Name: メロドラマの台頭クラッシュ・コース・シアター#28 (The Rise of Melodrama: Crash Course Theater #28)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T10:39:07.000Z
Duration: 12 min 7 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

This is Crash Course Theater, and today we'll be talking about brave heroes, scheming villains, scorching fires, convulsing earthquakes, spooktacular ghosts and grave robbing.

Yep, today is all about melodrama, the form that body slammed 19th century theater and still dominates entertainment culture.

It's funny and sad and morally simplistic.

It's endings are satisfying, and the scenery is off the hook.

And, wow, is there a lot of musical accompaniment?

So sit back, grab a meat pie and try to not get hit by any runaway chariots.

Lights Up Melodrama gets going right at the turn of the 19th century, about a decade after the French Revolution and a few decades after the American one.

It borrows from sentimental comedy and bourgeois tragedy, but is way more about showing the audience a good time.

There is a whole sub genre of dog melodrama.

Well, cities are getting bigger, faster, which creates a newly urbanized working class, and that urbanized working class wants to go to the theater.

And what's more, they want a theater that's not especially literary because they're not especially literate.

Highbrows at this time mostly stick to closet drama because I guess going out is for the poorest.

Regardless, Melodrama is an incredibly successful and well attended form.

What do you think 90% of Hollywood movies are?

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess they are bourgeois tragedies, but very different sense.

It's significant that melodrama starts in a period between revolutions after the 18th century ones, but before most of the 19th century ones, melodrama has all the emotional fervor of revolutionary art.

But it dulls and contains that fervor with comforting moral sentiments.

Basically, it's a conservative form that feels like a radical one.

It's some sound and fury signifying not much.

As the 19th century playwright Charles Nodia wrote, it reminds people that even here on Earth, virtue is never without recompense.

Melodrama begins in France, the father of melodrama and the first to introduce dogs is and I'm sorry about this, Renee Charl Goober depicts a record again.

Ah, guy who describes himself as having AH, soul in flames, a tender heart off fiery imagination and a proud and independent temperament.

I'm sure his friends were shocked at his melodramatic works anyway.

He was a minor aristocrat who fled during the Revolution, probably because of an anti jacket been play that he wrote After returning.

He starts writing less controversial plays, including The Dog of Montage, a story of a hound who brings suspicion upon his master's murderer and who, at the king's order, fights the killer.

This play makes Goto so mad that he asks to be dismissed from the theatre that stages it, picks a record, may or may not have said that he wrote his plays for those who cannot read, but he definitely pioneered the combination of moral instruction and man verse Dog trial by combat picture.

Of course, plays are eventually exported to England, and melodrama really takes off.

Blame the Lord Chamberlain as you'll remember from our episode on sentimental drama.

The licensing act of 17 37 means that on Lee, two theaters in London are licensed to provide serious drama with 1/3 in the summer months.

That's not enough theater people want more theater in the easiest way to get around the licensing act and thus stage more performance is to put on alternatives to spoken drama alternatives like operas or musicals.

Or maybe you just take a normal play and stuff it with some incidental music.

Eventually, melodrama becomes so popular that the licensed theaters basically have no choice but to produce it as well.

Of course, melodrama isn't just a play with music.

Mellow is Greek for music and drama from the Greek Drawn is Latin for play.

These plays tell exciting stories that almost always have a happy ending, where good characters get rewarded and bad characters get punished and all of the dogs get treats for revenge, as the case may be.

There are six stock characters in melodrama.

The mean villain, the sensitive hero, the persecuted heroin, the clown, the faithful friend and the villain's accomplice.

Audiences were encouraged to cheer and boo where appropriate and musical accompaniment helped them out.

The trumpet played for the hero, the flute signaled the heroin and the clown got stuck with the bassoon because bassoons are hilarious.

At certain moments, the actors would pause while music played so that audiences could have a moment to appreciate just how exciting the situation Waas and how awesome the actors looked.

We're kind of like the held poses in Kabuki.

Acting in melodrama was exaggerated, designed to appeal to the emotions.

We're gonna make 3000 distractible people listen.

In an age before microphones, early melodrama often borrowed from Gothic stories and had strong supernatural elements.

Heroes and heroines were often virtuous, working class types, and the villains were Squires and landlords that had to feel pretty good for urban workers, sticking it to the Bronte, a class right there on stage.

The style became more domestic in the 18 twenties and 18 thirties, when there was a craze for true crime melodramas, and there were all sorts of mellow sub genres to dog melodramas, of course, but also equestrian dramas, with horses running on treadmills and nautical dramas and battle dramas and a whole sub genre devoted to grave digging.

We're that far away from the late Roman theater.

We are not, though there is less nudity and people don't actually die on stage on purpose.

Melodrama became even more spectacular with playwrights, tryingto outdo one another to create sensation scenes, moments of plot and stagecraft that would leave the audience gasping.

This is when you get avalanches and erupting volcanoes and exploding steamboats.

Melodrama was an opportunity for set designers to really strut their stuff and plays called for ruined castles, desolate mountains, frothing waterfalls, prisons, caverns, tombs, tombs, Iorek Tombs.

But here's a funny thing about melodrama.

Even though the plays are wildly unrealistic, they're actually a precursor to realism.

Melodrama demanded an unprecedented level of authenticity from its set designers because audiences wanted the place to look is really is possible, even if the stuff that was happening was, well, melodramatic.

So they built and used all kinds of flats and treadmills and revolves just in case the play called for a rail crash or a chariot race, and this raised the bar for productions of serious drama to also the play's themselves dared to show all kinds of people in all kinds of situations because they were written quickly and often mirrored riel, life scandals and contemporary novels.

Yes, they were undergirded by Christian morality and had to end happily.

But these were some of the first place to take on racism, sexism, crime and urban poverty.

P is an Irishman named Dionysius Bussi Co.

Who churned out melodrama after melodrama and sensation after Sensation, the exploding riverboat.

That was him, Lucy Coe wrote quickly, and he wrote Topic Lee.

His plays are witty and sentimental and totally spectacular, and he was a savvy businessman.

He franchised his plays, rewriting the poor of New York as the poor of London and the poor of Paris.

But he didn't want other people doing any rewriting, and his lawsuit helped inform the international copyright agreement of 18 86 because he wanted to make sure he got his royalties.

Did this stop him from stealing from other playwrights, though it did not music, Oh eventually landed in America.

So we'll be seeing him again in our next episode.

But we're gonna take a sneak peek at American theater now, exploring one of the most popular and iconic melodramas of the 19th century, Augustine dailies.

Play under the Gaslight daily was a successful theater manager and one of theaters first directors.

Remember all of those cartoons where they tie some lady to the tracks.

Justus, the train is coming that starts here.

Laura Courtland is engaged to the dashing Captain Ray Trafford, but turns out Laura is adopted.

Instead of being like Hey, cool back story, Captain Trafford is like maybe I need a wife who's not a daughter of obscurity and crime.

Laura runs away from home and ends up supporting herself by hand coloring photographs.