Location: Music, Literature and Performance Afternoon, Newcastle University

This short talk argued that one of the great merits of recovering nineteenth-century melodrama as a subject of academic study is the way in which one might now trace a less contested progression between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century aesthetics. Histories of theatre in the 1700s tend to argue that the medium collapsed at the end of the century, its ideas and practices lost beneath Romantic and idealist ways of thinking. A better understanding of melodrama, however, shows how much eighteenth-century stagecraft endured in this form.