Form and Structure in Wilde’s Dramas – useful explanations
Victorian stage melodrama
The theatrical genre of melodrama uses theme-music to manipulate the spectator's
emotional response and to denote character types. The term combines "melody" (from
the Greek "melōidía", meaning "song") and "drama" (Classical Greek: δράμα, dráma;
meaning "action"). While the use of music is nearly ubiquitous in modern film, in a
melodrama these musical cues will be used within a fairly rigid structure, and the
characterizations will accordingly be somewhat more one-dimensional: heroes will be
unambiguously good and their entrance will be heralded by heroic-sounding trumpets
and martial music; villains are unambiguously bad, and their entrance is greeted with
dark-sounding, ominous chords.
Melodramas tend to be formulaic productions, with a clearly constructed world of
connotations: A villain poses a threat, the hero escapes the threat and/or rescues the
heroine. The term is sometimes used loosely to refer to plays, films or situations in
which action or emotion is exaggerated and simplified for effect. As against tragedy,
melodrama can have a happy ending, but this is not always the case.
The Victorian stage melodrama featured an the with limited number of stock
characters: the hero, the villain, the heroine, an aged parent and a comic man engaged
in a sensational plot featuring themes of love and murder. Often the good but not very
clever hero is duped by a scheming villain, who has eyes on the damsel in distress
until fate intervenes at the end to ensure the triumph of good over evil.
English melodrama evolved from the tradition of populist drama established during
the middle ages by mystery and morality plays, under influences from Italian
commedia del'arte as well as German Sturm und Drang drama and Parisian
melodrama of the post-Revolutionary period.[5]. A notable French melodramatist was
Pixérécourt whose La Femme a deux maris was wildly popular with the masses.[6]
The first English play to be called a melodrama or 'melodrame' was A Tale of Mystery
(1802) by Thomas Holcroft. This was an example of the Gothic genre, a previous
theatrical example of which was The Castle Spectre (1797) by Matthew Gregory
Lewis. Other Gothic melodramas include The Miller and his Men (1813) by Isaac
Pocock, The Woodsman's Hut (1814) by Samuel Arnold and The Broken Sword
(1816) by William Dimond.
Supplanting the Gothic, the next popular sub-genre was the nautical melodrama,
pioneered by Douglas Jerrold in his Black-Eyed Susan (1829). Other nautical
melodramas included Jerrold's The Mutiny at the Nore (1830) and The Red Rover
(1829) by Edward Fitzball (Rowell 1953).
Melodramas based on urban situations became popular in the mid-nineteenth century.
These include The Streets of London (1864) by Dion Boucicault; and Lost in London
(1867) by Watts Phillips.
The sensation novels of the 1860s and 1870s were fertile material for melodramatic
adaptations. A notable example of this genre is Lady Audley's Secret by Elizabeth
Braddon adapted, in two different versions, by George Roberts and C.H. Hazlewood.
The villain was always the central character in melodrama and crime was a favorite
theme. This included dramatisations of the murderous careers of Burke and Hare,
Sweeney Todd (first featured in The String of Pearls (1847) by George Dibdin Pitt),
the murder of Maria Marten in the Red Barn and the bizarre exploits of Spring Heeled
Jack. The misfortunes of a discharged prisoner is the theme of the sensational The
Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863) by Tom Taylor.
Early silent films, such as The Perils of Pauline had similar themes. Later, after silent
films were superseded by the 'talkies', stage actor Tod Slaughter, at the age of 50,
transferred to the screen the Victorian melodramas in which he had played villain in
his earlier theatrical career. These films, which include Maria Marten or Murder in
the Red Barn (1935), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) and
Tom Taylor's The Ticket-of-Leave Man are a unique record of a bygone art-form.
The Well Made play
The well-made play (French: pièce bien faite) is a genre of drama from the 19th
century that Eugène Scribe first codified and that Victorien Sardou developed. By the
mid-19th century, it had entered into common use as a derogatory term.[1] This did not
prevent Henrik Ibsen and the other realistic dramatists of the later 19th century
(August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, Émile Zola, Anton Chekhov) employing its
technique of careful construction and preparation of effects. "Through their example",
Marvin Carlson explains, "the well-made play became and still remains the traditional
model of play construction." [2]
In the English language, that tradition found its early twentieth-century codification in
Britain in the form of William Archer's Play-Making: A Manual of Craftmanship
(1912), and in the United States with George Pierce Baker's Dramatic Technique
(1919).[3]
The form has a strong neoclassical flavour, involving a very tight plot and a climax
that takes place very close to the end of the story, with most of the story taking place
before the action of the play; much of the information regarding such previous action
would be revealed through thinly veiled exposition. Following that would be a series
of causally-related plot complications.
A recurrent device that the well-made play employs is the use of letters or papers
falling into unintended hands, in order to bring about plot twists and climaxes.
Following the recommendations found in Aristotle's Poetics, the letters must bring
about an unexpected reversal of fortune, in which it is often revealed that someone is
not who he/she pretends to be. The reversal will allow for a quick dénouement, and a
return to order, at which point the curtain falls.
The majority of well-made plays are comedies, often farce. In his book The
Quintessence of Ibsenism, Bernard Shaw proposed that Ibsen converted this formula
for use in "serious" plays by substituting discussion for the plausible dénouement or
conclusion. Thus, plays become open ended, as if there were life beyond the last act
curtain.
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest exaggerates many of the conventions
of the well-made play, such as the missing papers conceit (the hero, as an infant, was
confused with the manuscript of a novel) and a final revelation (which, in this play,
occurs about thirty seconds before the final curtain).
Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House follows most of the conceits of the well-made play, but
transcends the genre when, after incriminating papers are recovered, Nora (rather
shockingly) rejects the expected return to normality. Several of Ibsen's subsequent
plays seem to build on the general construction principles of the Well-Made Play.
Farce
A farce is a comedy written for the stage or film which aims to entertain the audience
by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken
identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include
sexual innuendo and word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases,
culminating in an ending which often involves an elaborate chase scene. Farce is also
characterized by physical humour, the use of deliberate absurdity or/of nonsense, and
broadly stylized performances.
Many farces move at a frantic pace toward the climax, in which the initial problem is
resolved one way or another, often through a deus ex machina twist of the plot.
Generally, there is a happy ending. The convention of poetic justice is not always
observed: The protagonist may get away with what he or she has been trying to hide
at all costs, even if it is a criminal act involving crazy costumes.
Farce in general is highly tolerant of transgressive behavior, and tends to depict
human beings as vain, irrational, venal, infantile, and prone to automatic behavior. In
that respect, farce is a natural companion of satire. Farce is, in fact, not merely a genre
but a highly flexible dramatic mode that often occurs in combination with other
forms, including romantic comedy. Farce is considered a theatre tradition.
Wilde, Society, and Society Drama
By Cary M. Mazer
[This essay was prepared for the production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of
Being Earnest at People's Light & Theatre Company, Malvern, PA, in June, 1993.
Various parts of the essay were used by the artistic staff and company, in program
notes, in teachers' manuals, and in press packets.]
On February 14---St. Valentine's Day--1895, London was choked with a major snow
storm. But this could not prevent the opening night of The Importance of Being
Earnest, at the St. James's Theatre, from being a major social event. This was in part
due to the stunning popularity of Oscar Wilde in the theatre: The Importance of Being
Earnest was Wilde's fourth popular West End play in only three years, and An Ideal
Husband had only opened a month before and was still playing to packed house at the
Haymarket Theatre a few blocks away. Fashionable London was out in force, in their
most elegant clothes. As a tribute to Wilde's dandified aestheticism, women wore
sprays of lilies as corsages; and many young men wore lilies of the valley in the
buttonholes of lapels of their tailcoats. Wilde spent most of the performance
backstage, but he was nevertheless dressed in what one biography called "the depth of
fashion": "his coat had a black velvet collar; he carried white gloves; a green scarab
ring adorned one of his fingers; a large bunch of seals on a black moir ribbon watch
chain hung from his white waistcoat; and, like the young men in the stalls, he wore
lilies of the valley in his buttonhole."
Audiences came dressed in evening formal to opening nights then; in fact, you had to
wear evening formal dress any night if you wanted to sit in the stalls (what we call the
orchestra) or the dress circle (the first balcony). And this was true not only at the St.
James's Theatre but throughout "Theatreland," the entertainment district in the West
End of metropolitan London. For theatregoing was more than an entertainment
medium or an art form: it was major leisure activity for people of all social classes,
part of a network of urban activities that included private clubs, restaurants, pubs,
cafes, hotels, and casinos.
In the 1890s, there were over fifty theatres in greater London, most of the them in the
West End, a half dozen alone along Shaftesbury Avenue, which had been completed
in 1886 as part of an urban renewal plan off of Picadilly Circus. The theatres drew
their patrons from the greater metropolitan area, who came to the theatre by carriage,
omnibus, streetcar, and underground railway. Each theatre was exclusively leased by
a manager, often an "Actor-Manager," who established a reputation for his theatre
(the actor-managers were most often men) through the style of his acting, the physical
splendor of the production, and the type of dramatic entertainment offered.
Of the older and larger theatres, Covent Garden had become the home of grand opera,
and Drury lane was famous for its spectacular autumn melodramas and elaborate
Christmas Pantomimes. The most famous "classical" actor of the time, Henry Irving,
had managed the Lyceum Theatre for over twenty years, producing a series of major
Shakespeare revivals for himself and his stage partner, Ellen Terry. (When The
Importance of Being Earnest opened, Irving and Terry could be seen at the Lyceum in
J. Comyns Carr's King Arthur, a top-of-the-line costume epic with armor designed by
the pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones and incidental music by Sir Arthur
Sullivan; Irving would join their ranks when he received a knighthood--the first actor
to be thus honored--later that year). You could see melodrama at the Adelphi Theatre,
operetta at the Savoy (where the Gilbert and Sullivan collaborations had received their
premieres), and musical comedies at the Gaiety (An Artist's Model, one of a series of
musicals with working-class heroines, had just opened there in February, 1895).
Variety entertainment of all sorts could be seen in the Music Halls, either in smokefilled taverns in working class neighborhoods, in chic cosmopolitan halls tucked away
in the West End, or in glittering theatres like the Empire on Leicester Square, which
offered picturesque ballet-extravaganzas.
Several actor-managers--Charles Wyndham at the Criterion on Picadilly Circus, John
Hare at the Garrick on Charing Cross Road, and George Alexander at the St. James's--
specialized in "Society Drama," plays of modern life set in the rarefied world of the
upper classes. These plays could be witty and frivolous light comedies; or they could
be ponderous dramatic treatises on difficult social issues, most often the sexual
"double standard" and the "problem" of the "fallen woman." One such play, The
Second Mrs Tanqueray by Arthur Wing Pinero, had been presented by George
Alexander at the St. James's Theatre two years earlier, with the fiery and exotic
actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell becoming an instant star as the former kept-woman
trying to fit into the respectable world of her upper-class husband. We hear a parodic
echo of plays like The Second Mrs Tanqueray when Jack Worthing (played by
Alexander), in the final act of The Importance of Being Earnest, says of Miss Prism
(who he mistakenly believes to be his long-lost and unmarried mother), "who has the
right to cast a stone against one who has suffered? Cannot repentance wipe out an act
of folly? Why should there be one law for men, and another for women?" But for all
of their epigramatic wit and paradoxical attitudes towards life, Oscar Wilde's other
1890s society comedies (Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and
An Ideal Husband) are all serious "problem" dramas about the intractability of sexual
double-standards and the personal costs of respectability, precisely those issues that
Wilde appears (at least) to be satirizing in The Importance of Being Earnest.
At the beginning of Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Aubrey Tanqueray (played
by Alexander) rebukes his friend Cayley Drummle (a man-about-town modelled in
part on Oscar Wilde) for sharing in the values of "The Way of World" and
condemning all women of doubtful moral reputation. Drummle responds, "My dear
Aubrey, I live in the world." Aubrey ruefully defines what Drummle means by "the
world": "The name we give our little parish of St. James's."
For an upper-class bachelor in the 1890s, the little parish of St. James's was the world.
Exclusive gentleman's clubs line Pall Mall. Along Jermyn Street are the custom
shirtmakers and bootmakers. A few blocks away are hotels, shops, and galleries of
Picadilly, and the "bespoke" tailors of Saville Row. Within a short walk or a carriage
ride, a young man could leave his bachelor apartment in the Albany (where Jack
Worthing resides, under the name "Ernest," in The Importance of Being Earnest),
shop, pay an "at-home" call in Mayfair or Belgravia, dine at his club, take in a play at
one of a dozen theatres, or see a ballet at the Empire. And at the St. James's Theatre
(now demolished), right at the center of "our little parish of St. James's," a young man
could take a seat in the stalls for Lady Windermere's Fan or The Importance of Being
Earnest.
The Importance of Being Earnest at the St. James's Theatre was a Society Comedy
about life in St. James's for audiences who lived or shopped or dined in St. James's.
And Society Drama as a whole was a mirror in which fashionable audiences could see
fashionable images of their own fashionable world of at-homes, dinner parties, and
country-house weekends; a world in which gentlemen with hyphenated surnames,
dressed in carefully-creased trousers and elegant cravats, made small talk with titled
ladies dressed a la mode, and flirted, for a moment only, with the dreaded possibilities
of adultery and interclass marriage; a world in which one could pause for a moment to
consider what to do with the women of doubtful reputation in one's midst, but where
one would not hesitate to banish these "fallen" women back to their declasse world of
Parisian boarding houses and second-rate continental resort towns.
With regard to clothing, Society Drama at the fashionable theatres was a mirror
literally as well as figuratively. Actors employed by George Alexander at the St.
James's were contractually required to dress appropriately "off-stage as well as -on,"
and could be fired if spotted walking in Picadilly during the day in anything less than
a well-tailored morning coat. New Society Dramas would often premier at the
beginning of the London "season," and women would wait until they saw the fashions
worn by the female characters in the play before they ordered their new gowns and
hats. And would-be high-fashion couturiers with assumed French names would design
theatrical costumes for Society Dramas and then, their reputations established,
became high-society dress designers in the "real" world instead.
But if theatre is a mirror, it is a flattering mirror that lets the viewer see only what he
or she wants to see. And the mirror-image relationship between the audience and the
play in late-Victorian Society Drama is more notable for what the theatre chose to
leave out than what it mirrored. For the world of high society and high fashion was
more porous than anyone in society cared to admit; and the theatre, as it often does,
embodied by its very theatrical nature the instability of the English class system.
This was certainly true of the theatre auditorium. Audiences in even the most
fashionable theatres included members of every class, from aristocrats and financiers,
to businessmen and professionals, to shopkeepers, clerks, and artisans, to servants and
laborers. The lower classes had their own seating areas, with their own entrances,
lobbies, bars, and bathrooms in the theatre. But, in the more expensive parts of the
house, the auditorium was by no means as segregated as members of "society" might
wish. After all, not everyone could be admitted to a fashionable drawing-room; but
anyone who could afford the higher-priced ticket and had the right clothing could sit
in the stalls or the dress circle.
The actors on stage embodied these social ambiguities. Towards the end of the
century, as the theatrical profession became more respectable, acting was no longer
the exclusive province of theatrical families, social outcasts, and women of loose
morals--the class of people that centuries before had been legally classified as "rogues
and vagabonds"; and respectable, educated people from the middle classes could now
enter the profession without too much social stigma. But even then, actors were
certainly not, in their social origins, the aristocrats and ladies and gentlemen they
successfully pretended to be on stage in Society Drama. George Alexander was
typical of his generation of actors: his father was in dry goods, and he dropped out of
school when he was fifteen to be a clerk in a London office, joined a part-time
amateur dramatic society, and then went into acting professionally. No wonder
Alexander insisted that his actors dress well on-stage and -off: only by their ability to
wear perfectly-tailored clothes and a perfectly-chosen buttonhole could actors
convince audiences that they were, in manners, the gentlemen they pretended to play.
One of Alexander's most popular roles--in a dramatization of the popular novel, The
Prisoner of Zenda--is emblematic of the actor's theatrical status as a gentleman. In it,
Alexander played a middle-class English tourist with an uncanny resemblance to the
embattled King of Ruritania; just put the middle-class Englishman in the right clothes,
and he can play the part of a King to perfection.
The social ambiguities present on the stage andd in the auditorium of the St. James's
Theatre were present in the entertainment industry as a whole. Not all of the pleasures
to be found for money in "our little parish of St. James's" were dignified, or even
legal. Then, as now, the theatre was only one of the trades that offered the spectacle of
bodies for public scrutiny and sale: the West end offered patrons not only theatres,
restaurants and bars, but streetwalkers and brothels. The worlds of the late-Victorian
theatre and the flesh trade overlapped directly, particularly at the Empire Theatre in
Leicester Square. There, in the infamous "promenade"--a wide horseshoe-shaped bar
and lobby space behind the first tier of gallery seats, with an open view of the
auditorium and the stage--high-priced prostitutes and elegantly-dressed gentlemen
would make their assignations. Even after a well-publicized series of public hearings,
the scandalous practice continued openly. And a compromise arrangement that had
been reached--to let the open solicitations continue, but to screen off the promenade
from the auditorium with a low barrier--did not last long: on the first night after the
barrier was installed, it was torn down in protest by a gang of young, fashionable,
gentlemen-about-town, led by the young Winston Churchill.
If anyone knew about the theatricality of late-Victorian High Society, it was Oscar
Wilde. He was, after all, a perpetual outsider in the world of elegant fashion and
society he frequented. An Irishman of middle-class origins among the English, he
gained access to the upper-class worlds of Oxford and London through his sheer
intellectual and artistic brilliance. An espouser of the "truth of masks," he constantly
wore the mask of the dandy and the aesthete. And he wrote plays about the
impenetrability of the very "society" that he had, in fact, successfully penetrated.
All of these dualities are reflected in the fun-house mirror of The Importance of Being
Earnest. We can see why Jack Worthing, a respectable provincial justice of the peace,
would need to invent a ne'er-do-well younger brother to justify his frequent trips to
his bachelor rooms up in London. We can easily picture how he spends his time in
London when he is not paying at-home calls to the Hon. Gwendolyn Fairfax. We can
guess why Jack (under his assumed name) and his friend Algernon Montcrieff go to
the Empire. And we can only imagine where Algernon goes on his "Bunburying"
expeditions once he's gotten out of his dinner engagement with his Aunt, Lady
Bracknell. We can certainly see why Lady Bracknell is so concerned about her
daughter's prospective fiance's qualifications for marrying into the family, and
whether Worthing's father was born in the "purple of commerce," or whether he rose
"from the ranks of the aristocracy." And we can see why Worthing's "contempt for the
ordinary decencies of family life" reminds Lady Bracknell "of the worst excesses of
the French Revolution . . . and I presume you know what that unfortunate movement
led to?" The Importance of Being Earnest depicts a world in which the best kept
secrets are the ones that everyone knows; a world in which everyone knows very well
that their world is not as stable, as exclusive, or as moral as it pretends to be; and a
world in which everyone appreciates the vital importance of maintaining at all cost
what they know to be the fictions of everyday life.
Which brinngs us back to the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest at the
St. James's Theatre on Valentine's Day, 1895, and the lily of the valley in Oscar
Wilde's lapel. Two years before, at the opening of Lady Windermere's Fan at the same
theatre, Wilde, along with one of the characters in the play, had worn a green
carnation, an open acknowledgement of the homosexual sub-culture to which Wilde
and many of his friends belonged. In 1895, while The Importance of Being Earnest
was in rehearsal, Wilde was in the middle of his troubled but long-term relationship
with Lord Alfred Douglas, and was being pursued by Douglas's father, the pugnacious
and homophobic Marquis of Queensbury (author of "Queensbury rules" of boxing).
Queensbury had bought a ticket to the opening night of The Importance of Being
Ernest, planning to disrupt the play with a demonstration. A policemen met
Queensbury at the door and prevented his admission. Two weeks later, Queensbury
left a calling card in Wilde's mailbox at the Albemarle club, with a note written on it:
"To Oscar Wilde, posing as a Somdomite." The spelling error (he no doubt meant
"sodomite") and the cautious reference to Wilde's "pose" notwithstanding, Wilde
decided to take legal action and sued Queensbury for libel. Wilde lost the case; he was
arrested for sodomy immediately after, tried, convicted, and sentenced to two years
hard labor.
During the height of the controversy, Alexander withdrew The Importance of Being
Earnest from performance. He revived it in 1902, without the disgraced author's name
on the program. Only in a revival in 1909 did Alexander return Wilde's name to the
bill, and the play had the long and commercially successful theatrical run that it
deserved.
Structure – some useful terms
Plot (narrative)
In fiction, the plot is a sequence of interrelated events arranged to form a logical
pattern and achieve an intended effect. We can also say that it is basic outline of
story.[1] Along with character, setting, theme, and style, plot is considered one of the
fundamental components of fiction.[2] Aristotle wrote in Poetics that mythos is the
most important element of storytelling.
Plot structure
Freytag's pyramid
Plot is often designed with a narrative structure, storyline or story arc, that includes
exposition, conflict, rising action and climax, followed by a falling action and a
dénouement. The term storyline also refers to the plot or subplot of a story.
Exposition
Exposition is the beginning of the plot usually concerned with introducing characters
and setting.
Conflict
Conflict is actual or perceived opposition of needs, values and interests. A conflict
may be internal (within oneself) or external (between two or more individuals). It may
also be both internal and external.
Rising action
The rising action in a work of fiction builds suspense and leads to the climax.
Climax
The high point, a moment most intense, a turning point, a major culmination of
events. The climax isn't always the first important scene in a story. In many stories, it
is the last sentence.
Falling action
The falling action is the part of a story following the climax and shows the effects of
the climax. It leads up to the dénouement (or catastrophe).[3]
Dénouement (Resolution)
Etymologically, the French word dénouement is derived from the Old French word
denoer, "to untie", and from nodus, Latin for "knot". In fiction, a dénouement
consists of a series of events that follow the climax, and thus serves as the conclusion
of the story. Conflicts are resolved, creating normality for the characters and a sense
of catharsis, or release of tension and anxiety, for the reader. Simply put, dénouement
is the unraveling or untying of the complexities of a plot. Be aware that not all stories
have a resolution.
Character
Find definitions for the following:
Protagonist · Antagonist · Focal character · Viewpoint character · Foil character