We have seen that, while neither realistic tragedy nor sentimental comedy had experienced a notable development, they had been departures from long-standing conventions. Tragedies in three acts, tragedies in prose, tragedies on domestic themes, tragedies without princes, tragedies of the present, all gave some encouragement for further novelty and experiment. The several varieties of "soft tragedy and genteel comedy" departed far enough from the standards of both species to suggest a dramatic development that should discard the traditional limitations. This changing taste, however, was seized by German plays and dramatized "tales of terror." The large and varied influence of German poetry, criticism, and philosophy upon the romantic movement in England can be noticed here only so far as it affected the drama. The plays of Lessing and the early plays of Goethe and Schiller made little impression on the English stage, though they exercised an immediate influence on the reading public and on most of the young men "standing on the forehead of the age to come." The conquest of the English stage was made at its point of greatest vulnerability—its sentimentality—by one who seemed the very Napoleon of the drama, Kotzebue, the conqueror of the theatres of all western Europe. In 1798 "The Stranger" ("Menschenhass und Reue") took Drury Lane by storm, and the next year Sheridan's "Pizarro," an adaptation of "Die Spanier in Peru," plus some eloquence and some songs, gained a still more brilliant success and drew even George III to the theatre. For several years Kotzebue reigned supreme; twenty or more of his plays were translated; many were acted; "Pizarro" alone had passed through twenty-nine editions by 1811, besides other English and American versions of the play. Kotzebue's triumph was due in part to his great skill in stage-craft, and in part to his adroit appeal to the more superficial sentiments for social and political revolution that were everywhere stirring. When it is compared with preceding sentimental comedy, the success of "The Stranger" is easily understood. It has the theatrical merit of arousing curiosity at the beginning and keeping it on question until the last moment; and it deals, over-sentimentally of course, with a social question of dramatic value and of especial piquancy at a time when many conventions seemed tottering,—should an erring wife be taken back again by her husband? The theme of "A Woman Killed with Kindness," "Jane Shore," and "The Fair Penitent" was given a new interest and a new solution. "Pizarro," retaining much of the plot familiar in English tragedy since the time of Dryden's "Indian Emperor," has two lovers, opponents in war, and two heroines, one vengeful, the other angelic, but makes the real hero the renouncing lover, who sacrifices all for the happiness of the angel who loves not him but his friend. Under these new auspices the fair penitent and the renunciatory hero began long careers in English drama and fiction. But neither these nor any other of Kotzebue's plays offered any guidance toward a serious interpretation of life or any innovations of real consequence in the English tragic tradition.
If Kotzebue's plays offered little promise for the national drama, the native plays which rivaled them in popularity offered less. Castles, monks, dungeons, and so on had already become somewhat common in musical plays and operas[45] and occasionally in tragedies, when "The Castle Spectre" of Monk Lewis opened the flood-gates to "tales of terror" and their medieval and supernatural paraphernalia. "The Castle Spectre," which in the season of 1797-98 surpassed "The Stranger" and for a while held its own with Kotzebue, represents a new reign of romance. The new queen did not come from "perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." She belonged to the earlier days of the romantic movement, and made her conquest at the head of squadrons of medievalistic, terroristic, and Germanistic Goths. She is adequately described in the prologue to the play:—
"Far from the haunts of men, of vice the foe,
The moon-struck child of genius and of woe,
Versed in each magic spell, and dear to fame,
A fair enchantress dwells, Romance her name,
She loathes the sun or blazing taper's light:
The moon-beam'd landscape and tempestuous night
Alone she loves; and oft, with glimmering lamp,
Near graves new-opened, or midst dungeons damp,
Drear forests, ruin'd aisles, and haunted towers,
Forlorn she roves, and raves away the hours!
Anon, when storms howl loud and lash the deep,
Desperate she climbs the sea-rock's beetling steep;
There wildly strikes her harp's fantastic strings,
Tells to the moon how grief her bosom wrings,
And while her strange song chaunts fictitious ills,
In wounded hearts Oblivion's balm distils."
The "drama," as it was called, is in prose, and is a medley of the various terroristic novels, including the two most famous, "The Castle of Otranto" and "The Mysteries of Udolpho," and adding something from Schiller's "Robbers" and from Shakespeare. There is a haunted castle, a jocose monk, a fool, a marvelous dungeon, a fisherman's hut, a ghost, a midnight bell, and songs and elaborate scenery. The villain, a feudal baron attended by negroes, is finally killed by the heroine, who saves her imprisoned father and escapes with the hero.
The signs of life that succeeded the long petrifaction of the eighteenth century drama and the beginning of the revolutionary epoch thus resulted only in theatrical novelties and in no serious dramatic movement. All serious drama was, indeed, threatened by the ascendancy of the "illegitimate" drama of music and dumb show. The causes leading to the rise of this class and its ensuing history were in large measure connected with the theatres themselves. Even before the new romanticism had invaded the drama, changes in theatrical conditions of far-reaching importance were well under way. The monopoly exercised by the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres was first threatened about 1730 by the success of a few minor theatres which gave musical, acrobatic, or dramatic entertainments. The old theatres were successful in maintaining their monopoly in regular plays, but the irregular houses gained permission to give performances under the loosely defined term "burletta." A "burletta" was supposed to have a musical accompaniment, but it proved difficult to say how little music and how much of a drama might be included under the term. Henceforth, the regular drama had, in addition to the rivalry of Italian and English operas, that of musical and dramatic medleys; and the patent houses had to face the rivalry of playhouses that infringed as far as they dared on the legitimate drama. The patent theatres, with their vested rights in the stock plays and their obligation to maintain Dryden, Otway, and Shakespeare, offered no great inducements to new authors. This was particularly true, after the rebuilding and enlargement of both theatres in 1791 and 1794, when the increased cost of bringing out a play and the increased difficulty in acting or hearing an unfamiliar play led Kemble practically to abandon any attempt to produce new tragedies. The minor theatres, which were growing in importance, legally limited to the field of musical performances, and excluded from the regular drama except by trick, could offer little support to the serious dramatist. As a result, musical plays, operettas, and finally a new type, the "melodrame," flourished in the minor houses and found their way soon into the two great theatres. When in 1808-09 these were burned, the rivalry with the minors had become acute. The old theatres were rebuilt of so great a size that they proved unsuitable for any spoken drama. Through their great actors, Kemble, Kean, and later Macready, they maintained Shakespearean drama and a few of the old stock plays; but they were forced for the rest of the time to resort to melodrama, spectacle, or pantomime. The minors, though they now became more daring in their invasions of legitimate drama, naturally continued the kind of entertainments at which they had succeeded and to which they had forced the great theatres to succumb. The long struggle for a free stage was now nearing its end; the patent theatres were maintained with increasing difficulty; the minors prospered. With the death of Kean in 1833, a great prop of the patent theatres fell; and though the agitation for parliamentary reform in that year failed, and the final legislation against theatrical monopoly was not passed until 1847, the great theatres ceased to determine the history of the drama. Macready's two periods of management, 1837-39 and 1841-43, were the final efforts to restore the old régime that had maintained tragedy since the Restoration.
The "illegitimate" drama that triumphed in the theatres comprised a wide range of entertainments, mostly farcical in their dramatic elements. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the rage for dumb show and musical additions invaded the regular drama. Even Kotzebue had to be decked out with songs and choruses. Moreover, a peculiar species of the illegitimate drama developed in the plays of Andrews, Dibdin, Reynolds, Boaden, and Colman the younger that served as a half substitute for tragedy. This species seems to have been mainly due to the ingenuity of George Colman. Those of his plays verging on tragedy, of which "The Battle of Hexham" (1789), "The Surrender of Calais" (1791), "The Mountaineers" (1793), and "The Iron Chest" (1796) are the chief, are lively medleys of tragedy, comedy, opera, and farce. In each a tragic story is told in blank verse, audaciously Shakespearean, and this is mixed with broad comedy or farce in prose. There is a bustling action with shifting scenes, much spectacle, many songs, solos, duets, or choruses, for which a crowd of soldiers, monks, beggars, foresters, or the like, is always within call. "The Surrender of Calais" tells the story of Queen Philippa's mercy; "The Iron Chest" is a dramatization of "Caleb Williams"; "The Battle of Hexham" is a sort of musicalized chronicle history, presenting the adventures of Adeline in search of her husband, who turns out to be a captain of a band of robbers and the rescuer of Queen Margaret and the prince after the battle of Hexham. "The Mountaineers," suggested by a story in "Don Quixote," finds its land of romance in Spain, where a Christian prisoner elopes with the daughter of his Moorish jailer, accompanied by a stage Irishman as gracioso; and this group, when recaptured, are rescued by Octavian, a half-mad tragic soliloquizer, who also recovers his long-lost love, and was thought to be extremely impressive when impersonated by Kemble. In his use of all the well-worn motives of serious drama and his constant imitation of Shakespearean and Elizabethan diction, Colman displays remarkable cleverness as well as the most cheerful effrontery. He represents, too, a curious stage in the history of tragedy. He was born and bred in the theatre and had an exceptional opportunity to become familiar with the Elizabethan drama through his father's revivals and editorial labors. His method was to start with some incident, like that of Queen Philippa, and to connect with it any scenes that suggested themselves as interesting and varied, so that the motives, types of character, situations, and the very phrases of the Elizabethan and the later stock plays reappear to play their parts in his variety shows. He did not burlesque; in fact, he imitated so well that, while the judicious might grieve, the vulgar subscribed to pity and terror when his plays were performed by the great actors of the day. He popularized, vulgarized, and musicalized the great traditions of English tragedy, and passed them along to the nineteenth century as the possession of the illegitimate drama.
At the height of Colman's career, however, the illegitimate drama found a still more powerful ally. Englishmen who in 1802 went to Paris to enjoy the peace were delighted with an entirely new kind of theatrical entertainment there, the mélodrame. The industrious Holcroft promptly translated its most successful representative, and "The Tale of Mystery" heralded the long ascendancy of this new species of drama in England and America. The peculiar novelties of the mélodrame were the supplementing of the dialogue by a large amount of dumb show and the accompaniment of both dialogue and dumb show by descriptive orchestral music; otherwise, with its songs, sensations, and mechanical devices, it resembled the preceding musical drama of Colman and others. With this new recruit, the illegitimate held full sway. Its influence spread into all dramatic performances, and many regular plays were supplemented by songs, music, spectacle, or machinery. From the start, mélodrame allied itself to most of the paraphernalia, of medievalism and of the terrific school, but it soon showed the capacity for absorbing varied material. Reynolds in 1812 turned Dryden's "Don Sebastian" into a musical play in three acts written in prose; equestrian combats, real water, cataracts, and machinery for thrilling escapes became usual adjuncts. Soon Scott's poems and novels supplied splendid material. As each novel appeared the theatres vied with one another in bringing out the first melodramatization; and often several versions were acted at the same time. Macready gained one of his first large successes with "Rob Roy" in a version that reduced Di Vernon to a singing part (1818). Any kind of a story, providing it offered strange scenes, an exciting and lively action, and marked contrasts between bad and good among the characters, lent itself readily to a dramatization that required a minimum of dialogue and a maximum of action, music, and machinery. Comic scenes were, of course, de rigueur. "The Slave," by Morton, was one of the most enduring of the Colmanesque type. The serious plot, which presents Gambia, the slave, as the sacrificing hero, borrows from "The Curfew" and "Oronooko," and for its great scene improves upon the escape over the bridge in "Pizarro."[46]
After Clifton and Zelinda (whom Gambia hopelessly adores) escape across the hanging bridge, Gambia climbs up the tree from which it is suspended and cuts the rope. The pursuing villains are foiled on the brink. "We are safe, my husband," cries Zelinda from the other side; but her child, safely hidden by Gambia, hears her voice, and runs from his hiding-place,—on the wrong side of the river.
Child. It was my mother's voice! Mother! mother!