8 - Encountering melodrama

Summary

One of the earliest descriptions of melodrama - only it wasn't called melodrama but tragi-comedy - partly explains melodrama's ambiguous reputation. Writing in 1611, the English dramatist John Fletcher stated:

A tragi-comedy is not so-called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned; so that a god is as lawful in this as in a tragedy, and mean people in a comedy.

It was this deformed hybrid – this state of being neither one thing nor another, which refused to equate disaster and tragic excess with death, which acknowledged and celebrated common folk, and which did, despite Fletcher’s denial, inject moments of mirth into serious business – which brought onto the English stage a theatrical genre previously found in the ironic “tragedies” of Euripides and in the “pastoral” plays of Renaissance Europe. Although Fletcher sought to link “tragi-comedy” with the Athenian satyr play, his plea for respectability and critical status was ignored.