ABSTRACT
The most significant dramatic innovation of the nineteenth century was the naturalisation of melodrama into the English theatre. English melodrama was made out of French revolutionary politics and the populist art of melo-drame – literally ‘music-play’ – adapted so as to evade censorship of the Lord Chamberlain and his Examiner of Plays. The radicalism of the play’s structure of feeling, its production and communication of highly emotional states, linked to oppression and power, did not escape the observers and critics of the period. Baillie’s theorising on strong emotion resonates with contemporary Romantic discourse but also prefigures the discussions and theorisations of the place of emotion in acting which were threaded through critical discourse on the stage throughout the nineteenth century.
