ABSTRACT
Melodrama acting was an essentially pictorial art. Whereas the naturalistic actor must keep all his focus behind the footlights, the melodrama actor courts the audience’s vocal or visceral response. Theatre companies in the early years of the nineteenth century consisted of actors who specialised in a particular ‘type’ of character. The most obvious type was the villain, whose machinations tended to keep the melodrama’s plot wheels turning. The actor’s range and versatility in ‘dumb’ parts is suggested in Charles Selby’s Marceline, in which the eponymous heroine is dumb. What pictures cannot show is the physiology of emotion in action, the tears of dejection, the shiver of fear, yet it was these which helped to give rhythm to the performance. Finally, the melodrama actor played out to the audience. The actors created a series of pictures which the audience understood visually.
