the hope for the new royal domestic future. In Shakespeare’s time, this must have appealed to her immensely. When Shakespeare immodestly wrote that “our children’s children shall see this” in V.v, he probably had little idea how strongly he would arouse the pride and emotions of Kemble’s audience: the very “children’s children” of whom Shakespeare wrote (Marshall 53-4 – Vol. 4). In any case, the modification of characterization interacts substantially with the narrative structure of the play. Kemble’s removal of specific speeches results in an episodic plot of three mini-melodramas, unified by a melodramatic happy ending with the introduction of Elizabeth.
Kemble had a penchant for excising the wordy expositions of lesser characters that are typical at the beginnings of most scenes in the play. His reasons may well have been simply ones of economy, but certainly the removal of ‘excess baggage’ has the effect of a far more focused and simplified character interaction: no extras to confuse the simple narrative, and bore an audience weaned on spectacle. In order to control the narrative in this way, Kemble dispenses with all of the scenes with the unnamed gentlemen, and at the beginning of Act V, Kemble eliminates the exposition between Gardiner and Lovell. Kemble openly disliked the character of the Chamberlain. More than any other subsidiary character, many of his lines were cut, or assigned to another character if cutting them cost too much to the continuity of the play.
Nowhere are Kemble’s cuts to characters’ speeches more obvious than in Hamlet. In terms of the Manichaeistic polarization of good against evil, of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet fits the dynamic best: a singular hero, a singular villain, and a love interest in the heroine Ophelia. The singular villain, however, is broken into several parts - the blocking agent to Ophelia and Hamlet's love is played by her father Polonius, and the actual deadly combat is against Laertes. However, both of these characters are aligned with Claudius and act as extensions, much like Snatchem and Bowse to Black Brandon in My Poll and My Partner Joe, or the outlaw gang in The Miller and His Men. The problem is that Laertes and Polonius are not so clearly evil. They are entirely unaware of Claudius' murder of King Hamlet. In order for the dynamic to work in a melodramatic structure, Polonius and Laertes must be made aware of the King's villainy, or the King must carry out all of their actions against Hamlet. Moreover, as the emotional motivation for the narrative plot, Ophelia's role must become much more prominent, and much of the dialogue that paints Hamlet as his own worst enemy must be removed. The story of Hamlet's mother becomes entirely extraneous except as a mere addition of the villain's crimes against the hero. Kemble effects all of these changes.
Kemble systemically removes any lines that paint Hamlet as unlovable, Claudius as sympathetic, or Ophelia as irrelevant. Hamlet’s speech in I.v that begins “O pernicious woman” is deleted (Timmins). The effect is to avoid characterizing Hamlet as malicious towards his mother. It exonerates her of any ill-doing, and reserves the evil described by the ghost exclusively to Claudius. "Kemble excised the King's speech of remorse as well as his first acknowledgement of guilt, thus rendering Claudius more completely evil" (Woo 60). Furthermore, "Instead of having Hamlet leap into Ophelia's grave after Laertes, Kemble's stage directions required Laertes to spring out of the grave and seize Hamlet - an unprecedented break with tradition" (Woo 61) and one that participates with other changes made by Kemble that systemically remove any ambiguity in the benevolent nature of his heroic-only depiction of Hamlet. Ophelia’s suggestion that Hamlet “had been loos’d out of hell” in II.i is cut from her larger speech (Timmins). In order to amplify the melodramatic heroine in Ophelia, very little of her often extraneous speeches are removed, maintaining a more prominent role for her character in an otherwise heavily edited text.
Perhaps the most astounding evidence of Kemble’s modifications to the characters’ speeches to fit a simple good/evil dichotomy comes in IV.vi. In the Q2 version, after Claudius has convinced Laertes to take part in his fencing scheme to kill Hamlet, Laertes answers, “I will do’t / And for the purpose, I’ll anoint my sword. / I bought an unction of a mountebank” (Timmins). The preconceived purchase of poison and Laertes’ addition to the scheme makes him not only complicit, but an active villain himself, which has no other effect but to spread thin the clear villainy of Claudius. In Volume Two of the Folger Facsimiles of Kemble’s promptbooks, he has crossed out the lines after “do’t”. In the margin below, Kemble has written a replacement for Laertes’ deleted lines:
King. To make all sure, your sword shall be anointed
With a contagion of so mortal nature,
That if you gall him slightly, it may be death.
Laer. My Lord, I will be rul’d” (Shattuck - Vol. 2).
Kemble replaces Laertes intent with obedience, thereby relegating Laertes to the position of a mere ‘henchman’ and isolating the evil plotting in the character of Claudius.
On a larger scale, Kemble substantially simplified the plot. "Kemble liked to clarify and essentialize the moral and ethical questions a given production was to wrestle with" (Woo 60). In order to minimize larger ethical questions, Kemble eliminates subplots. He removes much of the interactions between Polonius, Laertes, and Ophelia. He entirely removes the interaction between Polonius and Reynaldo in II.i and only maintains the scene at the entrance of Ophelia. Even minute allusions to external politics that might give the plot a larger context are systemically removed. For example, Kemble cuts Horatio’s lines describing the appearance of the ghost in which he says, “So frowned he once, when in an angry parle, / He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice” (Craig). Kemble removes the entire Norwegian plot with Fortinbras except for its mention in the opening and closing scenes. By removing the ‘external’ plot of Fortinbras, the main plot has the enclosed feeling of a domestic melodrama, and the political undercurrent intended by Shakespeare – the whittling away of internal integrity giving strength to an ever-present threat of external political conflict – is entirely removed from the interactions of the characters in Denmark and we are left with an ‘evil King vs. a heroic Prince’ dynamic, void of its larger context. With these many cuts either maintained from traditional edits handed down to Kemble, or implemented himself, the golden age of melodrama began.
The golden age of melodrama was heavily influenced by the Kean family. Edmund Kean excelled in roles such as Richard III, Iago, or Barabas in Kit Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (Hartnoll 178). All of these characters fall distinctly on the villainous side of the melodramatic divide. He modified the complex sympathy generated by Shylock into a more simplified stock, "making the character a swarthy fiend with a butcher's knife in his grasp and blood-lust in his eyes" (Hartnoll 178). The melodramatic tendencies of the father were not lost in influencing the son. Edmund and Charles chose the most Manichaeistically opposed villain and hero in all of Shakespeare's works to live out the as yet undiscovered Freudian dichotomy. History records only a single performance where the two graced the boards together, father as Othello, and son as Iago, at Covent Garden in 1833 before the end of Edmund’s career and life (Hartnoll 178). The most popular of Charles Kean’s plays realized the apex of the mature genre. "The Corsican Brothers [...] contains hero (a double one), heroine, villain, comic relief, sensational incident, elaborate settings, mood-reinforcing musical accompaniment, rhetoric, and a firm sense of poetic justice - all these being standard elements of melodrama" (Booth xv). Charles Kean was the paradigm actor/manager of the British melodrama.
Kean’s Henry VIII revisited many of the melodramatic cuts that Kemble employed. As was true in Kemble’s time, Fontane echoes Marshall’s opinion of the original text. Referring to Kean's hundredth production of Henry VIII, Fontane observes that "it remains a sketch, and it lacks the wealth of engaging characters necessary for dramatized history" (Fontane 41). In Fontane’s ingenuous description of Shakespeare in the era of Kean, he offers a sincere account of several productions, and an audience member’s perspective of Kean’s work. Fontane describes Miss Heath’s Anne as more of a melodramatic heroine. “[H]er effect is entirely pictorial. But a person who is so beautiful has no great need of speech. The radiance of her countenance as she stepped forth to her coronation was a splendid sight” (Fontane 46). Whether Kean intended this contrast with the famously dramatic pathos of Mrs. Kean’s Katharine is uncertain and improbable. Nevertheless, the whole effect would have been one that mitigated Anne’s unjust displacement of Katharine, and strengthened an audience’s melodramatic sensibilities towards Anne as heroine. Fontane argues that "[t]here are only three scenes in the entire play where the actor can touch the hearts of the spectator. These are Buckingham's speech at the beginning of Act Two, [. . .] the trial of the Queen at Blackfriar's; and finally the fall of Wolsey at the end of Act Three" (Fontane 42). Fontane reports that all three scenes were left in (Fontane 43).
Where Kemble’s modifications result in a tertiary of mini-melodramas, Kean’s cuts result in a simple singular plotline. Kean reinstated most of III.i that Kemble had entirely removed. Katharine’s speeches are full of pathos which, in Kemble’s version, amplifies the depiction of Henry as a villain. In Kean’s version, in concert with other cuts he made, the scene actually acts to villainize Wolsey against Henry. His disobedience to the King is highlighted and the tenor is of his sympathetic speeches to Katharine feels insincere. “If your grace / Could but be brought to know, our ends are honest / You’d feel more comfort. Pray, think us / Those we profess, peace-makers, friends, and servants” (Kean 57). The last two Acts are nearly deleted. Of some 864 spoken lines in the full text, Kean leaves only about 298 intact, according to the Cornmarket Press facsimile. The most important loss is the pivotal speech in Act IV by Griffith extolling Wolsey’s virtues. The overall effect is one of subverting all the troubling divorce / lust / death of Katharine nonsense that casts Henry in an ambiguous light. Kean places Henry in the role of hero, nearly thwarted by the scheming of Wolsey the villain, and to maintain the melodramatic continuity, Kean glosses over the last two acts, marginalizing Henry’s victimization of Katharine and making Anne the silent heroine who would have lost her partnership with a King if the evil Wolsey had succeeded.
Kean’s staging of the last two acts of Henry VIII is an early example of a melodramatic tableau. Fontane reports that "in Kean's version the final two acts are nothing more than living pictures" (Fontane 41). The description is reminiscent of the closing tableau in Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin, the single most successful example of American stage melodrama in the nineteenth century. The play ends with an on-stage 'pictorial' in which creates an emotional aesthetic. The stage direction for the finale tableau of the play reads, "Gorgeous clouds, tinted with sunlight. EVA, robed in white, is discovered on the back of a milk-white dove, with expanded wings, as if just soaring upward. Her hands are extended in benediction over ST. CLARE and UNCLE TOM who are kneeling and gazing up to her. Expressive music. Slow curtain" (Wise 65). Fontane’s description of the last two scenes of Kean’s Henry VIII in Kean’s choice of presentation has the double effect of creating the illusion of a singular plot-line and anticipating the tableau characteristic of melodrama, while maintaining the polarized simplification of characters, particularly Henry.
Kean’s cuts to Hamlet were equally ruthless. “He entirely omitted the King’s prayer scene and Hamlet’s meditation on revenge, as Kemble had done before” (Spencer – introduction to Kean’s Hamlet). Also like Kemble, he cut the scenes with “Voltimand and Cornelius and the Norwegian embassy” (Spencer – introduction to Kean’s Hamlet), the scene between Polonius and Reynaldo, the account of the success of the child actors, the account of the fight with the pirates at the opening V.ii, and the same comic moments that Kemble removed such as the Queen’s repetitive thanks to Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, apparently correcting the King’s confusion of them. The already short Act IV is cut so heavily that Kean manages to get it down to a single scene. By entirely removing the scene with Fortinbras, and by minimizing Hamlet’s coy responses to Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Claudius about the location of Polonius body, the scene plays as a double-entendre of madness between the hero and heroine. The first half of the scene is comic, rather than foul, as Hamlet ‘madly’ dodges inquiries about Polonius corpse. The second half focuses heavily on the madness of Ophelia, with only the bawdy parts of her songs removed, nearly identical to those removed by Kemble. Kean cuts more of Polonius’ lines than Kemble, most notably his “tragical-historical-pastoral” description of the players, thereby reducing his wordy characterization. In so doing, the play is substantially shortened, and it affords a heavier focus on the primary Claudius-Hamlet dichotomy.
The most interesting aspect of Kean’s version of Hamlet is his creation of episodic emotional crescendos. In his exploration of Henry Irving, Shakespearean Allan Hughes refers to "traditional business" and "points" in Hamlet that the theatre audiences in Irving's time had come to expect (Hughes 28). "These were moments when the actor was supposed to make a sensation by revealing, with a single vivid strike, the meaning of a scene, speech or action" (Hughes 28). For example, I.i ends with Horatio’s melodramatic “This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him” (Kean 11) as opposed to the full text version, or Kemble’s, that ends with a more emotionally benign “Where we shall find him most convenient” (Timmins). Referring to Hamlet's rhyming couplet about catching the “conscience of the king” with the Mousetrap, Hughes states, "Well played, it is a thrilling moment, but inherently melodramatic. It is as arresting as a display of declamatory virtuosity; its single obvious meaning, however, may be inconsistent with Hamlet's character or a coherent interpretation of the play" (Hughes 29). Hughes makes clear the sacrifice of character and thematic interpretation in the name of an emotional scene-ending climax.
Kean makes a relevant cut at the end of every scene in the play that does not already have an emotional crescendo. He does the same with his version of Lear. Surprisingly, Kean, although influenced by Tate’s version of Lear restored the tragic ending. Nevertheless, his scene endings are “particularly truncated, to procure big ‘curtain’ effects” (Hunter – introduction to Kean’s Lear). Thorburn discusses modern television melodrama in exactly the same terms, constrained to have emotional crescendos before every commercial break. "That commercials have shaped television melodrama is decisive, of course. [...] Their essential effect has been the refinement of a segmented dramatic structure [...] whose capacity to surprise or otherwise engage its audience must therefore depend largely on the localized vividness and potency of the smaller units or episodes that comprise the whole" (Thorburn 599). These segments "achieve some sort of climactic or resolving pitch at the commercial break" (Thorburn 599). This melodramatic pattern explains Kean’s inclusion of Hamlet’s speech at the end of Act II that begins “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” (Kean 46). Kemble cut most of the first part of the speech, but allowed for the melodramatic crescendo at the end of the scene. Much like the rising emotional episodes that Thorburn describes in television melodrama, Kean maintains the whole speech, allowing for a slower build up to a melodramatic crescendo of epic proportions.
Kemble started the pattern, but Kean perfected it. "Hazlitt […]described such roles as Hamlet wherein Kemble's intensity came across as a lamentable want of flexibility that detracted from the character, but critics agreed that Kemble shone at developing a buildup of emotion" (Woo 59). For Kean, the strongest example of this pattern is his edit to the final scene. Where Kemble allows for some 14 lines following Hamlet’s final words, Kean ends with the death of his melodramatic hero. The final line in his version is Hamlet’s “The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit; / The rest is silence” (Kean 104) “followed by a slow curtain” (Spencer). The rest is silence.
Henry Irving’s versions of the same plays are cut in much the same way Kean did with very few variations. Hughes describes his edits in detail. “Speeches which seem to contradict the prevailing romantic notion of a 'lovable' Hamlet were omitted" (Hughes 31). "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's part in the scheme disappears with the scheme itself" (Hughes 33). In so doing, they are not complicit with Claudius, and Hamlet's revenge upon them is glossed. Hughes notes other relevant cuts including "Ophelia's description of his distracted visit to her closet" and "all traces of the voyage" along with the entire Rosencrantz and Guildenstern subplot (Hughes 34). Of course, both of these episodes, if left in, work to dilute Hamlet as a simplified hero and problematize him as lovable.
Hughes describes Irving’s cuts and reformulations to Lear as "ruthless surgery" and that "nothing can adequately replace the dramatist's [Shakespeare's] delicate juxtapositions or the disrupted patterns of imagery" (Hughes 119). In Irving’s Lear, "The Fool suffered heavily, of course: some of his most significant lines were cut, together with the response they elicited" from Lear and Kent (Hughes 119). It might seem ontologically that the Fool is a prototype of the comic melodramatic sidekick who saves the day. However, Lear's Fool was far too intelligent and aware to have been as accidentally humorous as such melodramatic buffoons as Tim Bobbin in The Murder in the Red Barn, or Watchful Waxend in My Poll and My Partner Joe. Moreover, he did nothing to 'save the day' and rather chastised Lear for being unable to.
Describing Irving's choices for editing, Hughes claims that he exercised a systemic hegemony of character of dialogue (Hughes 29). Hughes’ context for the word “character” refers to Irving's acting style. In a text where deep characterization is carried exclusively in the words, by ignoring them, Irving created characters that Hughes goes on to describe as "overemphasized by omissions, simplifications" (Hughes 29). Nevertheless, Hughes claims that his simplifications were lesser than those seen even today (Hughes 29) and that Irving's "characterization was so free of theatrical tricks, so naturalistic by prevailing standards, that the first audience in 1874 was baffled and failed to applaud until the third act" (Hughes 30). By the time of Irving’s performances, melodramatic conventions in Shakespeare had become so common that their absence left the audience bewildered.
Perhaps the most definitive characteristic of melodrama is characterization, or more specifically, the simplification of character for clarity of theme. Webster’s Dictionary defines melodrama as "a work (as a movie or play) characterized by extravagant theatricality and by the predominance of plot and physical action over characterization" (Merriam Webster's Deluxe Dictionary Tenth Collegiate Edition 1140). In fact, it takes characters that are designed to serve shallow plot functions to create melodrama.
Shakespeare’s plays were evidently full of melodramatic proto-pieces, but to access them required the destruction of Shakespeare’s larger artworks. Child notes that James Boaden's claims, in his pivotal historical text Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq.: Including a History of the Stage, from the Time of Garrick to the Present Period, might be reinterpreted to suggest that Shakespeare’s texts could be relentlessly cut with very little loss to the narrative or the artistic whole and that Shakespeare’s texts were so unnecessarily wordy it appears that he wrote with the intention of his texts being cut to serve the whims of the audience or actors (Child 7). Certainly this perspective is congruent with Lepage's notion that “[d]ealing with Shakespeare we’re dealing with an avalanche of resources, a box of toys to be taken out” (Lepage). Nevertheless, Child's general thesis is that Kemble's changes were valiant efforts to restore "as much of Shakespeare's own language as he could" (Child 18) but that Kemble "did not see Shakespeare's drama as [...] a form which could not be altered without loss of dramatic power" (Child 7/8). He describes any changes to Shakespeare's original text as "spotted snakes with double tongue" (Child 7). The tenor of his description is that any edition to Shakespeare is a heresy against the original "artistic whole" (Child 7).
Although Shakespeare was a progenitor of English melodrama, providing ample material upon which to build it, his artistic whole, particularly in the pivotally important depth of characterization, and the interaction of his subplots, is not melodramatic. "Not Shakespeare! we should say now" (Child 22). Placing Shakespeare and melodrama in distinct opposition, Child argues that it took edits of careful precision to raise Shakespeare to a level of popular appeal that was competitive with more obvious presentations of spectacle. For Shakespeare to participate in the commercial popularity of melodrama required editing of "no small achievement" (Child 21). Kean created ‘commercial’ crescendos at the end of scenes, and Kemble created mini-melodramas (such as in his Henry VIII) within the larger narrative in an attempt to maintain as much integrity of the original work as possible. But Shakespeare had no intention of creating sporadic and episodic mini-melodramas. His integrated whole in every play, even those ostensibly immature, or created merely because he was pressed by the queen, offers far greater critical opportunities and thematic depth than those cut up bits of melodrama extracted from his plays. While it could be argued that Shakespeare and melodrama have many characteristics in common, their esoteric distinctions are clear. No amount of intelligentsia could make the intelligent observer unable to see their distinctions, even if those distinctions evade a clear verbalized definition.
The cross-section of plays and artists available for examination within the scope of this paper is admittedly limited. I have chosen plays that seem most likely to depict polarizations of 'hero/heroine' against 'villain' in order to focus on the significance of modifications to their characterization. There is a vast amount of research remaining to be done. Actors such as Charles Kemble, Edmund Kean, William MacReady, Ira Aldridge, and Edwin Booth all presented versions of Shakespeare's plays, and they all participated in the melodramatic genre. These actors, as well as the three I have examined, offered performances of more than the three Shakespeare plays on which I have focused. In his own time Shakespeare could not have been a melodramatist as the specific genre did not yet exist (except as a sort of proto-Manichaeism in many plays). In the golden age of British melodrama (1797-1899) his texts had to be radically modified to meet the needs of audiences desiring melodramatic fare. In our own age, with both the age of Shakespeare and the golden age of melodrama in hindsight, even the most officious editing of Shakespeare, now a standard practice to accommodate shorter audience attention spans, results in either campy spectacle or slow, deep characterization, but never both. What is most interesting is the fact that by simply editing the speeches of characters that otherwise lean toward protagonist or antagonist to remove ambiguity in the other direction, the structure becomes near perfect melodrama with very little damage to the plot of the narrative but with substantial loss to the artistic whole. One might liken the modifications made by Kemble, Kean, and Irving to the work of a sculptor carving out a work of art from an already existing block of marble. But in this case, the block of marble is already a complete work of art: indeed, a much more complex work than that chiseled out of it. While Shakespeare’s works included and encompassed melodramatic characteristics, the cuts required in the golden age of melodrama to make Shakespeare’s plays conform to audience taste compromised the larger integrated whole of his art. Quite simply, Shakespeare was not just a melodramatist, but rather a melodramatist and more.






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