ABSTRACT
The label ‘melodrama’ is often used very loosely. Despite a strong family resemblance between many melodramas, it was not a fixed genre but one that varied from one author to another within the same period and, more significantly, as the century progressed. The relatively simplistic moral message and the sententious language of the melodrama of the early part of the century hark back to the eighteenth-century drame in tone and cling to the notion of the theatre as a school for virtue. Most of the plots of these plays are very simple, and the majority, whilst demanding very specific scenery, do not require numerous changes of scene. Pixérécourt, for example, remains very close to the classical unities. In Charles le téméraire, he even felt the need to apologise for a change of scene within an act. He justified this a little pedantically, arguing that he needed to depict the actual spot where, historically, Charles is supposed to have perished.
