Abstract
“Horror” is not often associated with nineteenth-century British plays. Although critics have explored “Gothic dramas,” monster spectacles, and supernatural theatre, there has been minimal attention to horror as a distinct theatrical mode. Winter unveils a very dark side to nineteenth-century theatre by uncovering meticulous horror mechanisms aimed to petrify audiences throughout the period. The stage technologies, gruesome scenes, and searing suspense all arrested the audiences’ attention, which provided platforms for voicing societal concerns in the plays’ contexts. Three representative dramas based on Frankenstein (1823), Sweeney Todd (1847), and ghostly mystery (1871) are examined to illustrate the genre’s shifting trends. Winter’s analysis thus provides an informative overview, whilst also casting light upon horror’s overlooked prevalence in the era’s theatres, where the roots of horror film lie.
Some of the author’s material on George Dibdin Pitt’s Sweeney Todd melodrama first appeared in the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance (volume 8, issue 3: 2015).
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Notes
- 1.
For further details on nineteenth-century stage technologies used for conjuring up spectral illusions, see David J. Jones, Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-Cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670–1910 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011).
- 2.
It is important to note that “Gothic drama” (which intrinsically incorporates horror, due to the permeable lines between the Gothic and horror fields) is widely accepted in criticism as distinct from “melodrama,” yet it is also generally agreed they share important overlaps. The debate over how to distinguish between Gothic drama and melodrama has raised complexities—for example, see Matthew Buckley (2014, p. 422) and Diane Long Hoeveler (2010, p. 143). I explore this issue in depth in my PhD thesis by asserting melodrama’s integral Gothic origins and perennial content across long nineteenth-century English theater and assess when and why melodrama fell into its pejorative connotations of excess and frivolity, which are far displaced from the genre’s prevalent horror dimensions in the era—see “Gothic Stages: The Rise and Fall of English Melodrama 1790–1890” (unpublished PhD thesis, Northumbria University, 2014).
- 3.
Jane Moody provides a thorough study of London’s minor theater culture in Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- 4.
Diego Saglia discusses Gothic theater’s offstage “virtual space” in his analysis of stage adaptations of Radcliffe’s novels and argues that “the offstage dimension bears crucially on the affectively impactful representations of space in Gothic drama and theatre”—see “‘A Portion of the Name’: Stage Adaptations of Radcliffe’s Fiction, 1794–1806”, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 223.
- 5.
All subsequent page references are from the John Dicks edition in Forry’s collection and are given in parentheses after quotations in the text. I have selected Dicks’s edition of the play rather than the earlier Larpent manuscript, as the latter was submitted for licensing before performance, and additionally, the later version contains more stage direction details (see Forry, p. 134) . The Larpent version is available in Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas (1992). All stage directions in the chapter’s discussed plays are original emphases.
- 6.
Melodrama introduced a new method of using music in theater, as the accompaniment specifically matched and emphasized specific points of the action. “Melo” is derived from the Greek “melos,” meaning “music”—for further analysis on melodrama’s music, see Anne Dhu Shapiro, “Nineteenth-Century Melodrama: From A Tale of Mystery to Monte Cristo,” Harvard Library Bulletin 2 (1991).
- 7.
As many critics have noted, Fritz is an early manifestation of Egor in later adaptations of the story (the figure of a laboratory assistant is absent in the novel).
- 8.
For specific dates on the increase and fall of crime literature such as broadsides and penny bloods, see Rosalind Crone’s Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 115.
- 9.
Some of the chapter’s material on George Dibdin Pitt’s Sweeney Todd melodrama first appeared in my article “‘His Knife and Hands Bloody’: Sweeney Todd’s Journey from Page to Stage – Melodrama, Adaptation and the Original 1847 Manuscript,” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 8.3 (2015a).
- 10.
I explore the 1847 play’s active role in fuelling Todd’s urban legend in more depth in my article, which includes comparative analysis between the original manuscript and its later 1883 redaction: “‘His Knife and Hands Bloody’: Sweeney Todd’s Journey from Page to Stage – Melodrama, Adaptation and the Original 1847 Manuscript,” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 8 (2015a), https://doi.org/10.1386/jafp.8.3.233_1.
- 11.
All subsequent page references are from this edition, reprinted in Weltman’s publication, and are given in parentheses after quotations in the text.
- 12.
See Weltman for a reprint of the original playbill, stored in the British Library (25–27).
- 13.
All subsequent page references are from this edition and are given in parentheses after quotations in the text.
- 14.
Erle’s recollections currently form the main contemporary account available for the nineteenth-century production. The exact date of the show he witnessed is unspecified, as he only states that his memoirs were “written a long time ago” (p. 19). But it is possible to ascertain that he saw a show after the initial repertoires, as he names a different actor who played Todd to the one on the original 1847 playbill (p. 39), and clearly before the 1883 version was printed. In addition to Erle, there is a very brief mention of the original run in the Theatrical Times (March 13, 1847), as discussed by Weltman (p. 16).
- 15.
The “vampire trap” was a contemporary theatrical term, derived from its first usage in Planché’s The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles (1820) for the villain to suddenly appear and vanish from various angles of the stage.
- 16.
See Weltman for dates on Dibdin Pitt’s composition, submission and staging (p. 1).
- 17.
All subsequent page references are from this edition and are given in parentheses after quotations in the text.
- 18.
Similar reactions were seen in response to Thomas Russell Sullivan’s melodrama, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1887–1888), and the plot corresponds with Mayer’s discussion of the era’s interest in the “double self.” I discuss the play’s horror in my article, “‘Two and the Same’: Jack the Ripper and The Melodramatic Stage Adaptation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 42.2 (2015b), https://doi.org/10.1177/1748372716645114.
- 19.
For an overview of the music halls’ growth in the later part of the century, see Jacky Bratton, “The Music Hall,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. Kerry Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- 20.
- 21.
There is some debate over the reasons behind the French Grand-Guignol’s decline—see Hand and Wilson’s discussion on factors including the rise of horror film and World War Two (Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror, pp. 23–25).
- 22.
See Tim Auld, “The Turn of the Screw, at Almeida Theatre, review,” The Telegraph, January 30, 2013, accessed July 25, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/9838436/The-Turn-of-the-Screw-at-Almeida-Theatre-review.html; and Susannah Clapp, “The Haunting of Hill House review: A spectre in search of a feast,” The Guardian, December 20, 2015, accessed July 25, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/dec/20/haunting-of-hill-house-liverpool-playhouse-observer-review.
- 23.
See Anon., “Hammer House of Horror – Live,” Hammer website, July 13, 2017, accessed July 16, 2017, http://www.hammerfilms.com/hammer-house-of-horror-live.
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Winter, S.A. (2018). “A Mass of Unnatural and Repulsive Horrors”: Staging Horror in Nineteenth-Century English Theater. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_11
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