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Introduction
1850 to 1950 onwards
SHAKESPEARE'S audiences liked blood, Restoration wits preferred sex, eighteenth-century exquisites favoured sentiment and Victorians demanded morals. Midway through the nineteenth century the theatres of London, Paris, and New York were overwhelmingly devoted to the display of virtue in conflict with vice. Authors depicted the struggle in novels and artists in pictures ; it was the dominant theme of the age.
Our shelves can soon be burdened with masses of badly printed 11 penny plays " belonging to the period. To read them all untiringly may not be difficult once they have become an acquired taste, but to discover some sort of order into which these manifestations of the zest for righteousness may naturally fall, seems impossible and very nearly is. We foresee at the start an objection that drama has in all ages represented the conflict between good and evil, and we must agree that it may well be so ; but in melodrama, where these are called virtue and vice, there is a difference. They are more sharply defined and of less magnitude than elemental forces ; they do not get out of control, and in the end, happy or unhappy, sin is not only published — as it always has been in the tragic masterpieces of the world — but punished in such a manner that a cosmic partiality for the virginal is powerfully made known. You will not find that in Shakespeare.
With this as a basis for enquiry an attempt may be made to trace the progress of the idea. Earlier in the century a solid conviction had been established that Virtue Triumphant was the law of science and of nature, and while Dickens wrote his novels secure in this faith, a multitude of hacks, whose scribblings bear a strong family likeness to his, exploited it just as conscientiously, though without his genius. It must not be forgotten that stage versions of his works, hastily adapted by the " resident playwright " at many a theatre, were as much the mainstay of the Victorian stage as Shakespeare's works were of the Jacobean. Long after the half-way line of the nineteenth century had been passed there were still dramatizations of Dickens, and still the same insistence on the triumphs of virtue.
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