ABSTRACT
The Covent Garden playbill for 13 November 1802 announced ‘a New MeloDrame in Two acts, consisting of Speaking, Dancing & Pantomime, called A Tale of Mystery’. To someone who was thinking about buying a ticket the teasing word here is ‘Melo-Drame’. Performances which had speaking and dancing, plays with music and pantomimes were all pretty familiar. And various sorts of tales of mystery regularly emerged from the pens of Gothic writers. But to call something ‘Melo-Drame’ was to be foreign. There were plenty of English phrases which would have done instead. Melo-Drames, after all, were things the French were performing in front of mass audiences, in their revolutionary state. There was something about that word’s appearance on a Covent Garden playbill that was, in several ways, calculatedly un-English.
